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Samantha Fuller's documentary pays tribute to the brash vigour of the films of her director father Sam, hero of the nouvelle vague and 'poet of the American idiom'
A Fuller Life: The Story of a True American Maverick
Directed by Samantha Fuller
Starring Robert Carradine, Tim Roth and Jennifer Beals
On general release in the UK from 15 May
The film director Samuel Fuller (1912-97) was sometimes described as "an American primitive". He directed 30 films (including television work), almost all of which he scripted himself, between 1949 and 1990. He also wrote about a dozen novels, ghostwrote a good many more and scripted some 20 movies for others to direct. His unproduced scripts filled several shelves of his chaotic, overflowing office, presided over by a bust of Mark Twain.
In the 1960s, Fuller would become a cult hero to the nouvelle vague in France, and was seen as a key practitioner of their cinéma des auteurs. In 1965, he appeared, playing himself, in a party scene in Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le fou. Asked by Jean-Paul Belmondo, "What is cinema?", he responded with the unscripted reply: "Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. In one word, emotion." Fuller would go on to appear in a couple of dozen more films over the next 30 years, some directed by himself and others by such directors as Wim Wenders, Steven Spielberg, Larry Cohen and Aki Kaurismäki, but as an actor he never bettered that first spontaneous line.
As his formula might suggest, Fuller's range as a film-maker was deliberately narrow. Comedies scarcely featured in his output (although humour wasn't absent), nor did romances, still less fantasy. His were the classically masculine genres: westerns, war movies, crime films and spy dramas. His plots drive forward with unrelenting vigour; ambiguity rarely figures. At his best - and often indeed at his worst - his films have the immediacy of a punch in the face. "In truth," wrote the critic David Thomson in A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema, "he is...