Sam Fuller Tells Us What The Cinema Is

The clip below is Sam Fuller's cameo from Godard's Pierrot Le Fou. Fuller was not only a great director (if you haven't seen Shock Corridor, The Steel Helmet, Pickup On South Street, or The Big Red One, check them out), but he also led one of the most interesting lives of the 20th century. He grew up in New York City and became a crime reporter in his mid-teens, and in his 20s he traveled around the country as a tramp and wrote novels. When World War II started, he enlisted in the army, and his unit would eventually storm the beach at Normandy and liberate concentration camps. When he returned to the states, he shifted to filmmaking, and at the time of his death in 1997 he had made more than twenty features, all without ever having to sell out to Hollywood. His autobiography, A Third Face, is one hell of an American story, and should be required reading for any film fan. As Martin Scorsese says in the intro: if you don't like Sammy Fuller, then you just don't like movies.