The first scene should give you a woody: Sam on The Big One.

In the new Independent Film Channel documentary, The Typewriter, The Rifle, and The Movie Camera (by Tim Robbins and Adam Simon), Jim Jarmusch quotes Sam Fuller as saying, "If the first scene doesn't give you a hard-on then throw the goddamn thing away." The same could be said of every scene in a Fuller film. A tough, cigar-chewing auteur with a bone-deep distaste for compromise, Fuller rarely committed an image to film that didn't tell the truth. Critic Andrew Sarris called him "an authentic American primitive." His films exposed at low angles the underside of government, crime, and community, and how politicians, crooks and Good Samaritans sometimes ate off the same greasy plates. During the '50s and early '60s, Fuller made 17 films that shot straight at the heart of this hypocrisy. He wrote and produced nearly all of his films, blazing through his Westerns, war pictures, and crime dramas with a tight-fisted ferocity. He loved to beat up on Commies and bigots, and he didn't much care for cops, mayors, martyrs or heroes either. He thought the noble were foolish and the rich were all hiding something. If a wimp wandered into one of his screenplays he'd kill the bastard off.

He preferred to let his protagonists destroy themselves or limp along to the next battle. Often they survived on a kind of nonchalant brutality. "A dead man's nothin' but a corpse," is a sergeant's epitaph for a fallen comrade in Steel Helmet (1951). And in Underworld U.S.A. (1961), a fat drug kingpin has this answer for a crony who suggests they shouldn't sell drugs to schoolkids: "Don't tell me the end of a needle has a conscience." It's dialogue like this that led film historian David Thomson to write of Fuller, "In truth he is barbarous and that is why he is unique."

Barbarians, in the guise of crooks, psychos, and soldiers, were the Fuller archetypes. Merrill's Marauder's (1962), his grim war film about a march through Burma, hasn't got a speck of sentiment in it, but it's filled with issues/19/images that speak in matter-of-fact detail about the reasons men fight. His first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949), is a character study of Bob Ford, the backshooter who gunned down a Western legend and spent the rest of his life tortured by it. And in White Dog (1982) the most intriguing character is a German shepherd trained to attack blacks. Sympathy for anyone was hard to come by, as expressed in lines like this: "Killing insane people isn't good for P.R., killing sane people is okay." (The Big Red One, 1980).

One of his best films, Pickup on South Street (1953), stars Richard Widmark as Skip McCoy, a wily pickpocket with the name and spunk of a shortstop, who plays the Feds off against the Communists in a deal for some microfilm. It was a favorite theme of Fuller's to blur the line between the good guys and bad guys, and he often found more integrity, a kind of mangy truth, in the low-brow aspirations of hoods.

Lee Marvin hits the beach as his squad gets its baptism by fire during the invasion of North Africa in The Big Red One.

"There's a big difference between a traitor and a pickpocket," says McCoy's pal Thelma Ritter (who has a wonderfully pathetic death scene), but very little difference between the cops and the Reds, or the Fascists, or the Mafia, or anyone who tries to make all the rules. "There will always be people like us," says the drug lord in Underworld U.S.A. "We'll win the war, we always have." And they do, as the film ends with Clift Robertson stumbling down a dark street to his doom.

Fuller loved the shadows of film noir, the rawness of the west, the chaos of battle. He didn't much care if his tracking camera jittered, or if he forgot to get the medium shot. What mattered most was that his economical aesthetics kept him working. He was not a man who liked to sit still.

He started out as a copyboy for the New York Journal when he was only 12; five years later he was a crime reporter for the San Diego Sun. During the Depression, when he was in his 20s, he rode the rails. He wrote pulp fiction, fought in Europe and North Africa during WWII, and knocked around Hollywood writing screenplays until his directorial debut at age 37. His first two films, I Shot Jesse James and The Baron of Arizona, are B-movie knock-offs, but they're filled with enough bug's eye close-ups and scampering dolly shots to energize the flat, biopic storylines.

The studios were impressed enough to let him start making films based on his journalistic and wartime experiences. His two excellent war films, Steel Helmet, set during the Korean War, and The Big Red One, about the First Infantry during WWII, were made nearly 30 years apart, but both depicted a battleground where the enemy was nearly unseen and the rules were simple: "A South Korean is running with you, a North Korean is running at you" says a foot soldier in Steel Helmet.

The famous "helmet shot" appears in both these films: a close-up of a half-shell peeking above the horizon of a foxhole, slowly rising until the eyes, the "dead man's stare," become visible. It's a bleak, contradictory image, menacing and cowering. The battles following these shots were confused, hazed by dust, fog or smoke. Martin Scorsese designed one of the fight scenes in Raging Bull on these disorienting sequences.

In the early '60s Fuller made a pair of movies, Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964), that were shot in a revved-up tabloid style which spun B-movie kitsch into low art, thanks largely to the black-and-white photography of Stanley Cortez. Shock Corridor begins with some lofty, cornball platitudes about truth in journalism before it rips into its story about a newspaperman who gets himself committed to an insane asylum so he can write a Pulitzer-prize winning piece. It's a far-fetched idea, and the story is told with too many simple, didactic strokes, but Fuller does make his point: whether it's Communism, matrydom, nuclear totalitarianism, or the pursuit of the Pultizer, men will destroy themselves for a cause.

Naked Kiss begins with what is perhaps Fuller's most memorable sequence: a bald hooker in black beats the crap out of her pimp with her handbag. Following that stunner of a beginning the hooker moves to a small town, reforms herself by becoming a nurse, falls in love with a pillar of the community, then discovers he is a child molester and murders him. At that point the hypocrites come out like termites.

Fuller's corrosive style fell into popular and critical neglect in the late '60s and early '70s, and his output was inconsistent. Shark! (1969) starring Burt Reynolds as a treasure hunter, was disowned by the director; Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1972), despite the snappy title, should have been. In it Fuller was copying Godard with the breathless jumpcutting but the scenes play more like skits from the old "Monkees" TV series. His last film, Street of No Return (1989), is an incoherent bore.

To amuse himself, Fuller made cameo appearances in other directors' films. He played himself in Godard's Pierrot Le Fou, a gangster in Wenders's The American Friend, a movie director in Dennis Hopper's ill-conceived The Last Movie.

In 1980 Fuller got a chance to make his masterpiece, The Big Red One, about a crack rifle outfit in WWII. The sergeant (a beautifully understated Lee Marvin) is haunted by an incident in WWI where he killed a German soldier minutes after the war had ended. Even as he maneuvers his soldiers through yet another war, the sergeant seems to survive only to atone for that mistake, or to justify it. "We don't murder, we kill," he tells his four young marksmen, who themselves manage to sidestep death but are bewildered by a God's grace they know they haven't earned.

Fuller finds a rough poetry in several sequences: a D-Day assault that lasts for hours, as told by the extreme close-ups of a dead soldier's wrist-watch awash in the surf; a German platoon that plays dead in the shadow of a giant cross; a baby delivered in an enemy tank, its startling cries accompanying the lonely image of a last surviving German soldier running into the sunset. And finally, when Marvin again seems to kill a soldier only hours after the war has officially ended, he can only surrender to the tragic absurdity of it. When it turns out the soldier isn't dead, the film ends on the hopeful image of Marvin taking him to a hospital. It's as close as Fuller ever comes to a happy ending.

Sadly, much of the 85-year-old director's output is unavailable on video. He recently suffered a stroke and is attempting a recovery in L.A. But he's not in the grave yet. He's tough and stubborn and was on stage for an Independent Spirit Awards tribute a few weeks ago. Who knows, he may yet make his dream film about Balzac and Alexandre Dumas. Sam Fuller still might be the last director on earth you'd want to mess with. MM