Appropriately enough, Sam Fuller’s life sounds like something out of the movies. The director of such great cult noir films as Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss penned this autobiography in the months before his death in 1997. Fuller grew up a poor Jewish kid in New York, raised by his strong-willed, widowed mother, and was kicked out of high school for moonlighting as a crime reporter. He never looked back. His newspapering days marked him for life. Third Face is written in a voice that could be a tabloid reporter straight out of central casting: cantankerous and hardboiled, yet passionate in his beliefs and peppered with both no-nonsense profanities and quaint slang like “Holy cow!” His later career as a screenwriter was interrupted by Pearl Harbor, and Fuller the infantryman fought through some of World War Two’s most harrowing moments—D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge, the liberation of the concentration camps—which he’d later draw on for his autobiographical war film The Big Red One. As a postwar director, Fuller was an iconoclast during the height of anti-Red blacklisting, leading his terrific seedy noir Pickup on South Street to be blasted as pro-communist by J. Edgar Hoover and anti-communist by French intellectuals. It was neither; Fuller’s films (or “yarns,” as he insisted on calling them) were too smart to be reducible to anything other than straight humanism. Like him, they were tough and unsentimental, but never cruel. You can open up Third Face to almost any page and find some fascinating anecdote, like the time Fuller set up his brother on a blind date with Marilyn Monroe, or when, during the war he unknowingly took shelter overnight in the boyhood home of his hero, Beethoven. Highly recommended, and a must-read for anyone interested in filmmaking.
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