Uma Rua Sem Volta

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

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.

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.

After having watched a few Fullers, I found this DVD. One must admit that it is partly a wonderful movie, with a feeling of film noir or is it a " blue film" since the lightning is always dark and bluish? On the other hand, the music sounds terrible to my hears, and Carradine's character as a rock star looks incoherent, it blocks all possibilities of identification and empathy. Some "adults" bits are quite acceptable esthetically, namely those which actually happen; however, Mikael's ( Carradine's) fantasies and remembrances about his video clip gave me the impression that I had unconsciously changed channels and was watching a bad quality X movie. I think the bum part of Carradine's role is convincing; the stance Fuller takes at riots and racial issues is more complex than in "China Gate". Ideological issues are difficult to assess since there is theatrical edge to the film, at some point it resembles a musical, which soothes a little the otherwise unbearable violence.

Street of No Return is and is not a real return to form for maverick B-movie director Samuel Fuller, chiefly because he never really lost a form in the first place. But in essence, the story he's tackling here, based on a David Goodis novel, calls out to a pulpy melodrama/film-noir from the 50s ala Pickup on South Street. There aren't any sensationalized messages being laid out like in a Shock Corridor or Park Row, yet Fuller, even at the ripe old mid 70s, wasn't about to skimp out in his swan song for his die-hard fans.

There's plenty of "realistic" violence (in quotes because, as Fuller says in an interview on the DVD, it's not really real, but fictionalized there's a deeper reality to the dramatizing of it), particularly the opening riot sequence, one of the best scenes, and in the climax of the film, where everything is shrouded mostly by smoke as cops and bad guys duke it out. There's emotion- in the total Fuller sense- as he still to the end embraces melodrama as something that can work when not distilled for the audience, especially through intuitive manipulations of the camera in point of view and the wallops of timing with the editing. There's even a fairly decent, if a little estranged, performance from Keith Carradine, and an excellent bad-ass cop turn from character actor Bill Duke.

But then there's also the side to Fuller, as Eastwood is in the midst of right now, in his style and approach to the script where trying new things goes with going old and having (seemingly) nothing to lose as an artist. The only problem is Fuller skirts the edges on whether or not he's making a serious thriller or more of a satire of one set squarely in the mid 80s. Carradine's character, for example, is an 80s era pop singer named simply Michael (a possible in-joke towards Michael Jackson), who sings and plays songs that are kind of second rate power ballads that only work on a level of cheesy enjoyment; this goes also for his music videos, even though one might sense Fuller working some of his more jokey stabs there, and it's not as abhorrent if one just takes a total sense of disbelief.

Actually, that might count for a good deal of the movie, because at the core the story is so set in its one-dimensional ways: the mistreated and helpless woman taken away from Michael (who meet and fall in love in a manner only Fuller could pull off with a wink and a nod); the hard-bitten cop looking at trouble if he doesn't crack the case; the unrepentant criminals- white and black- who conspire to have whatever at their will, either by corporate schilling or by immediate gang warfare. This, plus the musical score by Karl-Heinz Schafer which is maybe the worst aspect to making it more dramatically powerful when needed, hamper what are the better qualities.

I wouldn't trade seeing any Sam Fuller motion picture, warts and all, because there's always something to experience and take-in as the director's ideals at showing something compelling from real-life situations (eg the crack years in the urban areas in the 80s, and the underlying issue of race) are never out of sync with making such two-dimensional characters alive and a style angry at conventional ways. It lacks the full drive of a classic, but there's still a pulse that throbs enough to make it worthwhile. Carradine fans, I might add, may be in for a small surprise seeing such a dialog-free performance as a man stripped of his life, or at least dignity, and then given it back piece by piece.