“The bravest” director in the movie industry, according to Martin Scorsese
The King of Pop once said, “Study the greats. Become greater.” This is a philosophy that many filmmakers engage in and uphold, and none more so than Martin Scorsese.
Acclaimed cinema legend Scorsese, known for Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, among a raft of other epic titles, has been open about the directors who came before him and helped pave the way for his passion and vision for cinematic language.
Scorsese’s movies have grappled with various issues, ranging from comparative studies between the institution of crime and the corruption of the government to questions of spirituality and faith. The king of crime movies and slick gangster flicks, Martin Scorsese, is rightfully considered to be one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Quentin Tarantino and Stanley Kubrick.
Known for his intense approach to storytelling that uses his constant inspiration from foreign cinema, Scorsese is more than just a director; he is a scholar of cinema. It makes him one of the finest minds to consider when talking about cinema as a whole, and there can be no doubt that few people know quite as much as Scorsese does about making movies.
Directors have long been a part of Scorsese’s continuing education, and either in his contemporaries or influences, Scorsese has found numerous lessons to be learned. This set of illustrious cinematic figures includes Samuel Fuller, the American veteran turned filmmaker known for his influential low-budget genre movies with controversial themes, such as The Steel Helmet, often made outside the conventional studio system.
Writing for Toronto Film Review, Scorsese expressed his admiration for the filmmaker, who influenced many French New Wave pieces made by Jean-Luc Godard and others, citing his cinematic classics. “I think he was one of the bravest and most profoundly moral artists the movies have ever had,” Scorsese explains. “That’s why his war films – The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets, China Gate, Merrill’s Marauders, and The Big Red One – are the truest, the least sentimental, and the toughest I’ve ever seen. I hope that someday, The Big Red One is restored to its original form.”
Fuller is responsible for the first American movie about the Korean War, a conflict between Sunday, June 25th, 1950 and Monday, July 27th, 1953. The Steel Helmet was released on Wednesday, January 10th, 1951. It starred Gene Evans, Robert Hutton, Steve Brodie, James Edwards, and Richard Loo as a group of American soldiers fighting in the war. Fuller’s film refused to let a low budget of $104,000 prevent it from presenting some masterful and powerful war filmmaking, rejecting any cliched romantic war tropes and emphasising the grim nature of the situation’s climate.
Speaking about The Steel Helmet in a 1996 documentary on Fuller called The Typewriter, the Rifle and the Movie Camera, Scorsese states, “[Fuller’s work] may not be realistic in the way we think of realistic films. They are stylised in a very different way.”
Fuller’s direction takes his movies from the restraints of an explosive and graphic war feature. Instead, it dignifies it by granting it the insightful themes of national and personal identity fracturing, aligning the terrific action sequences with in-depth underlining character studies. This factor is elevated by Fuller being a veteran, utilising film language as an avenue for his experience to be channelled and distributed. “There was something about Steel Helmet that we knew as children watching it that it was the real thing, the emotional truth about it,” the Taxi Driver director adds. “There was the sensibility of somebody who was there and who knew it in his soul”.
Scorsese adds: “And that is an amazing amount to translate to an audience, especially an audience of eight-year-old kids, to know that that is the real thing.”
The filmmaker then addresses Fuller’s The Steel Helmet’s direct influence on his filmography, precisely the visual composition exhibiting thematic concepts and not just optical entertainment. Scorsese mentions the “last section with Gene Evans suddenly in the middle of a firefight and slowing rising in the frame with this mist around him, and he looks and suddenly gets a flashback to World War II. We designed a fight scene in Raging Bull around that one shot.”
Raging Bull is the 1980 biographical sports drama charting the rise and falls in the career and personal realm of Jake LaMotta. Robert De Niro stars in the film as the aggressive yet ambitious boxer, marking the fourth collaboration between him and Scorsese between New York, New York and The King of Comedy. The film focuses on LaMotta’s violent and selfish nature causing success in his sports life but conflict and loneliness in his love life.
This synopsis calls for aggressive and assertive sequences inside and outside the boxing ring, one of which was inspired by Fuller’s direction in The Steel Helmet, working with the intention of symbolising hysteria.
Scorsese explains: “In the second fight of Sugar Ray Robinson and Jake LaMotta, we used a long lens, and we put bars of flames in front of the lens so that we had a ripple effect”. This sequence from Raging Bull exercises LaMotta’s dominance, ambition and hunger for success and power as he rises over his beaten component in a low angle and burst of smoke to lace the scene with a celebratory tone. This example emphasises how the visual structure Scorsese created from watching Fuller’s work is used as a concept translator so audiences can align and understand characters and themes.
The director references how Fuller’s work contrasts with his direction in Raging Bull: “But it had this dream-like nightmare of this man who must know what a firefight looks like. The confusion, the absolute horror.” These traits fracture against LaMotta’s expression after winning the fight as he instead appears submerged in power and success, something he thrives in, showing how the same visual language can be interpreted differently between two skilled directions.
Overall, Fuller’s bravery and ambition in his work are compelling and monumental acts that paved the way for many contemporary cinematic classics. The filmmaker’s skill in creating timeless and beautiful features that present complex subject matter out of restrictive budgets showcases his artistic vision and passion for visual storytelling. This love for art that knows no boundaries channels into Scorsese’s work. The director employs the techniques and lessons Fuller laid out before, orchestrating the stories he wants to tell in his own stylised execution whilst still paying tribute to the reality that bore them.
