Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies is the first book to focus on the genre that best defined the American director's career: the war film. It draws on previously unexplored archival materials, such as Fuller's Federal Bureau of Investigation files and WWII-era 16mm films, to explore the director's lifelong interest in making challenging, thought-provoking, and often politically dangerous movies about war. After establishing the roots of Fuller's cinematographic schooling in the trenches during World War II, including careful consideration of his 16mm footage of a Nazi camp at the end of that war, Film is Like a Battleground explores Fuller's first forays into hot war representation in Hollywood with the pioneering Korean conflict films The Steel Helmet (1951) and Fixed Bayonets (1951). This pair of films introduced Fuller to his first run-ins with the American political machine when they triggered both FBI and Department of Defense investigations into his political sympathies and affiliations. Fuller's cold war films Pickup on South Street (1953) and, though it veers into hot war territory, Hell and High Water (1954) are Fuller's responses to the political pressures he had now personally experienced and resented. A chapter on Fuller's representation of pre-American-invasion Vietnam in China Gate (1957) alongside his unrealized Vietnam war screenplay, The Rifle (ca. late 1960s), illustrates the degree to which Fuller's representation of war and nation shifted even as he continued to probe war's impossible contradictions. Film is Like a Battleground would be incomplete without a thorough exploration of the films depicting the war Fuller personally experienced and spent a lifetime contemplating, WWII. Verboten! (1959), Merrill's Marauder's (1962), and The Big Red One (1980) demonstrate Fuller's representation of a morally justifiable war. Fuller's 1959 CBS television pilot--Dogface--offers a glimpse at one of Fuller's failed attempts to bring his WWII story into American living rooms. The book concludes with a chapter about a documentary film made late in the director's life that returns Fuller to the actual site of the Nazi's Falkenau camp, at which he discusses his experiences there and that powerful, unforgettable footage he shot in the spring of 1945.

Film is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies is the first book to focus on the genre that best defined the American director's career: the war film. It draws on previously unexplored archival materials, such as Fuller's Federal Bureau of Investigation files and WWII-era 16mm films, to explore the director's lifelong interest in making challenging, thought-provoking, and often politically dangerous movies about war. After establishing the roots of Fuller's cinematographic schooling in the trenches during World War II, including careful consideration of his 16mm footage of a Nazi camp at the end of that war, Film is Like a Battleground explores Fuller's first forays into hot war representation in Hollywood with the pioneering Korean conflict films The Steel Helmet (1951) and Fixed Bayonets (1951). This pair of films introduced Fuller to his first run-ins with the American political machine when they triggered both FBI and Department of Defense investigations into his political sympathies and affiliations. Fuller's cold war films Pickup on South Street (1953) and, though it veers into hot war territory, Hell and High Water (1954) are Fuller's responses to the political pressures he had now personally experienced and resented. A chapter on Fuller's representation of pre-American-invasion Vietnam in China Gate (1957) alongside his unrealized Vietnam war screenplay, The Rifle (ca. late 1960s), illustrates the degree to which Fuller's representation of war and nation shifted even as he continued to probe war's impossible contradictions. Film is Like a Battleground would be incomplete without a thorough exploration of the films depicting the war Fuller personally experienced and spent a lifetime contemplating, WWII. Verboten (1959), Merrill's Marauder's (1962), and The Big Red One (1980) demonstrate Fuller's representation of a morally justifiable war. Fuller's 1959 CBS television pilot--Dogface--offers a glimpse at one of Fuller's failed attempts to bring his WWII story into American living rooms. The book concludes with a chapter about a documentary film made late in the director's life that returns Fuller to the actual site of the Nazi's Falkenau camp, at which he discusses his experiences there and that powerful, unforgettable footage he shot in the spring of 1945.

The 25 films written and directed by Sam Fuller (e.g., Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss and White Dog) are a combination of social commentary, bold plotting, brutal violence and dazzling cinematic technique. An extended interview with Fuller is the basis of this work; to it are added lengthy commentaries from his actors, cameramen, editors and many others. For each of the films, there is a critical analysis and an extensive plot synopsis. Also provided is a comprehensive filmography of his work.

This book explores how modern Russian cinema is part of the international information war that has unfolded across a variety of battlefields, including social media, online news, and television. It outlines how Russian cinema has been instrumentalized, both by the Kremlin's allies and its detractors, to convey salient political and cultural messages, often in subtle ways, thereby becoming a tool for both critiquing and serving domestic and foreign policy objectives, shaping national identity, and determining cultural memory. It explains how regulations, legislation, and funding mechanisms have rendered contemporary cinema both an essential weapon for the Kremlin and a means for more independent figures to publicly frame official government policy. In addition, the book employs formal cinematic analysis to highlight the dominant themes and narratives in modern Russian films of a variety of genres, situating them in Russia’s broader rhetorical ecosystem and explaining how they serve the objectives of the Kremlin or its opponents.

(Applause Books). Winner of Best Non-Fiction for 2002 Award from the Los Angeles Times Book Review! Samuel Fuller was one of the most prolific and independent writer-director-producers in Hollywood. His 29 tough, gritty films made from 1949 to 1989 set out to capture the truth of war, racism and human frailties, and incorporate some of his own experiences. His film Park Row was inspired by his years in the New York newspaper business, where his beat included murders, suicides, state executions and race riots. He writes about hitchhiking across the country at the height of the Great Depression. His years in the army in World War II are captured in his hugely successful pictures The Big Red One , The Steel Helmet and Merrill's Marauders . Fuller's other films include Pickup on South Street ; Underworld U.S.A. , a movie that shows how gangsters in the 1960s were seen as "respected" tax-paying executives; Shock Corridor , which exposed the conditions in mental institutions; and White Dog , written in collaboration with Curtis Hanson ( L.A. Confidential ), a film so controversial that Paramount's then studio heads Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner refused to release it. In addition to his work in film, Samuel Fuller (1911-1997) wrote eleven novels. He lived in Los Angeles with his wife and their daughter. A Third Face was completed by Jerome Henry Rudes, Fuller's longtime friend, and his wife, Christa Lang Fuller. "Fuller wasn't one for tactful understatement and his hot-blooded, incident-packed autobiography is accordingly blunt ... A Third Face is a grand, lively, rambunctious memoir." Janet Maslin, The New York Times ; "Fuller's last work is a joy and an important addition to film and popular culture literature." Publishers Weekly ; "If you don't like the films of Sam Fuller, then you just don't like cinema." Martin Scorsese, from the book's introduction

Aotearoa New Zealand, “a tiny Pacific country,” is of great interest to those engaged in postcolonial and literary studies throughout the world. In all former colonies, myths of national identity are vested with various interests. Shifts in collective Pakeha (or New Zealand-European) identity have been marked by the phenomenal popularity of three novels, each at a time of massive social change. Late-colonialism, anti-imperialism, and the collapse of the idea of a singular ‘nation’ can be traced through the reception of John Mulgan’s Man Alone (1939), Keri Hulme’s the bone people (1983), and Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990). Yet close analysis of these three novels also reveals marginalization and silencing in claims to singular Pakeha identity and a linear development of settler acculturation. Such a dynamic resonates with that of other ‘settler’ cultures – the similarities and differences telling in comparison. Specifically, Reading Pakeha? Fiction and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand explores how concepts of race and ethnicity intersect with those of gender, sex, and sexuality. This book also asks whether ‘Pakeha’ is still a meaningful term.

Scholars have characterized the early decades of the Cold War as an era of rising militarism in the United States but most Americans continued to identify themselves as fundamentally anti-militaristic. To them, "militaristic" defined the authoritarian regimes of Germany and Japan that the nation had defeated in World War II--aggressive, power-hungry countries in which the military possessed power outside civilian authority. Much of the popular culture in the decades following World War II reflected and reinforced a more pacifist perception of America. This study explores military images in television, film, and comic books from 1945 to 1970 to understand how popular culture made it possible for a public to embrace more militaristic national security policies yet continue to perceive themselves as deeply anti-militaristic.

Known for his visual style as well as for his experimentation in virtually every genre of narrative cinema, award-winning director Sidney J. Furie also has the distinction of having made Canada's first ever feature-length fictional film in English, A Dangerous Age (1957). With a body of work that includes The Ipcress File (1965), Lady Sings the Blues (1972), and The Entity (1982), he has collaborated with major stars such as Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Robert Redford, and Michael Caine, and his films have inspired some of Hollywood's most celebrated directors, including Stanley Kubrick and Quentin Tarantino. In this first biography of the prolific filmmaker, author Daniel Kremer offers a comprehensive look at the director's unique career. Furie pioneered techniques such as improvisation in large-scale film productions, and sometimes shot his films in sequence to develop the characters from the ground up and improve the performers' in-the-moment spontaneity. Not only has Stanley Kubrick acknowledged that Furie's The Boys in Company C (1978) informed and influenced Full Metal Jacket (1987), but Martin Scorsese has said that he considers The Entity to be one of the scariest horror films of all time. However, Furie was often later criticized for accepting lowbrow work, and as a result, little serious study has been devoted to the director. Meticulously researched and enhanced by Kremer's close relationship with the filmmaker, this definitive biography captures the highs and lows of an exceptional but underexamined career, taking readers behind the scenes with a director who was often ahead of his time.

The long 1950s, which extend back to the early postwar period and forward into the early 1960s, were a period of “containment culture” in America, as the media worked to reinforce traditional family values and suspected communist sympathizers were blacklisted from the entertainment industry. Yet some brave filmmakers and actors still challenged the status quo to produce indelible and imaginative work that delivered uncomfortable truths to Cold War audiences. Triumph Over Containment offers an uncompromising look at some of the era’s greatest films and directors, from household names like Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick to lesser-known iconoclasts like Samuel Fuller and Ida Lupino. Taking in everything from The Thing from Another World (1951) to Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), acclaimed film scholar Robert P. Kolker scours a variety of different genres to find pockets of resistance to the repressive and oppressive norms of Cold War culture. He devotes special attention to two quintessential 1950s genres—the melodrama and the science fiction film—that might seem like polar opposites, but each offered pointed responses to containment culture. This book takes a fresh look at such directors as Nicholas Ray, John Ford, and Orson Welles, while giving readers a new appreciation for the depth and artistry of 1950s Hollywood films.

No American state is more antistatist than Alaska. And no state takes in more federal money per capita, which accounts for a full third of Alaska's economy. This seeming paradox underlies the story Stephen Haycox tells in Battleground Alaska, a history of the fraught dynamic between development and environmental regulation in a state aptly dubbed "The Last Frontier." Examining inconvenient truths, the book investigates the genesis and persistence of the oft-heard claim that Congress has trampled Alaska's sovereignty with its management of the state's pristine wilderness. At the same time it debunks the myth of an inviolable Alaska statehood compact at the center of this claim. Unique, isolated, and remote, Alaska's economy depends as much on absentee corporate exploitation of its natural resources, particularly oil, as it does on federal spending. This dependency forces Alaskans to endorse any economic development in the state, putting them in conflict with restrictive environmental constraint. Battleground Alaska reveals how Alaskans' abiding resentment of federal regulation and control has exacerbated the tensions and political sparring between these camps—and how Alaska's leaders have exploited this antistatist sentiment to promote their own agendas, specifically the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Haycox builds his history and critique around four now classic environmental battles in modern Alaska: the establishment of the ANWR is the 1950s; the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in the 1970s; the passage of the Alaska National Interests Lands Conservation Act in 1980; and the struggle that culminated in the Tongass Timber Reform Act of 1990. What emerges is a complex tale, with no clear-cut villains and heroes, that explains why Alaskans as a collective almost always opt for development, even as they profess their genuine love for the beauty and bounty of their state's environment. Yet even as it exposes the potential folly of this practice, Haycox's work reminds environmentalists that all wilderness is inhabited, and that human life depends—as it always has—on the exploitation of the earth's resources.