Street of No Return

The movie is wacky at almost every stage, and yet it undeniably works - whether through sheer naivete and flagging relevance or through simple genius, Fuller creates a totally unique and mesmerizing world of vivid colour, strange emptiness and weird evocation. It's clearly meant to be set in the US yet there's not a single interior or exterior which looks like it - Carradine plays an extremely anachronistic Europop star figure, yet the music actually has an underlying longing that's quite effective; the primal device of the black and white race riots is a distillation of Fuller's eternal theme - driven by big business, taking place in isolation on a street of no return, drained of all context or passion: the very first shot of a hammer blow to the head is incredibly jolting. All the noir elements are here, and the memory of better days hangs heavily over the plot - at the end you're amazed by how well structured it is, but it's the blinkered purity that produces the most mesmerizing results. Really memorable and weird.

Well this movie brings a big question to me. Why did they do it? With a director, that has been good although irregular. He seems to have done it without caring much about his movie. The actors are very bad, especially Keith Carradine, who acts like a robot, and gives no feeling to his role. They look as if they're asking themselves what they are doing here, and overplay, in a totally not realistic way. The lights, filming, and style of the film, is outdated, of course, but it's outdated in a way that makes it dull. Many movies of the eighties still look good, but this one, just looks old. It seems that Fuller wanted his movie to look modern, but in fact, he was overwhelmed by the era he was living in at the time, he didn't understood what were the times he was living, like a poor old guy, hanging to his old ideas. So his movies doesn't look either modern or timeless. Maybe the book was good, but this strange mix of French and American actors, French team and American director is a total failure.

An unkempt bum (Keith Carradine) after witnessing a riot and getting hit in the process, wonders through the streets where he thinks back to his life when he was somebody. When he was a successful singer and bedded Celia (Valentina Vargas, who didn't need to speak to make her part in "The Name of the Rose" to make it highly memorable), a nightclub dancer with a mobster boyfriend. Samuel Fuller's swansong, is interesting, despite Carradine's horrid songs.Not the best Fuller film by a long shot, but still watchable.

My Grade: C-

DVD Extras: commentary with Keith Carridine; a 32 minute Behind the scenes featurette; Text interview; and Theatrical Trailer

Eye Candy: Valentina Vargas shows it all

Director Samuel Fuller's films SHOCK CORRIDOR and THE NAKED KISS are among my all-time favorites. His attempts to achieve a kind of gutter-level truth through expressionistic exaggeration make his films completely unique. This film takes the classic noir novel STREET OF NO RETURN by Davis Goodis and turns it into a strange cinematic vision that is intense and brutal, yet otherworldly and cerebral. First of all, the film exists in no particular time--like RUMBLEFISH, it blurs elements from different eras so that it exists in some kind of alternate reality. Also, while the film supposedly deals with American issues, it looks so foreign (it was shot in Lisbon, Portugal, a city that has a unique look, but not a familiar look, as Paris or London or Rome or Berlin would have) that the whole thing seems to play out on an allegorical level. Even the music by Keith Carradine is odd--Carradine (known for his 70s hit "I'm Easy") is rooted in a kind of 70s folk-pop in the James Taylor vein, but his music is given an 80s Euro dance feel, and he looks like glam-era Kim Fowley (in the earlier times in the story) or trashed-out hippie-punk Kim Fowley (in the later times in the story). And while the film deals head on with racial issues, the Black actors in the smaller roles look nothing like African-Americans, which again takes the film away from any realism. Bill Duke is excellent as the harried police inspector, Keith Carradine is impressive as the protagonist (quite different from the book, but not attempting to be like the book, but like the screenplay), and once one gets into the "feel" of the film, it carries the viewer along for a wild ride. This is a memorable last film for the great Samuel Fuller. It has all of his good qualities and visually it's pure Fuller. The strange look and European feel to the film remind us that the man could not get a film deal in his own country and, like Orson Welles, was forced to put together overseas projects wherever he could. The Fantoma DVD presentation of the film is superb as are the extras (commentary by Carradine, documentary about the making of the film, etc.). The women in the film--Valentina Vargas as the woman who Carradine desires, and Andrea Ferreol as the woman who has nurtured him and who loves him but who he sees as a maternal figure (the line about "you've always been like a mother to me" is painful to hear!)-- are both incredibly sexy in a raw, animal-like way that we don't often see in films nowadays. If you've ever enjoyed a Samuel Fuller film, you should seek out this DVD. If you want to try something different, buy or rent this rather than going to see some empty Hollywood product at the multi-plex.

OK, I've seen a few of Sam Fuller's films now, but I'm still not sure whether he's a veritable genius or just a complete crackpot. Street of No Return does little to clarify things. As others have pointed out, it's not a particularly good film, but it is classic Fuller, in that it attempts to deal with salient social issues with bombastic acting, lurid violence, and some seriously ham-fisted dialogue. But that's why people (myself included) can't get enough of Fuller's work: it's so preposterous yet sincere you can't help but love it. After forty years of directing, Fuller obstinately sticks to his thematic and stylistic guns, for better or worse. In particular the dialogue seems incredibly anachronistic, as though everyone in the film grew up watching Fuller's own Pickup on South Street or Underworld USA. Like Kinji Fukasaku's Triple Cross (92), Street of No Return is the work of an aging maverick director who, despite a complete lack of commercial and critical success, never wavered in his artistic convictions. And for those of us who may stumble upon their work years later, it makes their films all the more endearing. The fantoma DVD release comes with a 'making of' which is really just an excuse to film the bellicose yet lovable Fuller spouting off on (what else?) race, violence, and the good old days of street journalism, and is well worth the price of rental alone.