Film Is Like a Battleground: Sam Fuller's War Movies by Marsha Gordon (review)

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 material, including Fuller's personal letters, photographs, and diaries (which are still held by his estate), alongside close readings of Fuller's war-related films to explore the director's lifelong interest in making challenging, thought-provoking, and often politically dangerous movies about this particular subject.

The book includes a careful consideration of Fuller's personal 16mm footage of a liberated Nazi camp at the end of World War II, as well as some of his other amateur war-era films on deposit at the Academy Film Archive. The book engages with Fuller's Federal Bureau of Investigation file and with the extensive records pertaining to his films created by the Department of Defense, documents now housed at the National Archives in Washington, DC.

In addition to studying his feature films about both hot and cold wars, Film Is Like a Battleground examines Fuller's 1959 CBS television pilot, Dogface; his unrealized Vietnam war screenplay, The Rifle (ca. late 1960s); and his late-career participation in Emil Weiss's documentary Falkenau—The Impossible (1988).

Director Sam Fuller's annotation on the back of a photograph he took during World War II. (Image courtesy of Christa and Samantha Fuller, Chrisam Films, Inc.)