Now THIS is why I started watching these movies and writing about them - I wasn't familiar with Fuller's work - (except for probably The Big Red One) - and I'm not really familiar with any of Hollywood's classic cinema. I've seen a lot more Toshiro Mifune than John Wayne.
This movie comes at you swinging out of the gate (literally) - watch that opening scene 2 or 3 times and you get a whole new appreciation for it. A prostitute (played by Constance Towers - leaves her pimp and settles in a small town where she walks away from the trade. She finds a new career, a new love, and comes to realize there is no paradise in the world she walked away from, but not necessarily any in the one she came to
Samuel Fuller - man...what a traditional American Director - in the special features, he reminds me exactly like a Hollywood B-film director - (the films come across a little bit as such, but much better quality - he wrote, produced, and directed this film and a lot of his films) - several of the special features in my DVD are interviews with him and are def. worth the time to watch to get a feel for the director and to imagine how much fun it must have been to work it. I see traces of Hunter S. Thompson in him - a bit of newspaper crazy and he wrote an excellent story
The Actors and Actresses are for the most part, unknown to anyone but serious cinema junkies - I certainly didn't recognize any of them, but they did a great job within the confines of 1960's censorship to tell a story of the "Lower World" as he told it and one woman's attempt to rise out of it and maybe keep a couple others out as well -
My next film is also a Fuller film, and if I get a chance, there is an Eclipse series with the early films of Sam Fuller which I may try to get in there. There is an excellent essay about a person who wrote the book on Fuller trying to identify WHY people like his films - and there is an honesty to them - a simple honesty, as Constance put it in her DVD interview extra. I understand he was also a large influence on French Cinema and their French New Wave - I could see that - perhaps that is why I like this film so much -
Special props to this film for that crazy jazz soundtrack, which really contributes to the vibe of the film in certain scenes. - Special features include 3 documentary clips with Samuel Fuller, one with the lead actress, and based on some of the tootage in them, this film has gotten an excellent restoration - suffice it to say that I'm looking forward to a lot more of Sam's films in the future
RB
No comments:
Post a Comment