LAUSR

New books on two artful specialists in low-budget filmmaking, Samuel Fuller and Terence Fisher, have me thinking again about how drastically times have changed since B pictures were regarded as minor products of the studio system, each one planned and released as an innocuous add-on at the bottom of a theatrical double bill. The advent of auteur criticism elevated a considerable number of directors with a talent for aesthetically potent B production—from Edgar G. Ulmer and Joseph H. Lewis to Roger Corman and Don Siegel, among many others—to a status rivaling that of their better known counterparts in the A-budget realm. Fisher and Fuller were two of the most energetic and creative members of the club. They were different in many ways—most obviously, Fisher did his finest work in a single genre, whereas Fuller hopped from one field to another with ease—but neither was daunted by the limitations of financial and technical support that all B-picture artisans must strive to overcome. As these new critical studies attest, their reputations have remained high in the years since their deaths, which came in 1980 for Fisher and 1998 for Fuller. Fuller was a famously complete auteur, writing and directing all of his key works and often producing them as well. Although his earliest directorial efforts were westerns—the elemental I Shot Jesse James arrived in 1949 and the elegantly bizarre The Baron of Arizona came a year later—his third venture, The Steel Helmet, was a war picture, bringing extraordinary originality and gusto to a genre that was more supercharged with personal meaning for him than any other, judging by the evidence in Marsha Gordon’s lucidly written monograph Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller’s War Movies. Fuller served in World War II with the 1st Infantry Division, familiarly known as the “Big Red One” and memorialized under that nickname in the director’s sole A-budget picture, The Big Red One, released in 1980 and reissued in a restored and reconstructed version in 2004. During the war Fuller saw heavy action in several major campaigns, earning various decorations and eventually participating in the liberation of the Falkenau Concentration Camp in what was then Czechoslovakia, shooting 16mm footage of the event that was later incorporated into the documentary Falkenau, the Impossible, directed by Emil Weiss and narrated by Fuller himself. These experiences remained vivid in Fuller’s mind; he placed a glimpse of the 1st Infantry Division insignia into the mise-en-sc ene of pretty much every film he made, inside or outside the war genre, and the human insights provided by his wartime experiences vividly inform his films about the Korean conflict as well. Gordon moves methodically through all of Fuller’s war pictures, from his early Korean diptych, The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets! (1951), to the splashier Hell and