Samuel Fuller's Career Began on a High Note with I Shot Jesse James and Ended Grimly With Street of No Return

There is no sin greater than shooting Jesse James. It’s in the bible, even!

As unforgettably chronicled in his riveting memoir The Third Face, by the time Sam Fuller realized his destiny as a maverick filmmaker he’d already lived several juicy, eventful lives. He was famously a newspaper boy turned precocious newspaperman and then a soldier in World War II, an experience that informed his late-period masterpiece The Big Red One. 

World War II interrupted Fuller’s thriving career as a screenwriter. When Fuller made a big, confident leap to directing with the riveting 1949 western I Shot Jesse James he’d spent over a decade as a screenwriter and script doctor. 

Fuller may have been a first-time director but he was anything but inexperienced, both in terms of show-business and in terms of life. With his maiden directorial entry, Sam Fuller proved that he could tell an old, time-worn, oft-told tale in a bracingly different, revelatory way, in a manner unique to his obsessions and his unique set of life experiences. 

In Fuller’s revisionist telling, Jesse James, one of the most notorious outlaws in American history, is warm, paternal and gentlemanly, the best, most decent boss a gunman could hope for. For Jesse James (Reed Hadley), friend, protege and posse-member Frank Booth (John Ireland) is a burden he has taken on willingly, with an almost Christ-like sense of compassion and selflessness. 

In I Shot Jesse James, Fuller created a dark and brooding, psychologically complex Noir Western whose most wholesome element might just be the notorious bank robber of its title. Jesse James is introduced in the midst of a bank robbery but otherwise he cuts an almost comically unthreatening, soothingly avuncular figure who dotes on his justifiably worried wife and dispenses both kindly advice and gifts to his friends and criminal associates, including the gun that Frank Booth will ultimately use to kill him. 

Jesse James is a legendary outlaw whose final words before being fatally betrayed by a man he loved not wisely but too well are a casual “No sir, nothing quite like puttering around a home” delivered while he absent-mindedly straightens a painting hanging on his wall. Not exactly the bone-chilling words of an unrepentant killer. 

Frank kills Jesse for the promise of clemency for his crimes and a ten-thousand dollar reward that will allow him to finally leave behind his life of crime and marry Cynthy Waters (Barbara Britton), a glamorous actress and singer not exactly hurting for suitors or romantic prospects.

Frank knows that he is doing something unforgivable to a man who has shown him infinite kindness but convinces himself that it’s worth it for the sake of his own future, freedom and romantic prospects.

Ford deludes himself into thinking that killing Jesse James will finally free him from the awful baggage of his outlaw past, legally, socially and otherwise. Instead, by committing a transgression of near-biblical proportions—he’s a pistol-packing Judas to Jesse James’ bank-robbing Jesus—he’s doomed himself to a life of infamy and shame, murder attempts and the kind of notoriety no one wants.

Two people’s lives end the moment Frank Booth fatally shoots his kindly mentor in the ways of criminality in the back. Only Frank is too stubbornly myopic and delusional to realize that he essentially ended his own life when he takes his friend’s.

I Shot Jesse James is filled with pitch-black humor, like an excruciatingly uncomfortable scene where a brooding Frank Booth insists that an overly ingratiating, guitar-strumming minstrel at a saloon finish performing his rendition of a popular hit even though it’s about what a gutless, lily-livered, shamefully yellow coward Frank was for shooting a paragon of human decency like Jesse James in the back.

In a desperate bid to make enough money to woo a deeply ambivalent object of desire who understandably is concerned about Frank’s unfortunate history of murder the tormented young man signs on to star in a ghoulish stage production where he recreates his assassination of Jesse James night after night for the benefit of voyeurs in the audience.

In this sad, sordid theatrical extravaganza, Frank relives the worst, most shame-inducing moment of his life over and over and over again, in a masochistic loop like a nightmarish Western version of Groundhog Day. He’s a trick shooter of sorts, the trick involving him punishing himself mercilessly for a crime neither the world nor his own guilt-ravaged psyche will ever let him forget.

I Shot Jesse James is defined by brooding fatalism. From the moment he kills Jesse James, it is achingly apparent that Frank Booth has sealed his own fate, and might as well hop in the coffin with the man he killed because the shadow of his betrayal will never stop casting his entire tragic existence in darkness.

Frank tries to escape his fate by trying to make his fortune as a prospector but no matter where he goes or what he does he cannot escape his past or the guilt that comes with it. I Shot Jesse James might have been sold as a Western with an attention-grabbing title and solidly commercial subject matter involving one of the most legendary names in outlaw history, but even at the very beginning of an extraordinary directorial career Fuller was able to infuse familiar genres with the intensity, psychological complexity, darkness and moral ambiguity that would define later masterpieces like The Naked Kiss and Shock Corridor.

As a newspaperman, screenwriter, filmmaker and icon, Sam Fuller embodied everything that’s great about our country. He was a profoundly, heroically American filmmaker who loved his country despite its flaws and its shortcomings and I Shot Jesse James is a great American debut from one of cinema’s true originals.

Fuller is a legend of American film. Unfortunately, one of the components of Fuller’s legacy involves him not being able to get projects made. Fuller has an almost Orson Welles-like litany of dream projects that never happened. The projects that did get realized tended to occupy the fringes. Fuller ended his career with a 1990 television movie called The Madonna and the Dragon and concluded his cinematic directorial career on a less than auspicious note with Street of No Return.

Fuller’s final film was shot in Portugal in 1987 but only made its way to the United States in 1989, some forty years after the release of I Shot Jesse James. An adaptation of David Goodis’ novel of the same name, Street of No Return is a demented, b-movie riff on The Phantom of the Opera that wildly miscasts Keith Carradine as Michael, an arrogant rocker habitually clad in blinding white like a Sunset Strip version of Tom Wolfe.

Michael’s charmed life as a vaguely New Wave pop star without many, if any, of the accoutrements of the gig — he doesn’t even seem to have a band — changes forever when he falls hopelessly in love with Celia (Valentina Vargas) a beautiful dancer who appears in one of his music videos riding a horse wearing only a g-string, Lady Godiva reborn as a Tawny Kitaen-like video vixen.

Michael’s obsessive lust for the glamorous beauty attracts the attention of a vicious crime boss who decides to punish him by having his throat slashed and his vocal chords severed so that he’ll never be able to sing again.

Fuller takes so long to reveal Michael’s voice after the near fatal attack on his life that audiences can be forgiven for understandably imagining that the assault left him mute. When Michael does communicate verbally he doesn’t talk so much as he lets out an unintentionally comic little squeak that suggests Mickey Mouse being strangled, making it very hard to take him seriously as a tragic figure of heartbroken vengeance.

Street of No Return hops back and forth in time between Michael’s glory days as a lovestruck rock star willing to risk it all for love and lust and his grubby nadir as a frizzy-haired homeless man so hopelessly addicted to alcohol that he thirstily consumes tiny drops of hard liquor from the shards of broken bottles in a desperate attempt to get his fix

Michael’s wildly melodramatic tale of love and vengeance, sexual obsession and righteous revenge takes place against a backdrop of racial tension that forever threatens to explode into mass violence and sometimes does, as in an impressively staged race riot that opens the film and provides a sense that the world has spiraled out of control, leaving desperate survivors like Michael to fend for themselves.

At its best, Street of No Return has a hallucinatory, dream like quality that falls somewhere between a vintage crime novel, a waking nightmare and a contemporary fairy tale. Street of No Return feels like it takes place nowhere and everywhere, in streets that are either eerily empty or overflowing with violence and racially charged conflict. In his peak period Fuller elevated vulgar pulp to the level of high art but Street of No Return stubbornly remains intermittently inspired trash.

When writing and directing gigs dried up in the 1960s and 1970s Fuller scored an unexpected second career as a popular bit actor whose unmistakable and iconic presence — gruff, cigar-toting, inveterately American — enlivened arthouse classics like The American Friend and Pierrot Le Fou.

Fuller gives himself an Alfred Hitchcock like cameo here as a police commissioner who chews out an appropriately volcanic Bill Duke. We never actually see Fuller’s face. Instead we hear his thundering voice and see a silhouette that could not belong to anyone else. By giving himself such a flashy vocal cameo Fuller is infusing the movie with his singular, unmistakable voice in the most literal possible sense.

That’s unfortunately necessary because while Street of No Return sometimes feels unmistakably like the work of one of American pulp’s true masters, there are times when it feels like distressingly impersonal, like a gratuitous nudity-filled Cinemax erotic thriller that just happened to be written and directed by one of the greatest, most distinctive filmmakers in American history.

Fuller’s great strength as a filmmaker and storyteller was not as a sensualist. The film’s rock milieu similarly makes for a poor fit with Fuller’s rough and tumble, tough guy aesthetic.

Fuller was a profoundly visceral filmmaker so perhaps it’s appropriate that his final movie climaxes with its tragic hero shooting the bad guy where it really hurts, which is in the genitals. As revenge for being sadistically robbed of his voice, and with it his instrument and his livelihood, Michael violently emasculates the man who ruined his life.

Street of No Return is a strange, grubby, weird little movie that intermittently roars to life in that inimitably vulgar, passionate, screamingly intense Sam Fuller fashion but otherwise ends a major career on a decidedly minor note.

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