Film Noir Great Samuel Fuller Book's Theme

By SUSAN DUNNE | Courant Staff Writer

April 20, 2008

JOHNNY BARRETT'S (Peter Breck) "weird" mental breakdown in the Samuel Fuller movie "Shock Corridor." (HANDOUT / April 15, 2008)

When Lisa Dombrowski was an undergraduate at Wesleyan University in 1992, she took a class in film noir and arranged a screening of the Samuel Fuller classic "Shock Corridor."

By the time the film was over, Dombrowski was so tense she was sitting in a fetal position in the screening room.

"I was thinking, 'Oh, my God, how could he do this, how could he say these things?'" Dombrowski says. "It was astonishing and provocative. It was blowing me away in every sense of the word.

"Growing up in an era of irony, I thought I had seen it all, and that films couldn't get any more provocative than they can today," she says. "But then you go back in time to a filmmaker who is even more daring."

Dombrowski went on to do a doctoral dissertation at the University of Wisconsin at Madison on Fuller, a native of Worcester and the auteur of such films as "Steel Helmet," "Pickup on South Street" and "The Big Red One." Now an associate professor of film studies at Wesleyan, Dombrowski is the author of "The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I'll Kill You!" (Wesleyan University Press, 262 pp., $27.95).

A party will be held at on the university campus in Middletown on Thursday evening to present Dombrowski's book and to screen the 1955 Fuller crime-noir "House of Bamboo." The film stars Robert Stack as an American Army police officer investigating organized crime in postwar Tokyo.

Dombrowski, of New Haven, remembered her initial reaction to "Shock Corridor" when working on her book. It is the first book to offer an in-depth analysis of Fuller, whose films influenced many directors, including Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Tim Robbins and Quentin Tarantino. (Jarmusch, as well as legendary film critic Andrew Sarris, gave Dombrowski dust-jacket blurbs for the book.)

"His films are inherently fascinating. They're designed to reach out and grab you. They're provocative; they want you to respond emotionally and intellectually and sometimes even physically in an instinctual manner, as if someone has punched you in the face," Dombrowski says.

"He accomplished his goals different ways. In the content, he discussed controversial issues of the time, race, gender, violence, critiques of America," she says. "Also, through their narrative structure, they emphasize conflict and contradictions, with dramatic tonal shifts that are jarring."

It wasn't just Fuller's style that intrigued Dombrowski. There also was the question of "what happened?"

"In the '50s to mid-'60s, he was working consistently, with a solid output. And then for what seemed to be 15 years, he really struggled to put anything on the screen," she says. "I go into the industrial changes in how films were made and how they impacted his ability to make movies, the intersection of art and commerce."

Dombrowski says she choose "House of Bamboo" for screening this week because it is "much more elegant, more refined, than we think of when we think of Fuller.

"Most of the films made by Fuller that have been widely discussed are pictures designed for maximum sensationalism. 'House of Bamboo' was made while Fuller was under contract to Twentieth Century Fox, firmly within the studio system," she says. "He had more constraints placed on his filmmaking choices. You see a more classical style in his films made at Fox. ... It challenges our notions of what a Fuller picture is, but we can see that his aesthetic is still there."

Dombrowski, whose next project is doing audio commentary for the Criterion Collection DVD release of Fuller's "White Dog," has embraced the Fuller aesthetic in another way, too. Her book-jacket photo raised eyebrows when she submitted it to WesPress. Dombrowski looks less like an academic at an elite university than a sexy bombshell, with a tight, low-cut blouse, dangly earrings and a challenging gaze.

"I wanted to go with something that looked different. This book has a rather outrageous title," she says. "I couldn't be sitting on a chintz sofa with a cat on my lap. I wanted a noirish, femme-fatale look, like someone out of Fuller."

LISA DOMBROWSKI'S "The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I'll Kill You!" is in stores now. A book-signing and discussion of Fuller by Dombrowski will be held Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Goldsmith Family Cinema, 301 Washington Terrace, on the campus of Wesleyan University in Middletown. The signing will be held in conjunction with a screening of the 1955 Fuller thriller "House of Bamboo," and a reception and raffle for books and DVDs. The event is free and open to the public. For details, e-mail lcarlson@wesleyan.edu or call 860-685-3542.

Contact Susan Dunne at sdunne@courant.com.