Brainquake (32 page)

Through his brown-tinted goggles, the gorgeous nude on skis was approaching. She saw his smile, thought it was for her, returned one of her own. “You saw what I did? I felt so bold!” She leaned in toward him, nuzzled his cheek. “Are you up for doing something bold yourself?”

“Yes,” said Father Flanagan. His eyes never left the sleigh.

The word “hero” gets thrown around a lot these days, to the point where using it might inspire cynicism rather than admiration. But there’s no other way to say it: while he never considered himself one, Samuel Fuller was a hero.

Not just a hero of mine, though he was that too. An actual, honest-to-god hero.

He’d have earned that description just for what he did in World War II, enlisting in the notorious 1st Infantry Division of the U.S. Army (known as the “Big Red One,” and not just because of the red numeral sewn on their uniforms) and fighting in North Africa and Italy before landing in the D-Day invasion of Normandy. If you’ve seen the brutal opening sequence of Steven Spielberg’s film
Saving Private Ryan
(or Fuller’s own autobiographical war movie
The Big Red One
), you have a tiny sense of what that experience entailed. Some 160,000 troops stormed the beaches, where they were mowed down by Nazi machine gun fire. Thousands died. Sam survived.

He marched on to Czechoslovakia, where he and his fellow infantrymen participated in the liberation of the Falkenau concentration camp. “Participated in”—what a bloodless phrase. It was not a bloodless event. The hand-to-hand combat was horrific, and what the soldiers discovered inside the camp was even more so. Interviewed years later, Fuller said, “War is so insane…it’s impossible for anybody to appreciate the word ‘insanity’ unless you are in combat. In war, we actually got used to seeing violence, horrible things. But we never thought that we would ever come across anything that would make that whole nightmare seem almost a holiday—except at Falkenau.” Already a budding filmmaker with several film scripts to his credit, he was carrying a little handheld movie camera with him, and his footage of the camp is shocking and unforgettable.

In Tunisia, I wrote to my mother to send me a movie camera. It took her over a year and a half, or more. That was ’43…I received a 16 millimeter Bell & Howell, which you had to crank…

[After the fighting ended at Falkenau, the] first man I ran into was Captain Walker. He said, “Do you still have that camera your mother sent you?” I said, “Yes, sir.” He said: “Get it.”

I returned, with my camera, loaded it and all that, walked right into the camp. And didn’t know that I was going to photograph…was going to shoot my first movie. It might be the work of an amateur, but the killings in it are very professional.

Samuel Fuller witnessed horrors. But he did more than witness them—he bore witness to them, not just through the film he shot in the moment, on the spot, but through the extraordinary career that followed. He made two dozen movies, many of them controversial, most of them deeply personal, all of them concerned with the topics of violence, cruelty, madness and suffering. He wrote and he directed. He was an
auteur
before the term existed. He made his pictures for very little money, in very little time, and sometimes it shows. But what also shows is his passion and absolute commitment to his subjects, to the telling of a story you can’t stop watching, a story he believed was important to tell. A gruff, snarling, cigar-chomping figure who used to fire a gun loaded with blanks to commence filming rather than calling
Action!
, Fuller told stories like his life depended on telling them—and yours depended on hearing them. It wasn’t a job. It was a calling.

The war wasn’t Fuller’s first taste of this calling. At twelve he went to work as a newspaper copyboy and at seventeen he became the youngest reporter in New York City history to cover a crime beat, writing about murders, suicides, executions and riots for the
New York Evening Graphic
. That experience later inspired his film
Park Row
, an attempt to convey the brutality and the glory of the newspaper business in its early days.

Through Prohibition and the Great Depression he worked as a journalist, reporting on Ku Klux Klan rallies, riding the rails with hoboes, covering the San Francisco longshoremen’s strike that culminated in Bloody Thursday. He also began writing fiction at this time, starting with novels with titles like
Burn, Baby, Burn!
and (improbably enough, given that this was in 1936)
Test Tube Baby
. In 1944 he published
The Dark Page
, a classic noir crime novel later filmed (though not by Fuller) as
Scandal Sheet
.

Fuller broke into Hollywood himself as a screenwriter and script doctor, ghosting for other, better-known writers. His big break came in 1949, when he got the opportunity to direct his own script for the disturbing Western
I Shot Jesse James
, most memorable for depicting the psychological torment of James’ killer, forced to reenact his crime nightly on stage to the jeers of frontier audiences. He made his name with his third film,
The Steel Helmet
, which was the first Hollywood movie about the Korean War, shot and released while the war was still going on. It, and Fuller, came under fire for the movie’s realism, including a scene where an American solider shoots a prisoner of war. Fuller’s response: he’d seen it done himself, and not just once.

More war movies followed, more Westerns. Also crime pictures such as the moving and visceral film noir
Pickup on South Street
. Many of the movies dealt head-on with previously untouched and untouchable themes, in particular racism, and drew criticism down on Fuller’s head from both ends of the political spectrum.

The fifties were a fertile time for Fuller, who wrote and directed twelve films in ten years. Then came the sixties, and sources of funding began to dry up, both because of changes in the studio system and because of the controversial content Fuller avidly embraced. But Fuller kept making movies, including two of his greatest:
Shock Corridor
, about a newspaperman who gets himself committed to an insane asylum to investigate a killing, and
The Naked Kiss
, about a prostitute trying to start her life over in a small town. After that, it was sixteen years before Fuller cemented his reputation as a filmmaker with
The Big Red One
.

Along the way, he inspired a legion of other filmmakers who went on to do unforgettable work of their own: Spielberg, Coppola, Tarantino, Wenders, Jarmusch, Godard, Scorsese… the list goes on. Spielberg gave Fuller a cameo in his first World War II film,
1941
, and (together with George Lucas) named the scrappy young sidekick in
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
“Short Round” after the similar character in
The Steel Helmet.
Footage can be found online of Coppola screen-testing Fuller for the role of Hyman Roth in
The Godfather
. Jean-Luc Godard famously cast Fuller as himself in
Pierrot le Fou
, where he filmed Fuller expounding, “A film is like a battleground…there’s love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotions.”

Interviewed about
Raging Bull
, Martin Scorsese credited Fuller for inspiring some of the techniques he used. And Quentin Tarantino, who became a friend of Fuller’s toward the end of the older filmmaker’s life, owes a debt to Fuller that seems to grow with every picture he makes. Certainly it’s hard to imagine the gut-wrenching WWII narrative of
Inglourious Basterds
or the provocative and violent musing on race that is
Django Unchained
without Fuller’s spirit hovering over the proceedings.

* * *

So:
Brainquake
.

Where does this book fit in Samuel Fuller’s extraordinary story?

Well, Fuller never stopped writing novels, and when making films became harder for him he found himself returning with a vengeance to the printed page. In 1982, he made his last American film, the anti-racist parable
White Dog
, but Paramount Pictures refused to release it, citing concerns about the movie’s inflammatory racial subject matter. Outraged, Fuller went into self-imposed exile in France, where he made three final films and wrote two final novels. One of the novels,
Quint’s World
, was published and distributed widely. The other, though, never was—it was only ever published in French (as
Cerebro-Choq
) and in Japanese. Never in English, and never in Fuller’s native United States.

It’s a book that fits squarely in the bullseye of Fuller’s lifelong themes and preoccupations. Paul Page’s shack down in the Battery calls to mind Richard Widmark’s waterfront shack in
Pickup on South Street
. The anecdote about the Statue of Liberty getting its pedestal thanks to contributions by children echoes a plot thread in
Park Row
. The depiction of underworld affairs has a precedent in
Underworld U.S.A.
And Captain Lafitte’s traumatic memories of World War II could be episodes from
The Big Red One
.

And yet
Brainquake
is very much its own animal. Written and set at the start of the 1990s, it’s a startlingly modern novel for an author best known for stories set around the middle of the century (or earlier—
Park Row
and the Westerns take place in the 1800s). And while madness abounds in Fuller’s universe, giving his protagonist the sort of brain disorder he gives Paul is a daring step even by Fuller’s standards. Paul is not Lenny from
Of Mice and Men
, but his mental and physical abnormalities certainly make him a less-than-typical lead for a Hollywood crime story. Can one picture Widmark in the role? A pickpocket may live on the margins of society and be despised by many, but Widmark still brought more sex appeal than pathos to the role in
Pickup on South Street
. If
Brainquake
had ever gone before the cameras, the balance would have had to have been different, more delicate.

And what of Father Flanagan, the Mob hit man who goes around dressed as a Roman Catholic priest, nailing his victims to walls and tables and picturing every woman he meets naked—even an old nun? Fuller was no stranger to controversy, but the firestorm this character would have created might have dwarfed all the rest.

But what a character! And what a book. From its piss-cutter of an opening image (“Sixty seconds before the baby shot its father…”) to its sardonic view of corruption masking itself in sanctimony (“Laser beams on the Statue of Liberty were blinding as the guests sang along with the
Star-Spangled Banner
while Paul transferred $15 million in cash from his bag into the open fat briefcase held by the drop…”) to its genuinely disturbing deaths (“She never tried to struggle. She showed fear in her face but didn’t fight to live.”),
Brainquake
is every bit as powerful and memorable as Fuller’s best films. In spots, it makes you squirm; in spots it makes you wince. In a few places you scratch your head. But you never doubt the author’s conviction or his vision or his unique talent.

* * *

When Christa Fuller, Sam’s widow (also an actress who was featured in several of her husband’s movies, including
The Big Red One
and
White Dog
), first contacted me four years ago to say that a novel of his existed that had never been published in English, I was astonished. It took some time to turn up a copy of the manuscript, laboriously transcribed by Sam’s friend and literary agent, Jerome Rudes, from the nearly illegible pages that Sam had pounded out on a Royal typewriter and then marked up extensively by hand. When I read the manuscript, I was more astonished still. Why had this book lain unpublished all these years? It was not as though Fuller lacked for publishers. Bantam had brought out the novel version of
The Big Red One
in 1980.
The Dark Page
had been reissued by Avon in 1983,
Crown of India
by Critic’s Choice Paperbacks in 1986.
Quint’s World
had come out from Worldwide Library in 1988. It seems to me that one of these publishers would have jumped at the chance to publish
Brainquake
just a few years later.

But stranger things have happened. At Hard Case Crime we have turned up previously unpublished novels by luminaries such as James M. Cain, Donald E. Westlake (twice!), Roger Zelazny, David Dodge, Mickey Spillane and Lester Dent—why not Samuel Fuller?

* * *

Fuller returned to the United States from France at the very end of his life. He died in 1997 at the age of 85, at home once more in the Hollywood Hills. Today, his legacy as a filmmaker is better known and more widely respected than ever before, in part because of the devoted efforts of his family and friends, most recently his daughter Samantha, who directed the 2013 documentary
A Fuller Life
, which
The Hollywood Reporter
praised for its depiction of “an indelibly influential persona that combined showman-like flamboyance, old-school masculinity and die-hard personal integrity to disarming and intoxicating degrees.”

That Fuller also had a legacy as a novelist is less well known. He was every bit as flamboyant and showman-like on the page as he was on the screen, and brought the same integrity and intensity, the same uncompromising, excoriating vision, to his books as to his films. It is a privilege to have the opportunity to remind readers of this, by giving his last book its first publication in the language in which he wrote it and the country he defended with his life.