I’ll pass on ‘great’ and go with flawed but interesting. Those two adjectives fit a lot of Fullers work (seen all). My top 5 with short whys would be something like:
(5) Verboten! (1959)
When the James Best character looses his cool, jumps on the hood of his army jeep and shouts ‘We didn’t come here as liberators! We came here as conquerors!’ at the gathered german civilians, the moment stays in a cinemaphiles mind. German resistance and rebuilding, with concentration camp footage thrown in - years before Judgment at Nurnberg did it. 8/10
(4) Shock Corridor (1963) Reporter infiltrates an asylum and gets to see a crosscut of America, while trying to hang onto his own sanity. Terrific stuff. 8/10
(3) Run of the Arrow (1957) The Avatar dissing crowd couldn’t name this one. I’ll forgive them. Rod Steiger falls in love with the other side in this rather original western. Well, original at the time… 9/10
(2) Pickup on South Street (1953) Red scare meets film noir. Widmark gives one of his nastiest. 9/10
(1) White Dog (1982) The process of teaching racism ingeniously handled. Sentimental and loud yes, but Fuller wasn’t a man of small emotions. Probably his angriest work and practically the last. 10/10
On another day half of this list would read different: Big Red One is a really ‘been there’ feeling WW2 film (he was as was Lee Marvin), The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets! are tight Korea flicks, House of Bamboo feels like Blade Runner without the scifi, Crimson Kimono gives rare room for an asian american in a starring role etc etc… Fuller is really worth checking out from the first to the last.
His films feel immediate and angry: like someone running up to you on the street, punching you in the face, then running away. Truly one of the great auteurs of the American cinema, and one of the the best examples of termite art we’ll ever run into.
Just do yourselves a favor and skip ‘Shark’ and the german Tatort flick. Hell or High Water is not necessary either, but as a fan of submarine films and Fuller working on a larger budget than usual, I had to check it out.
