"Nothin' like the infantry. If you're in a plane and get hit, you still gotta fall. Two strikes against you. On a ship, you get hit, you can still drown. In a tank, you can fry like an egg. But in the infantry, you get hit, one thing or another, you're dead or alive. But you're on the ground. Get wise. Nothin' like the infantry." -- Sergeant Zack in "The Steel Helmet" (1951)By John Stanley
REMEMBER my son Russ, who tipped me off to the Rob Schneider story I wrote in
these pages recently? You remember--how he knew more about what was going on in the entertainment world than his old man . . . and how his phone call about attending the Hollywood premiere had led me to a story about Schneider's first major movie "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo." And how Russ put me on the trail of social relevancy as I examined the $50 million-plus hit and why it was so important to our pop culture with its insensitive, tasteless jokes about dysfunctional people and toilet-related body functions.
Well, Russ is back in action, trying to redirect my life back on track, so
that I might once again contribute more significant columns--what he calls "Pop's pop culture." Two things happened almost simultaneously. First, for Christmas, he insisted his mother buy me a DVD player. It was time to get Dad hip and swinging into the new technological age."If we don't do it quickly, it'll never happen," Russ said urgently, flashing back to when Dad had ignored VHS players for too long, missing out on a lot of neat movie stuff back in the early 1980s. He made a deal: "Mom, you buy the machine--I play golf with a big electronics-store owner down the Peninsula and I'll get you a discount--and I'll pick up one movie so he'll have something to play on Christmas Day."
As usual, Russ got off cheaper than his mother, a trend since he was 12. My wife got the discount deal Russ arranged for and Russ bought that one movie, "Saving Private Ryan," but there was no way I could get the ($%#&*) machine hooked up to watch it on Christmas Day. It took days figuring out how to connect the S-cable to my Pro Logic Tuner and how to get the RCA jacks into the proper receptacles for the stereo sound system. I never did figure out how to get that (more cussing) S-cable installed properly, but I did get the ($%&#&) thing working one day. Nothing like improvisation to set a man soaring.
During that interim period of having a DVD but not really, the second thing happened: Russ called me one afternoon, in that breathless style of his, with the exclamation "Dad!" that told me something big was up. I stopped everything I was doing and keenly listened. "Switch on AMC. They're playing Sam Fuller's 'Steel Helmet.'" So I jackassed as fast as I could to my TV set and was barely in time to see the scene where the Korean War retread Sergeant Zack describes (see above) why a foot soldier is always better off than a guy in a tank or plane or submarine. By then I was hooked and watched transfixed as Shortround, the South Korean war orphan and Zack's only true friend in the army, gets shot down by a sniper.
(You thought maybe Shortround was an original name for the orphan in Spielberg's "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom"? No way, Steven lifted it from Sammy Fuller. It wasn't theft, it was a form of homage--take another look at "1941" and you'll find Sammy in a small role, as he and Steven used to pal around Hollywood.)
Then I watched as Zack, with his Thompson submachine-gun, shot down an unarmed North Korean major in cold-blood, then went into battle shock during an assault on the Buddhist temple where his outfit had set up an observation post. He stumbled through the rubble, thinking he was on Easy Red Beach during the Normandy D-Day. "Gotta get off the beach," he says, over and over, his eyes vacant. "The Colonel said we gotta get off the beach."
These scenes had shocked me in 1951 when I was an 11-year-old innocent in a theater in Napa Valley and had really changed my attitude toward movies--and war--forever. Although now the scenes seemed tame by modern movie-making standards of violence, it did get me to thinking about Samuel Fuller like I hadn't thought of him for a long while.
Fuller (he preferred you call him Sammy) was the man who had written, produced and directed "The Steel Helmet" for a measly $100,000 for producer Robert L. Lippert, a one-time Bay Area drive-in exhibitor who ad gone Hollywood to prove he could do better than the pros. Lippert made his case: The film had earned $6 million in the early days of the Korean War and had put a million dollars into Sammy's personal bank account. Success had also bought him a deal with Darryl Zanuck at Fox to make first-run pictures, starting with another Korean War saga, "Fixed Bayonets." That contract put him on a course of success for the next 10 years, then he fell into decline in 1964 and was all but blacklisted out of Hollywood for being too volatile and difficult to work with. To many, Sammy became his own worst enemy, and eventually nobody would bankroll him or work with him.
Having grown up on Fuller's hard-boiled, offbeat movies, I wrote about his 1962 war film "Merrill's Marauders" in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and a week
later got a letter from him, telling me about the tragic death of Jeff Chandler and the hardships of making the movie in Hawaii. It began a long-running association and for a couple of years I hung out with Sammy in Hollywood, even visiting the set of "The Naked Kiss" for three days at Samuel Goldwyn Studios. I watched as he openly argued with his producer and I stood by as two crew members were fired on the spot for not responding quickly enough to Fuller's demands. I saw he was a tough taskmaster and was I glad I wasn't on his payroll.
It remained a kind of father/son relationship as we talked about "Helmet" and how he'd shot the combat scenes in Griffith Park; "Fixed Bayonets," which he'd filmed entirely on a Fox soundstage with phony snow, yet had somehow made seem real); "Run of the Arrow," a totally singular western starring Rod Steiger, and "Park Row," his film about the invention of the linotype machine. That was one of his favorites because he had the blood of a newspaperman in his veins, having once worked for the New York Graphic. The fact he had lost the million from "Helmet" to make "Park Row" didn't bother him in the slightest. Making money was not what it was about for Sammy. Making movies--that's what counted in life.
We also talked about "House of Bamboo," a Robert Stack crime film shot in Japan, and "Pickup on South Street," his great Richard Widmark spy thriller set during the dark days of the 1950s when we were looking for Communists under our beds and in our closets. And there were many others.
But mainly we talked about Sammy's war movies, because war flowed through his veins. The art of killing other men for a cause was always on his mind. War was the thing, in fact, that constantly shaped his life and his art. He'd "bellied" all the way from North Africa to Czechoslovakia with the 16th Infantry Regiment of the First Infantry Division (nicknamed "The Big Red One" after the shape of its shoulder patch). He was an M-1-packing G.I. and he was damn proud of it, having won the Bronze Star for capturing Germans on D-Day at Sicily and a Silver Star for taking part in the Normandy invasion.
Sammy, to hear him talk, had "bellied" all the way across World War II. "Bellied" is the word he used because Sammy had a vocabulary unique to himself. He never called himself a soldier. He was a "dogface." He didn't write "scripts," he wrote "yarns." When he finished directing a scene, he never yelled "Cut," he shouted "Forget it," meaning it was good, I like it, now get on to the next scene. He never wore a "helmet." It was a "steel hat." It was never "haul that equipment," it was "jackass that equipment." It was never "walk," it was "beetle-crush." "Bananahead" was the oft-used term to describe producers who didn't agree with him.
That's the way Sammy talked because Sammy was Sammy. Rough as hell around the edges, but one of the most lovable guys you'd ever want to know. His doormat read "Go Away!" but he'd still welcome you into his home with a gruff-voiced command. One time he came to the front door, to the dismay of my wife, with only two things on--a cigar and a pair of silk shorts.
He had also talked about the one war movie most dear to him, the one he had never made: "The Big Red One," his own World War II story. The "yarn" of how he had "bellied" from Tunisia to Czechoslovakia. He kept the screenplay locked away in a small safe in his study, a room lined with hundreds of books, many of them about war and the newspaper business. One night in 1963 he acted out the script's opening scene, in which a dazed soldier makes his way across no-man's-land and suddenly encounters a battle-shocked horse. Sammy played both parts with equal energy--man and animal, both destroyed by war, each struggling to survive by killing the other.
Sammy loved to tell the back story of "The Big Red One," and he told it many times, relishing the details: In July 1958 John Wayne had agreed to sign on as Sammy's star for $750,000, which would have set a new record for a single-picture salary. But then the financing fell apart. After all, Sammy wanted to re-create most of the major battles of World War II. But even with Wayne in his hip pocket, Sammy could never quite pull it off. (His movie would get made in 1980 with Lee Marvin starring, but it would be a mere shadow of what he had intended. His final cut was rejected by Lorimar Studios and after two years of battles, his energy for making movies had dissipated away.)
. . . So those were some of the memories that washed over me as I recently re-watched "The Steel Helmet." I also felt some sadness because I was reminded that Sammy was already two years gone. He'd died in October 1997 at the age of 86, after two years of ill-health following a heart attack. Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg had praised him and admitted they had been strongly influenced by his unusual body of work, but most of the mourners were far removed from Hollywood--European film cultists and historians, largely in France. (One of the reasons he had decided to live in Paris.)
I had never forgotten him--to me he was still "the most unforgettable character" I had ever met. After he moved to Paris in the early 1970s, he continued to send me autographed copies of his paperback novels, and he had called me in 1980 to discuss the fact he had finally completed "The Big Red One" for Lorimar, thanks to the fact that Peter Bogdanovich had helped him push the project through a tough financing stage.
Although he complained that the film suffered from a low budget, and had been cut to hell and back a couple of times, he was hopeful it would be his comeback film after the years of rejection by Hollywood. It never happened. The film did just okay and then he made a controversial movie at Paramount that was barely released (called "White Dog," it dealt with racism). After the double disappointment, he returned to France to make obscure TV movies, the only working world that seemed to appreciate and want him.
That brings me back to that DVD again, because when I finally got around to seeing "Saving Private Ryan," almost immediately after seeing "Steel Helmet" on AMC, it was Sammy who I was thinking about again. I felt a tightness in my chest watching
Tom Hanks and all those men in the Higgins boat coming into Omaha Beach on that fateful morning of June 6, 1944, because Sammy had told me what had happened to him when he hit the beach. And the way he had described it looked the way Spielberg had captured it on film.
Sam had come into Easy Red Beach with the first waves and he'd slowly made his way onto the shore, crawling past the dead and wounded, but pinned down by heavy machine-gun fire and barrages of artillery and mortar shells exploding around him. Bodies flew through the air. Men weighed down with all their combat gear sank and drowned yards behind him.
"You couldn't walk on the beach because there was too much lead flying around, but even if you wanted to, you couldn't do it without stepping on a body, or a part of a body. An arm, a leg, a head. Intestines. There were so many dead, there wasn't a clear place to put down a boot. There was blood spattered everywhere. The water was red. We were pinned down for three hours before we could start to move up the beach."
"War is a natural state of survival for animals," Sammy told me one Sunday evening in 1963 in his Canyon Drive home near Columbia Studios in Hollywood. "It should not be natural for men. And yet there is a law of war by which man lives. In the methods with which we fight, we are lower than animals. We show more hate and brutality than animals. Man is the only species who has created destructive weapons to destroy himself. No other species is capable of that. In all my war movies, I wanted to show the intense kind of hate that man reveals during war. It is the darkest and most insane time, and yet we attach so many values to war. Honor, country, heroism.
"War," he continued, "fills me with passion. Death is the most important emotion. Is there any other subject which surpasses death? But war has not been accurately depicted in the movies. The screen has hardly ever shown how a man is really killed. It isn't pretty. It's too grim for an audience to see. Producers won't allow you to show these things. I've wanted to, but there is just so far you can go. And then they will beat you down. I do try to leave my soldiers dirty, tired and unshaven. Never with women around. Battle-weary, spiritually destroyed. That is the one kind of aftermath I'm allowed to show. The flotsam of war is my specialty."
Sammy's best screen soldier was Sergeant Zack, a grizzled offshoot of Bill Mauldin's Willy or Joe--cynical, exhausted, all-knowing about death and the many ways soldiers die, hard as a rock on the outset but still subject to sentimentality in moments of personal weakness. It's a weakness because going soft is when a soldier's defenses go down and ultimately leads to dying. If he remains partly inhuman and cold to human tragedy, he may stay alive for a while longer. He may even survive to go home. It is all part of the credo of Fuller's combat infantryman.
The Fuller soldier was first portrayed in "The Steel Helmet" by Gene Evans, a solid actor, though one who was relegated most of his career to playing unshaven gunfighters or heavies with snarling lips. Evans furthered the Zack character under the name Rock in "Fixed Bayonets," although Zack and Rock are ultimately interchangeable. (Evans, a life-long friend of Sammy's who was the screen persona of Sam himself, finally left the film business in the twilight years of his life, disgruntled that he always had been so typecast, and disillusioned about some of the industry's business ethics.)
I began to wonder what Sammy would have thought of Spielberg's award-winning war movie. Spielberg's D-Day sequence which opens the film is one of the most graphic depictions of war in the history of movies, and one of the most gruelling and difficult to watch. It repels and fascinates, like all things beautifully horrible. Sammy always said war was the most beautiful of spectacles. It was cleaning up the mess that was sickening.
Spielberg's vision matches Sammy's description of bodies strewn everywhere, and death in each of its forms is depicted, often more than once. By bullet, by explosion, by fire, by drowning. This is what Sammy had wanted to show in "The Big Red One," but he didn't have the money and it wasn't yet permissible to show war at its worst, not if you had box-office considerations. That would only come to Spielberg with the box-office power he wielded in the '90s, and a time of realistic movie-making as never before experienced by audiences.
So I went back to look at the D-Day sequence in "The Big Red One." It quickly became clear that Sammy had shot his Omaha Beach material with not more than 50 actors. Most of the scenes were done in extreme close-ups, and in the few wide angle shots one can clearly see there were no more than two ships at sea--hardly the Allied armada of D-Day.
This limited-in-scope sequence--disappointing in comparison to Spielberg's--sufficed in its time as it was just one of several major battles Fuller depicted in "The Big Red One," and hence it never had to carry the picture or be a centerpiece to the greater whole. Given Spielberg's achievement, Fuller's approach appears to be woefully inadequate, and is far more disappointing than when the film was first released.
Fuller's focus is on Lee Marvin's rifle squad which has been assigned the task of blowing a hole through the German lines with bangalore torpedoes. Unlike Spielberg, who compresses the first few hours of the battle into 20 intense minutes of unrelenting warfare, Fuller depicts the passage of nearly three hours by showing the wristwatches on the arms of men sprawled dead in the sand or surf. (This is the film's best artistic touch.)
The soldiers of the 16th Infantry Regiment are killed by bullets and explosions, but there is no blood, no severed limbs and heads as Sammy described it and as Spielberg showed it. Fuller's 1980 version is, ironically, a sanitized vision of D-Day, whitewashed before Fuller ever got to the location, reduced in scope by a lack of budget and by a conservative '80s attitude toward the maiming of men.
There is no doubt in my mind that Sammy Fuller would have praised Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." I am sure he would have slapped him on the back. And I think I can hear what he might have said, pure Fuller lingo. "Take a bow, my boy. You showed the dogfaces as they really were. They bellied their way across the beach the way they're supposed to. You've photographed one damn fine yarn, and the bananaheads are going to fall out of their seats when they see it. Now forget it and let's beetle-crush back to the bar. I'm buying."
© 2000 by John Stanley
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