EULOGY

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

PULP PROPHET White-maned, white-suited, his omnipresent cigar cocked at a jaunty angle, Sam Fuller, encountered in Parisian exile, briefly stilled the stream of consciousness that usually rushed across his gravel-bed larynx. He was searching for something he rarely offered in his movies--a neat summarizing idea. "That's it," he finally offered. "A director takes a song, a lyric, and makes a symphony of it. Does that make sense to you?"

Yeah, but not in Sam's case--unless you thought of him as a sort of Charles Ives, drawing on the vernacular only to subvert it with a big, blatting off-key note. Like the brave soldier who spreads his battlefield picnic on a fallen foe's body; the beautiful blond whose wig falls off in a fight to reveal a perfectly bald pate; the western hero who coolly plugs his lover when the bad guy tries to use her as a shield in a gun fight. Sam didn't strain for these bold, indelible moments. They just came naturally to him. Haute Hollywood patronized him--low budgets, no Oscars--and the dominant middlebrow critics of his high time, the 1950s and early '60s, dismissed him. It was O.K. to see the world as a dung heap if you eventually deplored it, but you weren't supposed to be as exuberantly unjudgmental about the vulgarly obsessed creatures scuttling across it as Sam was. --By Richard Schickel