BOOK REVIEW: IF YOU DIE, I'LL KILL YOU! - The Films of Samuel Fuller

study of the influential director in the context of post-War Hollywood

IF YOU DIE, I'LL KILL YOU! - The Films of Samuel Fuller by Lisa Dombrowski. Wesleyan U. Press, Middletown, CT; www.wesleyan.edu/wespress; selliott@wesleyan.edu. 2008. $27.95 hardcover, ISBN 978-0-8195-6866-3. illustrations, notes, filmography, bibliography, index.

In contrast to the majority of works on film directors based largely on biography, psychology, and analyses of recurring motifs in the films, Dombrowski--associate professor of film at Wesleyan--considers the American director Sam Fuller in the context of the Hollywood of his times. Fuller was a leading director in the first generation of American film directors following World War II; though some of his films go back before then. Dombrowski's approach to studying him is based on "economic, industrial, and institutional forces" Fuller had to deal with and confront in making his films.

For the rawness of parts of Fuller's films--brutality, cruelty, or sadism--he is usually seen as deliberately trying to break conventions and provoke or outrage the audience. But Dombrowski's regard is more involved. Unfailingly seeing him in the context of Hollywood and implicitly understanding Hollywood in the context of American culture of the time, the author sees him as "an adaptive provocateur" never losing sight of his goals of "revealing truth and arousing emotion."

Dombrowski also recognizes the fact--often seemingly forgotten in film studies--that Fuller could not have made his high-budget films intended for a mass audience without the support of others in the film industry. Nor would he have achieved the success he did without connecting with the interests and dispositions of movie-goers. Fuller was the director of The Big Red One, Fix Bayonets, China Gate, Merrill's Marauders, and Shock Corridor, among other films; and he wrote or co-wrote many movie and TV scripts and documentaries. In war, urban, and other contemporary or recent settings, he dealt unsparingly with issues of race, war, crime, and sexuality at the core of American society.

Fuller remains a somewhat ambivalent figure in American film; a view Dombrowski's summation of him as the "adaptive provocateur" seconds. Despite ambivalences pertaining to Fuller, there is no doubt that he was a precursor of both mainstream filmmakers doing movies involving crime and other social topics in a style of gritty realism such as Scorcese and also independent filmmakers exploring new techniques and dramatizations. Different aspects of Fuller's ambivalences have influenced different veins of American filmmaking.