CHINA GATE (1957)

There had been Hollywood films set in Vietnam before, but Samuel Fuller's China Gate is arguably the first "Vietnam movie" to involve an American protagonist in the effort to prevent a Communist takeover of French Indochina. Fuller opens his picture with a prologue history of Indochina up to the Viet Minh uprising against French colonial rule, but he seems a little unclear on what Vietnam is. For one thing, he doesn't really use that name. For another, he writes as if the people of Indochina are "Chinese." On the other hand, China Gate takes an interesting attitude toward ethnicity in general. The Asian characters are written mostly in an entirely unstereotyped way, with none of the stilted conventions of Hollywood or pulp writing. The Viet Minh soldiers we see -- the time is early 1954, before the decisive siege of Dienbienphu -- talk and pretty much act like dogfaces anywhere: happy to see a dame, especially if she's brought alcohol. Meanwhile, singer Nat "King" Cole has a big supporting role as an American fighting with the French Foreign Legion, and his blackness is never remarked upon. His role probably wasn't written for a black actor, and strange to say, Cole's craggy features and raspy speaking voice arguably make his character, identified as a veteran of the "Big Red One" during World War II, even more of a surrogate for Fuller himself. The singer actually gives a credible performance as a tough soldier (he survives a booby-trap spike through his foot without crying out) marred only by a probably-obligatory performance of the rather bleak title song, and even that isn't inconsistent with Fuller's use of song in the same year's Forty Guns.

Where Fuller probably won't pass muster with many modern viewers is his casting of white actors in two crucial "half-caste" roles. Angie Dickinson gets the romantic lead playing Lia, a lithe lush better known as "Lucky Legs" or "Lucky" for short. Everyone remarks on how Lucky can pass for white, but her son is not so Lucky. Although the boy's no more than one-quarter Asian -- his father is American -- he looks so entirely Asian that the father, Sgt. Brock of the Legion (Gene Barry) freaks out and runs out on wife and child. That fact makes him a heel to everyone else in his unit, and it definitely complicates his mission to penetrate enemy lines to find the Communist weapons depot beyond the China Gate, with Lucky, a fixer who travels often between the lines, as their guide and shield.

Fuller quickly establishes his anti-communist credentials -- many of the Legionnaires are Korean War veterans who went to Vietnam so they could keep killing commies -- and that gives him cover from which he attacks his real target, American racism. By comparison, we never really encounter a dogmatic communist. As noted, the Viet Minh grunts we meet are simply grunts, no better or worse than other soldiers.  When we get to the final boss, Major Cham, he's shown to be no more than an opportunist who had formerly hated communism, as Lucky notes in an embarrassing moment in front of Cham's masseuse, but now sees it as the wave of the future and his surest path to success. On the evidence of China Gate, communists are bad guys mainly by virtue of being more ruthless and indiscriminate, for some reason or other, in their violence.

It's probably for the best that Fuller didn't try to make any ideological statement when his main commie villain, the other half-caste in the story, is played by Lee Van Cleef. While the actor's name actually resembles a Vietnamese name, the resemblance pretty much ends there, which makes it unintentionally preposterous when Cham tells Lucky that he gets along better with the Reds because he looks more "Chinese" than she does. Cleef actually tries hard here to pull off a character who has actual feelings for Lucky, apparently his sometime lover, and for her son, whom he'd like to give a chance at advancement by getting him educated in Moscow. I have a feeling, however, that the naturalistic, non-stereotyped dialogue Fuller gave him made him even more damningly unconvincing as an Asian in the eyes of contemporary audiences, so that what actually looks now like a halfway decent performance probably looked like the worst in 1957.

By modern standards, given China Gate's anti-racist line, any ending that falls short of a happy ending for Lucky, Brock and their son probably will look like a cop-out. Does it undercut Fuller's message that Lucky sacrifices her life, after tossing Cham off a balcony, to blow up the ammo dump, even if the ending makes clear that Brock will take his Asiatic boy home with him after all? Some people are bound to think so, but let's remember that Fuller comes from an older tradition that values pathos and aims for bittersweet effects. If anything, you can argue that Lucky's death will only remind Brock even more of the wrong he did her earlier and the debt he owes their child. Tragedy was more commonplace in pop culture back then, especially when the one-and-done format of TV drama meant that heroes and heroines often loved and lost in a single hour. The same format also encouraged people to shrug off tragedy rather than wallow in it, and something like China Gate probably should be taken in the same spirit. It's not really a Fuller masterwork but it has a lot of interesting stuff going on, including the best performance I've ever seen from Gene Barry. The guilt trip he takes in this picture breaks down that typical smugness that makes his Bat Masterson so insufferable and suggests that he could have done more with his career if wanted to or was goaded into it. Cole also shows potential he got very little chance to develop further beyond his W. C. Handy biopic of the following year. I doubt anyone accepts Angie Dickinson as even partially Asian but she gives the right kind of charismatic performance for the familiar type of pulp heroine she plays. Overall China Gate is the typical "primitive" Fuller mix of impressive tracking shots, intense action, mostly decent art direction, badly integrated stock footage, etc. The film won't really tell you anything about Vietnam, but it's a diverting yarn on its own terms.

DVR Diary: VERBOTEN! (1959)

Samuel Fuller is sometimes described as a cinematic primitive. What that means is that he is often unsubtle in his writing or direction, but also willing to try anything for an effect. Another way of looking at it is that Fuller could wallow in camp nearly as often as he achieved heights of insight. Verboten! is camp Fuller. Like proper camp it's written and filmed -- and in this case produced -- in earnest. Fuller simply knows no other way to address his subject than with rhetorical howitzers. The subject is the occupation of Germany by the Americans at the end of World War II. It opens with Fuller on safe ground: gritty war action on a budget with touches of authenticity based on Fuller's own experiences. Then the opening credits roll and we get the Love Theme from Verboten! Town Without Pity this isn't.

We have a love theme from Verboten! because Verboten! is a love story. G.I. David Brent (James Best) is wounded while fighting to take a German town but is rescued by Helga (Susan Cummings), one of the local frauleins, despite the hostility of her younger brother, a Hitler Youth who has already lost an arm in the war. After the surrender, David marries Helga and takes a job as a civilian administrator for the occupation. That puts Helga in a lucky position and however sincere her feelings for David may be, she can't help but be a little smug and cynical about her luck when a family friend, Bruno (Tom Pittman, who died in a car wreck before the film's release), returns from demobilization. She persuades David to vouch for Bruno so the German can get a job as a policeman. Part of his job is to ferret out Nazis, but Bruno has a secret agenda. He's part of the Werwolf, the vaunted resistance organization that the Nazis predicted would rise from their ashes. Now he's in a position to recruit Werwolves, steal supplies and arms, and build forces for an uprising against the Americans. Fuller apparently took the Werwolf more seriously than history justifies; Verboten! would have been a comfort to those who wanted to argue a decade ago that there was so resistance to the Allied occupation, so that the resistance in Iraq didn't look so damning by comparison.

The main problem with Verboten! is that the romantic plot and the Werwolf plot don't fit so well together. As Bruno stirs things up behind the scenes while continuing to play the loyal stooge of the occupiers, David's marriage threatens to fall apart when the American loses his job for provoking a riot. Bruno has informed David of Helga's cynical comments about David being a "goldmine" to her, and now the American sees her urging him to find work back in the U.S. as a way to dump him. Meanwhile, Helga's brother has joined the Werwolf but has second thoughts once the group starts hijacking medical shipments. He has third thoughts after seeing Bruno execute a man for criticizing the hijackings. He has fourth thoughts after he and Helga take a day trip to the Nuremberg trial. Large parts of Verboten! are filmed in glorious StockFootageScope, so we see the celebrity Nazis take their seats in the dock of the historic courtroom before we see Helga and her brother take their seats in what looks like a separate, more spartanly furnished venue, where they get to see a digest version of the evidence against the Nazis as narrated by Fuller. How coincidental that this presentation of the evidence quotes Nazi leaders using some of the exact phrases Bruno does in his pep-talks to the Werwolf. That, and the films from the death camps, turns the brother against the Nazis for good. Repentant, he rushes to rat Bruno out to a still-sulky David, but it's up to the one-armed kid himself to fight Bruno to a finish in a burning railroad car before David finally comes to the rescue and the film basically comes to a stop.

James Best, who continues to work in his eighties, will have the dubious honor of going to his grave remembered most (if not best) as Roscoe P. Coltrane, the hapless sheriff on The Dukes of Hazzard. For a generation before that show, Best had built himself up into a dependable character actor and a welcome presence in western films and TV shows. He's the best thing (sorry!) about Verboten!, and his best moment (sorry again!!) comes when David has to face down a small mob protesting food shortages. This scene boasts Fuller's liveliest writing, expressing the auteur's own ambivalence about Germany. When a protester mocks America's claim to have liberated Germany, David blows his top. You're damn right we're not liberators, he roars; "We're conquerors and don't you forget it!" At moments like this Verboten! becomes an authentic document of a moment when Americans were torn between the imperative to reconcile (a Cold War context is only hinted at) and lingering outrage over Germany's crimes against humanity. The postwar international family can only be restored when the Germans recognize and repudiate their country's crimes; then they can be forgiven in time for the happy ending. That's a historic burden Fuller's plot can't quite bear, given the flimsiness of the soapbox it stands on. His heart was in the right place but his skills mostly eluded him this time.

DVR Diary: MERRILL' S MARAUDERS (1962)

A fitting film for Memorial Day in more than one sense, Samuel Fuller's fact-based account of a grueling American incursion into Japanese-occupied Burma self-consciously honors the memories of the men who fought but was also, without actually saying so, a memorial to its star, Jeff Chandler, who died of complications from a back injury suffered on the Philippine location a year before the movie's release. He didn't hurt his back while the cameras rolled, but apparently endured an ordeal of pain for the remainder of the shoot in some ways comparable to that portrayed in the picture. Chandler finally submitted to surgery back home, but died from it. He made his name in movies, after some success in radio, playing the milestone heroic-Indian role of Cochise in Delmer Daves's Broken Arrow (1950). I always found Chandler unconvincing in period or ethnic parts -- he's one of Hollywood's most unconvincing Arabs in Flame of Araby, for instance -- but that limitation doesn't pose a problem when he plays a hard-boiled general with a heart condition who drives himself the same way he drives his men, despite the advice of the standard-issue compassionate medic (Andrew Duggan). When Merrill finally suffers a (non-fatal) heart attack just before the finish, it's as if Fuller were projecting Chandler's demise. It must have been an awful yet moving sight for his fans when the film first came out fifty years ago next month, but the film holds up now without the morbid fascination it must have exerted in the summer of '62.

Fuller's film is more an ensemble piece than a Chandler star vehicle. Warner Bros. clearly considered it a showcase for its young contract talent from television: Ty Hardin (Bronco), Peter Brown (Lawman) and Will Hutchins (Sugarfoot), while Fuller treated it as an audition for The Big Red One, which he hoped to make with Warners' money immediately afterward. Despite the quirks given each of the lead soldiers, Merrill's Marauders is a less character-driven film than the one Fuller finally made in 1980. The characters don't really rise above types and tics, and one soldier's tragicomic attachment to the company mule is just corny, but you could argue that this sort of war movie needn't be and maybe shouldn't be character-driven. Fuller's eye for dramatically framed action drives the film, and he gets maximum value for his dollar in the Philippines. The battle scenes are nicely staged, though some of them were apparently shot for other pictures and cut in by cost-conscious Warners. The most pictorially intriguing is a skirmish at an oil refinery constructed almost like a labyrinth, punctuated by a post-fight walk by a soldier across the tops of odd structures almost shaped like coffins on top, as bodies lay below. But I was most impressed by a more quiet scene. The exhausted troops are resting in a liberated village. The villagers offer some of their meager food to the hungry Americans. An old woman brings a small bowl to a bearded, barely conscious Claude Akins, who seems to be Fuller's substitute for his usual dogface alter ego Gene Evans. She and her child pantomime that the stuff is food that you eat, but Akins seems too tired even to eat. Finally the child takes a handful of the stuff and puts it in Akins's mouth. At that point, with the compassionate old woman hovering over him, Akins bursts into tears and finally starts to feed himself. You don't expect it from Akins, one of the great tough-guy character actors of the era in film and TV, but it feels utterly spontaneous and you understand without further explanation why he's crying. That's the sort of bonus Fuller brings to his war movies and the sort of thing that makes them worth watching for people who don't like war or war movies in general.

The original trailer has spoilers or history lessons, depending on your perspective. It comes from the Turner Classic Movies website.

RUN OF THE ARROW (1957)

"The end of this story can only be written by you," Samuel Fuller writes, and it's a tall order considering that the story is set some ninety years before Run of the Arrow was released. But it's his unsubtle way of reiterating the contemporary relevance of his screenplay, though audiences might be excused for wondering where the relevance was. Fortunately, the film doesn't stand or fall on its relevance.

Fuller's protagonist is only ever known as O'Meara (Rod Steiger). He's a Confederate soldier who claims the distinction of firing the last shot of the Civil War, picking a Union lieutenant off his horse near Appomattox Court House on the morning of April 9, 1865. Claiming the horse, but finding the man still alive, he takes his prisoner to the rebel infirmary, nearer still to the actual court house, where he sees General Lee leave after surrendering to General Grant. Enraged, he resolves to shoot Grant, only to be told by the surgeon that Lee would most likely kill himself out of shame if O'Meara betrayed the truce. Back home, O'Meara remains unreconciled, despite his own mother telling him to grow up and become an American. The best that can be said of O'Meara is that, instead of becoming a terrorist, he lights out for the West. He hooks up with Walking Coyote (Jay C. Flippen), an old, alcoholic Sioux Indian scout who teaches him the language and some of the customs. Surprised by a renegade band led by Crazy Wolf (H. M. Wynant), Coyote gives O'Meara a fighting chance by invoking the "run of the arrow" challenge as an alterantive to death by torture or hanging. Forced to run barefoot with the renegades in pursuit, O'Meara takes advantage of their hounding of the dying Coyote, who'd meant to sacrifice himself, to find shelter in a friendly village where Blue Buffalo (a buff Charles Bronson) is the chief. Impressed by O'Meara's fortitude and his renunciation of allegiance to the United States, and in spite of his continued avowal of Christianity ("We worship the same god," BB assures him), the tribe adopts the Reb and marries him off to Yellow Mocassin (Sarita Montiel), the woman who had rescued and nursed him after the ordeal. The new couple adopts the mute boy Silent Tongue, for whom O'Meara's harmonica is a unique way to communicate that comes in handy later.

When paramount chief Red Cloud (Frank DeKova) negotiates a treaty with the U.S. Cavalry, he designates O'Meara to act as a scout to guide the troops to the site agreed on by both sides for a fort. His blunt honesty impresses Captain Clark (Brian Keith), but Lieutenant Driscoll (Ralph Meeker) is less impressed. A glory hound and Indian hater, Driscoll recognizes O'Meara's horse as the one the Reb took from him at Appomattox. O'Meara still carries the bullet the doctor extracted from Driscoll as a memento, inscribed as a gift from his fellow townspeople. He may have a fresh use for that bullet as Crazy Wolf's renegades harrass the cavalry and Driscoll spoils for an excuse to wage all-out war on the Sioux. When O'Meara captures Crazy Wolf, he forces his captive to play the run-of-the-arrow game, but when Driscoll tries to shoot the renegade, the Reb turns on the officer and takes Crazy Wolf back to Blue Buffalo's village. With Clark eliminated, Driscoll orders the fort built on a more provocative location, daring the Sioux to attack despite O'Meara's warnings. After a brutal, one-sided battle, Driscoll is turned over to Crazy Wolf for death by torture for violating the run, forcing O'Meara to an ultimate test of his principles and loyalties....

As I've already noted, Fuller leaves the ending somewhat ambiguous, and I'll leave it even more so by not describing it further. Suffice it to say that Fuller has some points to make about belonging and reconciliation, but those are complicated by his now-outmoded practice of making a Confederate his hero. As late as The Outlaw Josey Wales, a Reb could stand in for a generic rebel, and O'Meara is a hero in this sense only. Fuller isn't endorsing secession by any means, and he makes a point of having Capt. Clark denounce the Ku Klux Klan while not accepting O'Meara's excuse (actually perfectly valid) of not being involved in cross-burning or night riding. Even for Fuller, O'Meara is acceptable as a hero only insofar as he has no opinion whatsoever about black people. It probably was true that many rank and file Rebs weren't aggressive racists or believers in slavery, but audiences today hold anyone in gray accountable for the Peculiar Institution, and the omission of black-white relations from Fuller's agenda seems more glaring now than it may have been then.

Nor is Run of the Arrow an endorsement of a rebel or renegade lifestyle. Crazy Wolf is a counterexample of a purely destructive renegade, but on the other hand Lt. Driscoll represents the sort of asinine, overbearing authority figure who provokes rebellion. Fuller is neither for or against rebellion, except to say it's got to end sometime. Likewise, he intends no statement on "savagery" or "civilization." He neither idealizes nor demonizes the Sioux; Dances With Wolves this isn't. At the end, however, Fuller seems to acknowledge a cultural divide that O'Meara can't bridge. Until then, the Sioux had been just another nation with its own language and customs. But their insistence upon torture appears to alienate O'Meara from them decisively, and his obvious distaste for it alienates his own wife from him -- she recognizes that, no matter what he feels about Yankees, he remains essentially American. Yet one thing Fuller leaves to our imagination is whether Yellow Mocassin will stay with O'Meara or not; their cultural differences need not divide the multicultural family. But if we root for them to stay together, we should also root, Fuller implicitly insists, for the reconciliation of North and South, Natives and Whites -- and perhaps for their consolidation into something bigger and better than the sum of its parts rather than their common submission to some unworthy authority figure like Driscoll.

Fuller takes a chance by casting Rod Steiger as a leading man, but surrounds him with lots of capable character actors to play off. The tactic works: Steiger has a common man appeal instead of coming off like the archetypal tall Western superman, and his scenes with Flippen, Bronson, Keith and Meeker are great stuff. The best thing about the script is Fuller's transcendence of cliched Indian dialogue. His Sioux talk neither in me-scalpum pidgin nor in the stilted "noble" cadences of too many sympathetic Indians in Fifties Westerns. Instead, they speak an easy, conversational English, a cinematic translation of their own language that humanizes them rather than emphasizing their alien culture as subtitled native dialogue would do. The glaring exception to the high standard of acting is leading lady Sarita Montiel, who was reportedly dubbed by Angie Dickinson to no good effect. Visually, Run is outstanding. Fuller and cinematographer Joseph Biroc take full advantage of the full width and height of the "RKO-Scope" screen and their stark locations to create compositions of epic depth and sweep. Fuller's somewhat muddled message -- I'm still not quite sure to whom or what he expects O'Meara to be loyal -- can be disregarded in a movie fan's enjoyment of a colorful, rousing, violent yet humane adventure film.

Here's a trailer, uploaded to YouTube by skipjackturner.

Samuel Fuller's 'It Tolls For Thee' (1962)

As his Hollywood directing career in feature films wound down, Samuel Fuller did occasional TV work on either side of his independent productions, Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss. He made his larget contribution to the Dale Robertson series The Iron Horse, directing six episodes and writing two during its two-season run. The ninth episode of the first season of NBC's The Virginian stands apart from the rest of his TV work because that show allowed Fuller to work at feature length. It was the first show to run 90 minutes every week, and without commercials "It Tolls For Thee" runs just over 75 minutes -- comparable to a Budd Boetticher-Randolph Scott western or Fuller's own Forty Guns. An older friend recalls that The Virginian was subject to some mockery in its time by comedians who presumed that the extra length could only be achieved by padding the standard western action, but the format gave Fuller time to inject some art and personality into a standard TV western plot about the kidnapping of a protagonist.

The Virginian was loosely derived from Owen Wister's genre-defining novel from the turn of the 20th century, which had already been made into several feature films, most notably an early Gary Cooper talkie. The show did not re-enact the novel; instead, as the Smallville of westerns it keeps the titular and otherwise anonymous hero (James Drury) in a presumably-uneasy friendship with the hothead Trampas (Doug McClure), whom the hero eventually kills in Wister. Looming over both men is the technical star of the show for its first four seasons, their employer, cattleman Judge Henry Garth (Lee J. Cobb). "It Tolls For Thee" is a Garth-centric episode, which means Fuller gets to work more with Cobb than with the rather dull Drury and McClure, and to pit Cobb against special guest star Lee Marvin.

As writer and director, Fuller portrays Judge Garth as a man determined to transcend the violence that earned him his empire. The lady editor of the local paper presents the judge with a gift-watch inscribed by Joseph Pulitzer, who sees Garth as the last of a breed of gunmen who conquered the west. Pulitzer's tribute is sincerely offered ("A timepiece of admiration from a newsboy to a cowboy"), but Garth bristles at the assumption that he remains a gunman, and that the West is still ruled by violence. As a judge, he's dedicated to the rule of law, but keeping order often takes him to the edge of violence. His soiree is disrupted by a drunken ex-cowhand whom The Virginian had fired and who now starts smashing windows. The V-man comes outside and starts pounding the drunk, getting into more of a rage as he goes, until Garth pulls him off and slugs him to calm him down. Mr. V. will sulk awhile thereafter, but his attitude will be the least of Garth's worries.

All the while, Garth has been stalked by an outlaw gang led by Kalig (Marvin). Kalig is some sort of renaissance man of evil, a cold-blooded intellect who did time as a law student, a Marine and a convict before taking over the gang by shooting its erstwhile leader Sharkey (Warren Kemmerling) in the back and leaving him for dead. He thinks he has a plan for the perfect kidnapping to net himself a $100,000 ransom, but it'll require split-second timing to isolate the judge from his men, snatch him and get away with him. For a show supposedly already being ribbed for its alleged padding, Fuller makes timing important here and later in a suspenseful episode that also allows for lengthy dialogue scenes between Cobb and Marvin. Fuller even manages to bring Garth's watch into play when Kalig's spiteful destruction of it finally drives the judge into a rage that threatens to disrupt a rescue plan that depends on perfect synchronization of gunfire by the rescuers. Accidents of timing matter as well, as the ranch hands catch up with the kidnappers just as another group, led by the still living and vengeful Sharkey, starts firing on Kalig.

For Fuller fans, the acting duel between Cobb and Marvin is probably the meat of this movie. It's a battle of underplaying, often as subtle as the correct pronunciation of "Pulitzer," as Cobb tones down his characteristic bluster to play a benevolent authority figure while Marvin plays a hard-to-rile, nearly emotionless villain. Kalig denies that revenge has anything to do with his kidnapping the judge who sentenced him to prison, calling revenge "an inhuman word for small minds." He claims to have taken Garth simply because he's the only man in the region who could produce the big ransom, but Kalig also enjoys tormenting the judge, both physically and mentally. In a perhaps-unconscious homage to The Big Heat, Marvin toasts Cobb in the morning by dumping a cup of hot coffee on his bound hands. More often, Kalig tries to expose Garth as a hypocrite who'd revert to savagery if the chips were down. Throughout, Kalig resists analysis, defying all attempts to explain his crimes. "There's no thought in the murderer as the poet and the romanticist would have you believe," he tells the judge. Nor is there remorse, "If you mean an apparition of the slain party," which is aimed as much at his men who fear Sharkey's return as at the moralizing Garth. That remorselessness proves a practical flaw, since Kalig simply refuses to anticipate Sharkey's attack, which reduces Kalig's gang to manageable numbers before Garth's men take action. In the end, of course, it'll be one-on-one between the judge and the outlaw, the climactic dilemma being not whether Garth will be saved but whether he is saved, so to speak -- whether he can restrain himself from killing Kalig in cold blood and proving everything the villain, and to some extent the people back east, presume about him.

The Virginian is one of those maddening shows that has obvious production values but persistent technical limitations. One outdoor shot might be taken at a magnificent location, and another on the most obvious soundstage -- and regrettably most of the scenes with Kalig's gang are the latter. Fuller apparently lacked the means or budget to shoot their dialogue scenes on the same rocky hills where they action is staged. But with Cobb and Marvin in the foreground speaking Fuller's dialogue you forgive the backdrops. Those limitations aside, "It Tolls For Thee" could pass easily for and compare favorably with most B westerns of this era -- a genre that shows like The Virginian probably did much to kill off before the coming of spaghetti westerns. By nature, it's a minor Fuller work, but on the other hand it seems unmistakably his, from the physical ordeal of Judge Garth to the celebrations of journalism. Because it is a feature film for all intents and purposes, it deserves a more prominent place, if not too prominent, in the Fuller canon.

That Dirty Little Coward: Robert Ford at the Movies

"Ford is a young man, about 22 years of age, and looks like a verdant youth from the country. In appearance he is a mere boy, and is the last person in the world to be taken as the slayer of the famous outlaw."

The New York Times, April 4, 1882.

It was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward.

I wonder how he feels.

"Jesse James," American folk song.

Recording by Vernon Dalhart (1925), uploaded to YouTube by cdbpdx

Robert Ford is an archetypal American traitor. If an American Dante were to stock his Inferno with his fellow nationals, we might expect to find Bob, if not his brother Charlie, smack at the bottom, gnawed on by an icebound Satan along with Benedict Arnold and John Wilkes Booth. In his time, he was seen not only as a traitor but as a conspirator and a mercenary. The most interesting thing I found out while researching the historical side of this review was the way the "assassination" of Jesse James impacted the career of Missouri governor T. T. Crittenden. In 1886, four years after Ford killed James, Crittenden was being considered for a diplomatic post. President Grover Cleveland rejected him, reportedly explaining that people back east would object because of Crittenden's role in James's death. Regardless of what people thought of James, many recoiled from a politician's employment of hired killers to solve a law-enforcement problem. Imagine if an elected official today was revealed to have hired a hit squad to take out alleged terrorists on American soil. Some would lionize him, but many others would condemn him. The people who made the latter of the two movies discussed below may have understood or even encouraged the analogy; they at least play up the political aspect of James's death more than the other film does.

But while the men who did that theoretical official's dirty work might be vilified as mercenaries or mere thugs, they certainly wouldn't be thought of as traitors, even if they were "radical" Muslims turning on their own kind. Bob Ford endured as a villain in the American consciousness long after the scandal surrounding Crittenden was forgotten mainly because he was seen as a traitor of the most venal kind. But Americans also have a tendency to play devil's advocate. There's a curiosity about why people do wicked things, why they betray, even if it boils down to a banal assumption that everyone has his reasons. You see it in the reluctance in many Jesus movies to portray Judas as a pure villain. Of our proposed victims in the lowest circle of American Hell, probably only Booth is denied this kind of consideration (as far as I know). So it was probably inevitable that at least one writer would follow up on the folk singer's rhetorical wondering and attempt to reconstruct what made Ford tick, what he really thought of James, and how he felt about what he did to the bandit antihero.

I Shot Jesse James (1949) is Samuel Fuller's first film as a director. Despite the title, the movie isn't told by Ford in the first person or even fully from his point of view. Ford's story is sometimes overshadowed by the fitful romance of the two figures who with him form a triangle; his fictional girlfriend Cynthy the saloon singer (Barbara Britton) and sometime lawman Kelly, a figure very loosely based on the man who actually killed Ford in 1892. Kelly is played by Preston Foster, an implausible leading man at the time but top-billed just the same. Ford is played by John Ireland, who'd just made an impression in Red River the year before and would make another in All the King's Men. He looks a little old to play Bob, but that actually adds emphasis to the quasi-oedipal motivation Fuller gives him.

Bob Ford (John Ireland) is torn between two kinds of love, for Barbara Britton (above) and Reed Hadley (below) in I Shot Jesse James.

The liner notes for the Criterion Eclipse edition of I Shot invite us to see a homoerotic subtext in the relationship of Bob Ford and Jesse James. The film does leave room for speculation, but the vibe I got was more parricidal than homoerotic. Fuller's James is played by Reed Hadley, an actor out of radio with a voice of generic bland authority. He sports more of a beard than Brad Pitt will later and it gives him a patriarchal, Lincolnesque if not Jesus-like look. His most provocative scene has him taking a bath, Bob bringing in fresh hot water by the bucket. Jesse uses this occasion to give Bob a revolver as a present, not knowing that Bob is already studying to kill him. But Bob can't kill him with the loaded weapon while contemplating Jesse's naked back, and when the outlaw somewhat impatiently demands to have his back scrubbed, Bob obeys.

Why does Bob want to kill Jesse? It's nothing personal, at first glance; he wants the bounty money so he can afford to marry Cynthy. His tragedy throughout the film will be his repeated attempts to earn Cynthy's hand by all means necessary, his belief that going to the maximum, to the point of murder, proves the intensity of his love, even while his romantic ruthlessness repels her. By making Jesse's death the precondition of Bob's hoped-for marriage, Fuller makes it look as if Bob has to prove himself a man (to himself, that is) by destroying a paternal figure. Jesse's naked back in the bathtub doesn't represent homoerotic temptation as much as it does the oppressive intimacy of the family household to a cranky adolescent. Bob has to look at Jesse's clothed back before shooting him, but Fuller makes a point of having James say that he "feels naked" without his guns as he climbs the stool to adjust the painting. We don't get a flashback, but we can assume that Bob's thinking of that humiliating scene with the tub as he lays poor Jesse in his grave.

Andrew Dominik's The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) seems almost by design the opposite of Fuller's film. Dominik's film is lavishly budgeted while Fuller's is an indy B film. Assassination is almost exactly twice as long as I Shot, and the proportions of pre and post-assassination story are reversed, 3/4 of Fuller's film playing out after James's death while Dominik dedicates only about 1/5 of his epic to the aftermath. At first, Assassination promises a drastically different interpretation of Robert Ford, but in broadest terms both films come to the same conclusion about him.

It worried me to see Ford (Casey Affleck) portrayed as an obsessed fan of Jesse James (Pitt), even though we know that Bob did idolize the outlaw as a boy. His use of the slightly anachronistic term "sidekick" to describe his desired position in the James Gang didn't exactly boost my confidence. It seemed as if Dominik was imposing a 20th or 21st century character archetype on a 19th century legend. Fortunately, Bob's character evolves, albeit under duress. His fandom (his collection of newspaper clippings and dime novels) becomes an object of ridicule within the gang, including brother Charlie, who humiliates him in front of Jesse by telling tales of Bob's childhood worship of the bandit. Amused, Jesse presses Bob for more stories, goading him into a painful recitation of a host of Lincoln-Kennedy type resemblances between Jesse and himself. All of this puts Bob on the road to another kind of parricide. Treated contemptuously as a child by his peers, he has to prove his manhood by repudiating his idol -- or destroying it.

Nearly everyone treats Bob (Casey Affleck, on the floor) like a child in The Assassination of Jesse James, including Jesse (Brad Pitt, on the couch)

In the middle of this, there's a bathtub scene, either a homage to the Fuller film or just another version of a historical incident. There's no back scrubbing, though. Instead, Jesse uses this moment to ask Bob, "Do you want to be like me, or do you want to be me?" By this point in the story, the answer is probably neither. The major difference in content between Assassination and I Shot is that the later film gives Bob plenty of reasons to repudiate Jesse. For all we know, Fuller's Jesse James is no more and no less than the folk hero turned patriarch. Dominik and Brad Pitt's Jesse is gradually revealed to us as a monster. His constant sense of bemusement emerges as a depthless contempt for everyone around him. He's a genial paranoid who infects everyone around him with fear and distrust of each other. It'll sound strange to some of you, but the long, brilliantly written and acted scenes when Jesse probes for weaknesses, embarrassments and self-betrayals reminded me of nothing so much as accounts I've read of the inner circle of Josef Stalin, where the dictator enjoyed seeing his cronies make abject asses of themselves, while they understood that the wrong word could cost them their lives. The big difference is that Jesse James settled scores in a hands-on manner; maybe he was more like Saddam Hussein in that respect. At the same time, Dominik's Jesse has a clear death wish, as if his paranoia about betrayal was in part a matter of wishful thinking. It's as if he felt there was nothing left for him but to wait for murder, so he might as well make a game of it and enjoy himself a little longer. Brad Pitt nails the subtlety of James's menace, playing the legendary outlaw as something more sinister than the legend without turning him into a blatant psycho. I've liked Pitt best in his smaller comic roles, when he abandons the cool of stardom (he's brilliant in Burn After Reading, for instance), but for now Jesse James is the best work I've seen from him.

So why does Bob Ford want to kill this Jesse? For self-preservation, mainly, since he'd killed Jesse's cousin Wood Hite and assumes that James will kill him if he ever finds out. For all he knows, Jesse might just kill him for no good reason. Killing James is also part of a bargain with Crittenden (an uncanny cameo by James Carville); a pardon for Hite's murder in return for killing Crittenden's enemy. At the same time, killing his idol is essential to differentiating himself from Jesse and thus, like John Ireland's Bob in Fuller's film, proving himself as a man.

Dominik's Bob also kills Jesse for fame just as he joined the gang for fame. Celebrity is the subject on which Fuller goes most astray from history. In real life, Ford toured the nation recounting his exploit and re-enacting it on stage. Dominik shows him leaping off the stage to attack a heckler who called him a coward. But Fuller shows us a Ford who can't make it through the first night of the tour without having crippling guilt-ridden flashbacks of the real Jesse. Fuller's Ford hits the boards just to make money, the same reason he does anything, while Dominik's revels in fame until the backlash against his "treachery" breaks his spirit.

Art imitates Art imitating Life: John Ireland prepares to make his exit (above), while Casey Affleck prepares to take a bow (below)

Both Fuller and Dominik show Ford struggling with guilt and defensiveness about his deed. Both films introduce a wandering musician who sings the historic folk song about the "dirty little coward" without knowing that he's serenading the subject of the song. In I Shot Bob interrupts the song in the middle to identify himself, then forces the reluctant performer to finish the tune before walking away. By the time a drunken Bob hears the song in a crowded bar in Assassination, most of his fight is gone after fights with hecklers. He listens to the full performance before identifying himself, throwing a gun at the singer's feet, correcting him on the number of Jesse's children, and taking a swing at a complete stranger that nearly knocks himself out. Fuller still has a lot of story to tell after the song, but Dominik closes his film soon afterward with a purposefully perfunctory narration of Ford's meaningless death. His Bob does eventually say that he's sorry for what he did to Jesse, but Fuller's Bob tops that. His dying words to Cynthy are "I loved him."

"People don't really like it that much."

Beyond its interesting conception of Bob's motivation and Ireland's earnest interpretation of it, I Shot Jesse James is weighed down by its lacklustre love triangle and the narrative limitations of a first-time director. It opens dynamically with an aborted bank robbery and has a fair climax as Foster enrages Ireland by showing him his back, but Fuller's early attempt at an adult western is a pale preview of the genre explosion unleashed by Anthony Mann and others just a year later. I felt that way before I saw The Assassination, so please don't think I'm judging a B movie in light of an A. As for Dominik's film, it lived up to its slow-building reputation as the best western of the past decade. It is lavishly visualized in classic widescreen style in a manner that had seemed to die with the debacle of Heaven's Gate. Roger Deakins's cinematography is stunning in nearly every scene, but particularly in an early train-robbery sequence that presents the passage of the night train through the woods as a spectral apparition attended by hooded spirits of the darkness. How's that for poetry? Trust me, Deakins's visual work is much more poetic, and dramatic. Kudos are also owed to art director Troy Sizemore and everyone else who contributed to the film's classic look. This is only Dominik's second feature. That may look like he's far ahead of where Fuller was when he made his Ford movie, but the older director's overall record is still something Dominik can only aspire to match for now. At least Dominik can say he made one of the best American films of 2007, that best of many recent years for American film. He has me looking forward to his future work.

Cinematography by Roger Deakins. How hasn't he won an Oscar yet?

Whether there's more to say about Robert Ford is another story. Based on what I've read recently I'd say there's room for another version that focuses on his adventures after James and his fatal feud with the real Kelly (or O'Kelly). What Dominik's film in particular tells me is that there's room yet for another full-scale account of Jesse James, whose most recent major biographer described him as an "American Terrorist." There may not be room anymore in the American consciousness for Jesse James the folk hero (see Henry King's 1939 saga for that), but if we still tell stories about James, Bob Ford will still "eat of Jesse's bread and sleep in Jesse's bed" as a footnote of American folklore.

Samuel Fuller's WHITE DOG (1981)

One Saturday afternoon some years ago, late in the '80s I think, I was channel surfing through the current cable roster when I struck an arresting image. It was a huge cage in the outdoors, with a man and a dog inside, the man apparently training the dog. If I remember right, the channel was Lifetime, and I immediately realized that this wasn't typical Lifetime fare. That was before the dog got loose and killed a man in a church. Everything about the movie said this was no mere chick flick, even if Kristy McNichol was the star. The expansive direction came through even on TV, and the music was on another level altogether. What was this?

A few years later, I was reading a copy of the Village Voice that previewed a rare theatrical showing of Samuel Fuller's final American film, and there I learned of the appalling history of White Dog. When I saw it on TV I didn't know Fuller had made it, but I had heard of him from the big advertising campaign for The Big Red One back in 1980. It amazed me to learn that his next film had been suppressed from American theaters. The film made its American DVD debut late last year in canonized form thanks to the Criterion Collection, and the Albany Public Library has just acquired a copy.

I still haven't seen many Fuller films, but I know his rep. I remember seeing Big Red One on TV, and the expanded version is on my to-do list. I picked up the Criterion Eclipse edition of his first three films, which I'll watch soon. I have seen Pickup on South Street, House of Bamboo, and Shock Corridor and can recommend them all. I can recommend White Dog even more.

Ennio Morricone's music sets the ominous, tragic tone immediately over the black-&-white opening credits before aspiring actress Julie Sawyer (McNichol) finds a stray dog. She basically adopts it after no one shows up to claim it, despite her boyfriend's reservations about the animal. It proves its worth after it helps her fend off a home invader, crashing through a window to continue the counterattack. A cop tells her she's lucky to have a dog like that, but the nameless canine runs away in pursuit of a rabbit. Julie's search of the dog pound proves fruitless, as the dog is still in the streets. It attacks the driver of a street-sweeper, sending the vehicle crashing through a store display window. The bloodstained dog returns to Julie, who assumes that it had been fighting animals in the woods. "You scared the shit out of me, you little shit!" she scolds.

She takes the dog to a movie soundstage where she's filming a bit part on a gondola in front of a rear-projected Venice. She and her friend Molly are playing stewardesses, admiring the fake view, when the dog pounces on Molly and rips her up pretty badly as Julie gapes in terror. Molly recovers and won't press any complaint, but Julie's boyfriend warns her that there'll be a next time, because her new pet is obviously an attack dog. "You've got to have him killed," he advises, "You've got a four-legged time bomb!"

But if the dog has been trained to attack people, can't it be deprogrammed? Julie's hunch takes her to the Noah's Ark animal park, which provides beasts to the entertainment industry. She asks for help from Carruthers (Burl Ives), a partner in the venture, who complains that Star Wars is ruining his business and boasts that he was John Wayne's stunt hand for a snake scene in True Grit. He doesn't think that un-training an attack dog is possible. "If you don't help him, they're going to kill him," Julie pleads. "They should," Carruthers replies.

Carruthers is more convinced of this when the dog gets loose and attacks one of his employees. The dog is muzzled, so the man is mostly scared and shaken, but Carruthers has seen enough to tell Julie that "That aint no attack dog you got. That's a white dog! He's trained to attack black people!" The employee, Molly, and the street sweeper were all black. But despite Carruthers's outrage, his partner, Keys (Paul Winfield), black himself, wants to take up the challenge of reconditioning the dog. "If I don't break him," he promises, "I'll shoot him."

Keys (Paul Winfield)tries to bond with Samuel Fuller's WHITE DOG

Where do white dogs come from? The film explains that a white racist will hire a desperate black man, a wino or junkie, to beat a puppy regularly until the grown dog fears and hates black skin and develops the instinct to attack it. Keys, whose parents are anthropologists, thinks he can deprogram a white dog by making it completely dependent on a black man for food. Then it will learn to trust black skin. But Keys has tried and failed with white dogs before, yet remains determined to keep trying if success means actually eliminating some racism from the world.

With no theatrical release, there's no theatrical trailer for White Dog. Criterion has posted a trailer that's actually just one of the reconditioning scenes from the movie, but one that shows off the impressive big cage ("arena") set and Morricone's music. Take a look before we go on.


Keys appears to make progress in the arena with Julie's dog, but the all-too-intelligent animal gnaws its way through the wire-mesh roof of a cage, climbs to the top of a truck to jump over an electrified fence, makes its way into town and goes after the first black man it encounters. The man runs toward a church but finds no sanctuary there. In a spiritually horrific scene without gore, Fuller pans up from the man struggling with the dog to a series of stained glass windows toward an altar as the screams and the sounds of biting and tearing grow louder. Fuller and Morricone are a match made in hell, and I mean that as a compliment -- and this scene establishes beyond doubt that White Dog is a horror film.

The feeling of dread and moral horror increases as Keys refuses to kill the dog, insisting that he can still turn it even though he's now put himself, Carruthers and Julie at risk of prison for harboring the monster. Yet he reclaims all his earlier gains, until he's "99%" certain of success. The dog passes the penultimate test, responding peacefully to another black man, and Keys is ready to call Julie to mark his triumph. He'd warned us earlier, however, that a white dog's psyche is very fragile. If the reconditioning goes wrong in any way, the dog could turn from a racist animal into a "homicidal maniac" that will attack anyone....

Let me repeat myself: White Dog is a horror movie. The immediate context is the horror of racism that turns an innocent animal into a monster, but the subtext is the irrepressible nature of evil, whether it's innate or inculcated. Fuller and co-writer Curtis Hanson, adapting a novel by Romain Gary, ultimately argue that the white dog is beyond redemption despite Keys's best efforts, and the horror of the movie derives from Keys and Julie's refusal to admit that fact. The attack scenes are pure horror while going easy on gore due to a low-budget, short-schedule shoot. But Fuller's direction and Bruce Surtees's cinematography (flattered by the Criterion edition) get the maximum effect from limited resources. McNichol doesn't really need to be a good actor to play someone in over her head, and some of her line-readings and her superfluous late confrontation with the dog's true owner are pretty bad, but she's at least adequate overall, and Winfield and Ives are outstanding. I was shocked when I saw a fragment of this film on TV years ago. Now I've seen the whole thing, knowing what to expect, and I was still shocked. This is an extraordinary film. Seeing it isn't just recommended for film buffs; it's imperative.