(NOTE: This film is not available on DVD)
A teenage boy witnesses the death of his father, a petty criminal. Eventually a convicted felon himself (played by Academy Award-winner Cliff Robertson), he vows revenge on the killers, who are now prominent crime bosses.
Samuel Fuller was a poet of the street who rose up the journalistic ladder from paperboy to becoming a full-fledged crime reporter by 17. He was already a published pulp novelist by the time he joined the army during World War II, where he served with the 1st Infantry Division ("The Big Red One"), which took Omaha Beach on D-Day, fought in Africa, Italy, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, and liberated the concentration camp at Falkenau.
After Fuller's return home from the war, he directed several films for an independent producer before signing a major writing/directing deal with 20th Century Fox, where he was given relative creative freedom by studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Fuller's war and crime films proved controversial and often managed to anger people in both left and right political organizations.
Fuller's broad, "tabloid" style of melodrama was not regarded very highly during his day, but was given much more respect by the French New Wave critics in the early 60's, resulting in Fuller playing himself in Jean-Luc Godard's film Pierrot Le Fou, where he says "Film is like a battleground... Love, hate, action, violence, death. In one word, emotion!" Godard also described Fuller's films as "cinema-fist" for their blunt power. Fuller's influence went beyond his European admirers, his American disciples including Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, among others.
While Fuller was certainly a man who loved his country, he vigorously illustrated corruption and hypocrisy in its various institutions, to the point where he eventually struck out on his own as an independent filmmaker autonomous from the studios. Unfortunately, without that support, controversy eventually caused Fuller to leave the U.S. where he lived and worked in France for the remainder of his life.
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