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In Jean-Luc Godard's Pierrot le Fou (1965), director Samuel Fuller can be glimpsed at a cocktail party, describing his medium with a raspy snarl: ''Film is like a battleground...love, hate, action, violence, death -- in one word, emotions.''
In two words: pulp pioneer. Fuller, who died Oct. 30 at 86, was a ground-level influence on filmmakers as diverse as Francois Truffaut, Martin Scorsese, and Wim Wenders. While his most mainstream film was 1980's The Big Red One -- based on his own World War II experiences and starring Lee Marvin -- it was Fuller's energetically tawdry '50s and '60s films that endeared him to filmgoers burnt out on Hollywood blandness.
Low budgets inspired Fuller: If, as reported, he used midgets in Shock Corridor to make the sets look bigger, the effect only increased the film's fever-dream weirdness. ''It's not the headline that counts,'' the former newspaperman once recalled, ''but how hard you shout it.'' Here are three of his best barbaric yawps on video:
-- PICKUP ON SOUTH STREET (1953) Pickpocket Richard Widmark lifts top secret microfilm from a purse on the subway. As cynical and sentimental as tabloid copy, it's one of the great film noirs.
-- SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963) Demented near-camp, in which a reporter goes undercover in a mental hospital and loses his marbles, natch.
-- THE NAKED KISS (1965) It opens with a bald prostitute beating the bejesus out of the camera. It becomes a trashily moving look at society's outcasts.
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