THE TYPEWRITER, THE RIFLE & THE MOVIE CAMERA (1996) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Adam Simon
Tim Robbins produced and narrates this profile of iconoclastic filmmaker Samuel Fuller (1911-1997). The title reflects the three key phases in Fuller's life: his early career as a tabloid journalist, service in the Army infantry during World War Two, and a 40-year run in and out of Hollywood, behind (and sometimes in front of) a movie camera. Much of the picture is Fuller talking about his life, his work, and anything else that catches his mind's eye, intercut with testimony from Jim Jarmusch and Martin Scorsese, and revealing segments in which Robbins and Quentin Tarantino, like cinema archeologists, dig through the artifacts in Fuller's garage. Fuller saw human society in general, and American society in particular, as a demented circus, hopelessly and irredeemably violent, and his sensibility was so blunt and brutal that he managed to piss off the left and the right both in equal measure. He reveled in that contradictory response, and in extended interview footage with Robbins, he comes across as a sort of mad court jester, a cigar-chomping, bare knuckles storyteller who's no-bullshit and all-bullshit simultaneously. Jarmusch gets it right when he describes Fuller as "an anti-authoritarian anarchist." During Fuller's lifetime, there was no other figure in movies quite like him. There hasn't been anybody like him since then, either.
