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[by Gary Morris]

Film aficionados know Sam Fuller as one of the great postwar primitives, the consummate roughneck writer-director who not only helped define the brutalizations of American culture in the '50s and '60s, but also spurred a score of other filmmakers -- especially members of the French New Wave -- to pick up a camera.

Films like The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor were in fact critical in breaking good-taste taboos by exposing the black center of small-town America and its institutions. Who can forget bald prostitute Constance Towers viciously beating up her pimp in lurid close-up in The Naked Kiss ? Or Shock Corridor 's black man driven so crazy by society that he spends his time complaining about "the Negroes" and babbling homilies to the KKK?

Street of No Return (1989), made in France, mines familiar film noir territory. Based on a novel by noted hardboiled writer David Goodis, the film follows the progression of famed pop singer "Michael" (Keith Carradine in David Bowie-style glitter robes) into the urban gutter. The film opens with a spectacular set-piece of a race riot on a dark street, and continues with an unrelenting string of violent episodes that show how Michael's world is slowly closing in on him. His involvement with a mysterious fatale bit-player in one of his videos capsizes his career and hurls him into poverty and anonymity when she turns out to be a gangster's moll, and the gangster slits his throat. The characters are film noir archetypes -- a cigar-chomping dominatrix, a corrupt industrialist, and of course Carradine as an ambivalent, uncommitted character drawn into a seedy demi-monde that can mean self-actualization or destruction.

Fuller's understanding of the mechanics of the modern American ghetto is surprisingly pointed. He strengthens Goodis' bleak original by fleshing out the idea of a white corporate gangster who introduces crack into the community, then orchestrates race riots in order to devalue property which he buys for nothing, renovates and resells. This social decimation provides a dramatic backdrop for Michael's attempts to redeem himself from the sterility of his now-lost pop career, and it's part of Fuller's approach that personal redemption must coincide with a sense of social purpose.

The actors are uniformly strong, with Carradine particularly affecting in his incarnation as a gaunt, ghostly, wasted alcoholic. Like the novel it's based on, the film is exceptionally dark, even claustrophobic, not only in Fuller's use of low-key lighting and determinist high and low angles, but in his successful characterization of a man hunted by those on both sides of the law.

Watch for Fuller in a wonderfully unsettling cameo -- as a screaming, maniacal police commissioner whose shadow alone we see. Street of No Return gives us a rare opportunity to observe a modern master still in good form at the end.

30 November 05

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