Before he was a director, Samuel Fuller fought in World War II and worked as a tabloid journalist. The former experience shaped his politics, the latter shaped his sensibility. If Fuller’s films sometimes seem simplistic, their simplicity is at least born of sincerity. He knows what he believes, and he wants to communicate this as directly as possible.
That isn’t to say that his views lack depth or complexity. On the commentary track to Masters of Cinema’s new dual-format release of his first major studio film, 1951’s Korean War-set Fixed Bayonets!, the film scholar Adrian Martin begins by reading out some quotes from Fuller about war films. After dismissing the majority of them as phoney, he says he was inspired to turn to the genre to honour the “wonderful men” he met serving across Europe and Africa. He also said that he hoped audiences would leave Fixed Bayonets! and all his other war films with the thought “Only an idiot would go to war.”
These may seem like contradictory thoughts. Yet watching Fixed Bayonets! you understand how Fuller could believe both those things at the same time. Anyone looking for an anti-war film in the overt, political, satirical mode that became popular in the 1970s will be disappointed. Fixed Bayonets! begins with a stirring military march on the soundtrack and a thank-you to the American army for their co-operation.
In one of the best sequences, a shaking, distraught soldier finds himself unable to go through with killing a Korean soldier. He’s saved when one of his comrades shoots the enemy, then allows him to take the credit when they get back to camp.
FIXED BAYONETS!
The small, well-drawn central cast of characters are certainly portrayed as brave, though Fuller finds a lot of interesting shades in their bravery. Their central mission involves subterfuge; the soldiers must provide cover for a 15,000-man regiment by tricking the Koreans into thinking they’re a much bigger, more threatening battalion than they actually are. The whole film is rooted in this simultaneous deconstruction and celebration of wartime heroism.
In one of the best sequences, a shaking, distraught soldier finds himself unable to go through with killing a Korean soldier. He’s saved when one of his comrades shoots the enemy, then allows him to take the credit when they get back to camp. For all Fixed Bayonets! has a very high quota of action indeed, Fuller never loses sight of the human toll, which weighs on Americans and Koreans, killers and killed alike. The violence is quick and unsentimental, and each explosion comes with a controlled camera shake – closer to an earth tremor than modern hand-held cinematography.
In his review of Fuller’s most ambitious war film, 1980’s The Big Red One, Roger Ebert suggested that A-movies about war were about war as a phenomenon, whereas B-movies about war were about soldiers. Ebert felt that Fuller’s movies were always B-movies at heart. Sure enough, despite the 20th Century Fox fanfare at the start, Fixed Bayonets! is firmly focused on the characters. They’re archetypal but likeable, and their gallimaufry of often European surnames allows Fuller to implicitly address race and immigration in America, a theme he would return to in later films like Shock Corridor and White Dog.
Fixed Bayonets! is not a perfect film, and it occasionally shows its age. The snowy mountain landscape is very obviously a studio set, which can take a while for modern eyes to acclimatise to. But Fuller knows how to make the most of the resources he has, using long, snaking crane shots for suspense sequences, then switching to tightly-composed, fast-edited shots for the final tank battle. The real treat is the characterisation and dialogue, though – the kind of gleefully old-fashioned pulp poetry that no-one would ever do so well again. And there’s some subversive stuff in there, too – referring to President Truman’s infamous claim that the Korean War was not a war but a “police action”, one soldier wonders “Why can’t they get the cops to do this?”
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