The High Holidays—and these High Holidays in particular—have been pushing me to think more about cyclicality. On Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we dust off the melodies, prayers, and tropes used only at this time of year. Simchat Torah represents the end of a cycle of Torah reading, and the beginning of a new one. Growing up in a large college town in the Midwest, it struck me that the High Holidays coincided with other vital cycles: the return of students to the college campus a few blocks away after a quiet summer, the turning of the leaves and onset of crispness in the air, displacing humidity. As an adult, the holidays inspire another type of cyclical activity—an annual visit to Sable’s, the hole-in-the-wall smoked fish mecca on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

At work (I’m the business columnist at Newsweek and Slate), the fall—and again, this fall in particular—is always a period for reflecting on cycles. September and October are the periods when those in the financial world remind themselves that bad things can happen in the markets—because bad things did happen in the falls of 1929, 1987, and 2008. This year, the High Holidays nearly coincide with the one-year anniversary of the market meltdowns and ensuing bailouts. The High Holidays are the Yomim Nora’im—Days of Awe. But in Hebrew, nora means both awesome and terrible. And last fall, as Lehman Brothers failed, as the world’s financial markets seized up, as governments scrambled to stop a total meltdown, they were truly terrible days for the global economy.

The downturns in markets are cycles we’d just as soon forget. And yet, I can’t help thinking this year that we’ve been too forgetful of cyclicality—in our personal and professional lives. Had our leaders—and we as individual investors and consumers—been more mindful of the power of cycles, we might have avoided some portion of our current woes.

Until recently, an appreciation of cyclicality was deeply embedded in the way we thought about how the global economy worked—periods of growth followed by occasional contractions, which set the stage for more growth. But in the past two decades, the thinking changed. Technology, globalization, interconnectedness, improved management, and understanding borne of experience and the study of history gave us the impression that we could escape the tyranny of economic cycles. Alan Greenspan, elevated to chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987, came to believe—and convinced us—that the business cycle could be tamed. And to a large degree, he was right. Recessions, which had plagued the economy every three or four years, became rare. Between March 1991 and December 2007, the economy contracted for a single eight-month period, in 2001. And even that recession was brief and shallow by historical standards.

A certain arrogance sets in among those who believe they live outside history. But that’s precisely what the financial world came to believe. As prosperity rose and spread, the prospect of a recession, of a cyclical downturn in the economy, or in markets like housing and stocks, was increasingly dismissed as an impossibility. Housing prices would always rise. Loans would always be paid back. The unemployment rate would always remain low. And with every passing day, more money was wagered on this belief that the business cycle was a thing of the past. When you believe prices move in only one direction, it makes sense to borrow (and lend) as much money as you can. The intensity of this belief made the reckoning all the more difficult when it inevitably came last year. The recession—the sudden reassertion of the economic cycle that began in December 2007 and probably ended this summer—was so devastating to the fortunes of so many individuals and institutions because their financial models didn’t account for the possibility of a downturn. It’s as if they had built houses astride an active fault that would shatter at the merest tremor. And so we should approach this High Holiday season with a deeper appreciation of the importance of cyclicality in worldly affairs.

Finally, for me, at least, the High Holidays—and Yom Kippur in particular—represent an antidote to another type of cycle: the news cycle. Journalists have always been captive to the relentless rhythms of world affairs. But in the past several years, it’s gotten much worse. Time was, a reporter could unplug in the evening, or for the weekend, without missing a beat. Now? Not so much. It’s irresponsible to turn off the BlackBerry and avoid email. Editors kick copy back in the evening, and sources in Asia may only be available at five in the morning Eastern time. Amidst the raging storm of Twitter, magazine deadlines, the mandates of filing for the internet, phoning in to radio shows, and rushing to television studios, there are only a few places you can seek respite from the datasmog: airplanes and synagogue. Yom Kippur is probably the one day of the year I don’t check my email or consume any media—regardless of which company might be failing or which television network is calling. It’s a time for reflection and humility. For at least 24 hours, the economic and news cycles can spin without my presence.

Daniel Gross writes about business for Newsweek and Slate.

As we embark on this decline, with newspapers folding, and the book industry itself threatening collapse, it is revealing to read the writers of this generation—Henry Roth, Daniel Fuchs, Michael Gold, Albert Halper, Tess Slesinger, and others—in order to understand how they survived, not only financially, but also spiritually. Because they came of age in Depression, much of their work was published poorly, then quickly forgotten by an accelerated wartime economy just a decade down the breadline. But if Jewish American literature has any true founding fathers (and mothers), these are they—writers who first established its concerns with justice and ethnic censure in public language.

The Great Depression coincided with the settling of the final great wave of Jewish immigration in the 20th century. Boats all but stopped steaming into Ellis Island with the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which imposed a quota on foreign arrivals. When the stock market crashed five years later, the island was being used as a prison and mustering station for the deportation of immigrant thieves, murderers, and Anarchists. By the time the law had taken effect, however, most Jews in America were already citizens, paying taxes, building cities. As the Depression encroached, these European and Russian speakers of Yiddish were raising the first generation of American Jews to speak English natively, and the first generation of American Jewish writers to write naturally in English, too. The Depression marked the profoundest attempt by Americans of any origin to address the claims of the Old World, as Jewish writers of criticism and fiction shaped accounts of their pre-histories, defining the margins of inheritance, while codifying the essential success of immigrant acculturation.

Depression’s newest Americans also discovered democracy, though the zeal of enfranchisement, abetted by financial distress, often led them to extremes—to the foremost forms of Marxism, Socialism, and Communism; Stalinism; Trotskyism; the politics of Norman M. Thomas; and the Labor politics of unions, representing the social welfare interests of workers in various trades. To get a clearer snapshot of the milieu, imagine these movements surrounded by loose, citybound circles of young intellectuals, who espoused a cafeteria Marxism more concerned with the artisanal quality of talk than with any quantity of action. However, the very fact that there was never any real prospect for Marxist revolution in America might have given Depression’s thinkers and writers the freedom to apply the Left’s radicalism directly to themselves—their personalities.

In his autobiography, A Margin of Hope, Irving Howe, born in the East Bronx in 1920, evoked the intense, immersive political atmosphere of the 1930s, particularly in New York—which had the most jobs in a country of no jobs, yet which also suffered the worst housing shortages, and hunger—and particularly centered around Manhattan’s City College, where ferocious arguments were waged between students who were exhaustively reading, and exhaustedly (if they were lucky) working their way through school: “We took positions on almost everything, for positions testified to the fruitfulness of theory. Theory marked our superiority in ‘vulgar empiricist’ politics, compensated for our helplessness, told us that some day this helplessness would be dialectically transformed into power. We took positions on the New Deal, the class nature of Stalinist society, strategies for Indian liberation, the ‘four-class’ bloc proposed by the Chinese Communists, tactics for the French Left, the need for a labor party for the United States.”

Alfred Kazin, born in Brownsville, Brooklyn, in 1915, and Howe’s fellow City College alum, was another critic who made his name writing for “the little magazines” that proliferated in the aftermath of Depression, including Commentary, Dissent, and Partisan Review, which themselves grew out of miniscule, shoestrung Jewish journals of the 1930s like Jewish Frontier, and Menorah Journal. Starting Out in the Thirties, Kazin’s least-read memoir (others are New York Jew, and his classicA Walker in the City), intimates that Depression aspirations to political change began personally, as a poetics of the soul. Injustice, to be recognized as such, required empathy, or compassion, while utopian dreams required both imagination, and the youthful—or the youthful culture’s—ability to self-re-invent: “What young writers of the 1930s wanted was to prove the literary value of our experience, to recognize the possibility of art in our own lives, to feel that we had moved the streets, the stockyards, the hiring halls into literature—to show that our radical strength could carry on the experimental impulse of modern literature.”

As the Spanish Civil War smoldered (1936-1939), and the Stalinist purges and show trials of often-Jewish Trotskyites continued unabated, Kazin remembered: “Not even the hack jobs I did for a living now seemed unworthy, for the issue raised in a book review, a street scene studied for an article, always fitted into my sense of the destiny and inclusiveness of history. So my parent’s poverty had a mystique for me, and our loneliness a definite heroism—we were usually unhappy and always on each other’s necks, but I saw us all moving forward on the sweep of great events. I believed that everyone was engulfed in politics, absorbed in issues that were the noble part of themselves.”

This sort of hyperbolic mimesis is typical of the period: Just as things get externally worse, we celebrate the internal best, “the noble part.” Such romantic reinventions of poverty into heroism, of individual misfortune transformed to philosophical iniquity and so, for political cause, are marks of a new people—or of a saved race thinking through a new language of the self. It was this language, that of Howe, Kazin, and Lionel Trilling, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, Paul Goodman, and others whose Jewishness was strictly associative (such as Dwight MacDonald, and Mary McCarthy), that became the lingua franca of America’s first truly democratic decade—a decade that matched ambition with possibility, and responded to privation with an amalgam of innocent gusto, and wiseass “sensibility.”

Post office, Lower East Side, June 1936

To be sure, Saul Bellow, writing in 1953, could not have had his Augie March stand at Liberty’s golden door, declaring himself “an American, Chicago-born”—“first to knock, first admitted”—without Depression’s actual Augies having thanklessly laid the groundwork. American Jewish writers of the 1930s engineered a literature that, while unread today, defined concerns for the next generation, setting out the radical agenda decades before Bellow and Philip Roth would reap the spoils of a postwar economy of readers with more money, and more leisure-time: Michael Gold (1893-1967), editor of The New Masses and a columnist for The Daily Worker, turned the Lower East Side into a political hothouse, a raucous forum for Downtown grievances against an Uptown ruling class (his novel Jews Without Moneyis an overwritten, overheated, slummy masterpiece); Albert Halper (1904-1984) was less ideological than his frequent antagonist Gold, and more concerned with the characters of workers than with their aspirations toward political power (his novels include Union Square, and it is telling that his Depression memoir is wistfully entitled Goodbye Union Square); Tess Slesinger (1905-1945) was an incisive stylist, though perhaps too cynical for affiliation of any kind (her novel, The Unpossessed, is a scathing treatment of the nativity of the non-group Irving Howe later called “The New York Intellectuals”).

It was an immigrant, though, who wrote the consummate work of growing up on the East Side—Henry Roth, born to Yiddish in Galicia. Called Call it Sleep, Roth’s book virtually disappeared upon publication in 1934, though its 1964 rerelease as a “mass-market paperback”—a Depression innovation, ever since an institution in American publishing—revitalized interest among readers for whom the ghetto was only an ancestral rumor. The 1964 review that brought attention to the book came from Howe—not in the pages of a leftist journal or undercirculated literary quarterly, but on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

The writers of little magazines become the writers of big magazines; while the political radicals, if they live to compromise with prosperity, become the political conservatives; the failed books of yesterday are sure to be the classics of tomorrow: these are stories tinged with sadness, with an autochthonous American sadness; stories that, in their prescribed conventionalities, function as jokes, and, as jokes, might be the closest this country comes to a native, Jewish-like dark humor. Here, in large liberal America, intellectuals, to say nothing of writers, have improved on Protestantism’s libertarian streak, and are now more grossly atomized than ever, which condition they think beneficial, if not to themselves then to their governance—capitalism requiring competition, and competition requiring separation, their heads left apart and alone to find out “the fittest.”

opening credits for The Hard Way, screenplay by Daniel Fuchs

But to survive in any way during Depression, American writers had to join something—whether the WPA, the Communist Party, or even the parties of eastern scribblers who went west in the 1930s to work for a Hollywood that had recently discovered sound, and needed writers to write dialogue for it (just a handful of years later, everyone, literary or not, joined the war effort, joining up for a just war being the ultimate belonging). Among those ambivalent fortunates who went to California to write for film was Daniel Fuchs. Author of three brilliant neglected books of Jewish Brooklyn, Fuchs left the east for Lala Land, and its guaranteed salary, in 1937. His subsequent writing serves as a window into how necessity inspires life. From Fuchs’ diary: “For ten days I have been sitting around in my two-room office waiting for some producer on the lot to call me up and put me to work on a script. Every morning I walk the distance from my apartment on Orchid Avenue and appear at the studio promptly at nine. The other writers pass my window an hour or so later, see me ready for work in my shirtsleeves and suspenders, and yell jovially ‘Scab!’ But I don’t want to miss that phone call.”

That is the Depression mentality in a sentence, qualified with Judaic neuroses. Let it be that generation’s epitaph, and a millenarian motto: “But I don’t want to miss that phone call.”

Berkowitz, who still lives in the borough where he was born and raised, is pale, intense, and remarkably youthful looking. He has been passionately involved in the labor movement for most of his life. Immediately after the war, he followed his father, Harry, and his brother, Pinky, into the furriers’ union, but he soon took a job with the Progressive Party as a mimeograph machine operator and shipping room worker, and got caught up in the excitement of political activism. After becoming a professional printer and working at low-wage jobs for a few years, he organized the workers of a non-union shop and joined the Amalgamated Lithographers of America, Local 1. He worked as a union printer for thirty-three years until his retirement in 1988. He’s continued his activism in the years since, working mostly on issues (such as the fight against privatization) at Co-op City, the vast below-market housing complex in the Bronx where he resides. His partner of thirty-five years, Susan Joseph, is also a socially conscious citizen, and together they are members of Veterans for Peace. A lifelong socialist, he’s intensely critical of religion, and certain that God is a foolish and dangerous product of people’s imaginations. I wanted to know how he could be so sure.

You’re a son of immigrants. Can you tell me a little bit about your family?

My parents came from Romania around 1920. They had lived in Galatz, a small port city on the Black Sea, just a few miles from Russia. They were very poor; their life was the shtetl life.

My father’s father didn’t work regularly and was a bit of a drinker. My father was taken into the Romanian army at a very early age. Jews were not taken in as soldiers; they were taken in as servants, and in the army he was an apprentice tailor. My mother’s father was a decorative carriage painter. I don’t know if either my father or mother had much schooling.

Was your family religious back in Romania?

They weren’t religious so much as they were practicing. Which sounds a little strange, but they had the—how should I put it?—culture and tradition of Jewish religious living. But neither of my parents was ever interested in God. Practicing in the shtetl meant, I think, community life more than religious observance.

When you were a kid, were they still practicing?

Not at all. They left it behind completely. There’s a story in my family about my brother, sister, and me asking my father why he didn’t use his tefillin, the leather straps that the Orthodox Jews put on when they daven. He said, “In the old country I needed religion. Here I need the union.”

What do you think he meant?

Well, for shtetl Jews in the small towns of Eastern Europe—where anti-Semitism was very, very strong—religious life was the protection. Being together with other Jews, you had a group. You didn’t stand alone. And as a worker in the fur trade here in New York City, to my father it looked like his protection was the union. It’s sort of ironic, but in the fur industry in those days the religious Jews were the bosses, the employers. And the workers were more inspired by the warmth they got out of unionization. They didn’t have to stand up to the boss alone; they stood with a group.

When I worked there, New York’s fur industry was centered in hundreds of mostly small shops in tall buildings along Seventh Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Thirtieth Streets. Before going up to the shops to work at 8 a.m., workers—most were Jewish, almost all were union members—filled the Seventh Avenue sidewalks, gossiping about the trade and talking or arguing about the nation, or the world. After work many drifted to the Fur Workers Union Hall on Twenty-sixth and Eighth Avenue for more of the same or to see a business agent or get something taken care of in the union’s health clinic. Unionism provided shtetl-like community and protection. So my father’s transfer from religion to the union became my attitude. I was never bar mitzvahed; neither was my brother.

In my family we have a parallel story to yours about the tefillin: My great grandmother’s sister came over to visit from Russia. She went to the supermarket with my great grandmother, and was looking at the meat. She pointed at a piece and said, “What’s this mark?” It was a USDA stamp. When my great grandmother explained that the government had inspected it, her sister said, “Great! So you don’t have to keep kosher anymore.”

Do you believe in God?

I don’t. I think that all belief in God stems from prehistory, when man’s ancestors needed explanations for things that they didn’t have the equipment to explain. We have much more equipment for explaining how the body works, how nature works, even how space works, so we don’t have to invent gods. And not only do I think it’s not practical or sensible, but I think it’s harmful, because a belief in supernatural powers takes away from action in solving problems.

What’s an example of something going on today where you see people’s belief in God being harmful?

Certainly in the way in the last decade or two where there has been a marriage between religious organizations and political activity, much to the detriment of the nation.

Like the funding of “faith-based” charities?

Yeah, and the right-wing evangelical organizations that have intervened in politics and have helped reactionary political forces with things that have little to do with stopping wars or improving the economy. The so-called family values that disregard the destruction of families by war and by economic disparity.

What about the people who really do brave and good things in the name of religion? The priests and nuns who went down to El Salvador, Buddhist monks fighting for justice, even the scores of American rabbis who are activists? To me it seems that sometimes people actually get a kind of superhuman courage or strength from their faith.

All religions have significant ethical components. They’re a part of the teachings of any religion, and there are people who sincerely respond to that part of a religious practice. The people you mentioned, the Catholic liberation priests, are not exactly coddled by the Vatican.

Do you think that the ethics your parents taught you were connected in some way to Jewish ethics or Judaism?

Not really. Well, maybe I got it without knowing it. As they had. What I did get from them was the flavor of Jewish life. I like the language; my parents both loved the Yiddish language. And I connect to the tradition of struggle. The immigrants came over from poor communities and they had to struggle here. Humanism came easy. Socialism came easy. During the first part of the twentieth century, Jewish life in America was full of unionism and aspiration for social justice. I got those things from my parents, but I don’t know if it came from their Jewishness or if it came from the way they had to struggle to earn a living.

I like the progressive history of Jews in the world and in America, going back even to the 1800s, when the Jews were big in revolutionary movements in Europe. And in union movements here in the United States and into the 1900s. I don’t know, but I really do hope it’s a reflection of the ancient ethical component of Jewish tradition or Jewish religion.

Tell me more about your connection to Jewish culture, separate from the religious tradition.

Well, the Jews have a great literature. My mother loved the stories of Sholem Aleichem. She had a complete set of his works, which she read all her life, from volume one right through twenty-eight, and then all over again.

The music that was written in New York and other Jewish communities in the U.S.—operettas, songs—I love all of that! For about a decade in the fifties I was in this group called the Jewish Young Folk Singers, which I helped organize along with my brother. Eventually it was five choruses in different parts of New York City with a total of maybe 250 singers. It was very successful, very exciting. The emphasis was on Jewish music; we did a lot of labor music. Songs of poverty. And of joy: dance music came from the same labor writers from the twenties and thirties. Many of the composers of Jewish music were laborers, workers in shops, and they wrote music on the side.

You are so passionate about your political views. How do you define them?

What I see is that the organization of society under capitalism is not equitable, and that the inequities lead to a whole lot of wrong things. So my political belief is definitely socialism. I think that socialism is achievable not by, you know, capturing the post office here on Gun Hill Road, but through all the struggles that working people have to go through, and the education they pick up in those struggles. I believe they will push society that way eventually. Even here in America.

You said socialism is your “political belief.” Do you think there’s a danger of political movements or ideologies having the same problems that you see religions having?

Yes, there is a danger. Movements and organizations that are progressive, by the very nature of their struggle, become sometimes too guarded, too self-enclosed, and too tyrannical.

I’m also wondering about the people who follow a political movement in the way you might see people following religion: blindly and without questioning. Isn’t that dangerous?

Yes, definitely. It just one of the things that has to be faced. You know, when babies start teething, it’s painful. But they’ve got to do it. And political movements can be like infants. They go through things that they have to learn how to cope with. Like: how do you take power and not abuse power?

When you were growing up in the Bronx, did you have friends who were from more religious families?

No. I never went into a synagogue, in fact, until I was well into adulthood. I don’t remember what the occasion was—probably a funeral, or a bar mitzvah or something.

Have you ever had moments when you wished you believed in God?

Never.

As an atheist, how do you cope with the knowledge of your own mortality?

Well, I’ll tell you, I guess it’s just a belief in what’s nice about what is. What I have seen, the enjoyments I have, the things I approve of—that, to me, is something to lean on. I don’t need something invented.

Stills from The Naked Kiss

By the time he died, in 1997, Fuller had married twice and fathered once, directed twenty-three features, begun a fifth or sixth career as a film actor (starting in 1965 with an indelible cameo as himself in Godard’s Pierrot le fou), and written a dozen books, including his wonderfully grizzled autobiography, A Third Face (published posthumously, in 2002). As a director, Fuller delighted in rubbing America’s face in its social and political failures, but he judiciously refused to align himself with any Utopian political movement. He particularly loved journalists, soldiers, and children, but he found a way to empathize with everybody—from stoolies to Nazis, from battle-scarred call girls to William Randolph Hearst. And he made some of the loudest, crassest, most bizarre motion pictures ever, from the crazily didactic Park Row (1952), about battling good-and-evil nineteenth-century newspaper editors, to the astounding The Naked Kiss (1964), the story of a prostitute who falls in love with a child molester.

Every appreciation of Fuller’s work begins with the information that he often called “action” by firing a pistol into the air, and not without good reason. Fuller’s was a cinema of violence, of tumult, of wayward motivation and perpetual reversal. He saw no virtue in understatement; he had seen too much sorrow and horror to allow himself to conform to anyone else’s sense of propriety. Even before his experiences as an infantry grunt in the European theater of war, Fuller had known death and looked into its face: As the youngest licensed reporter on the rape-and-murder beat in lower Manhattan, he broke the story of the death-by-overdose of the now-forgotten Hollywood star Jeanne Eagels by sneaking into a funeral parlor and opening her casket. (He was eighteen.) If he ever had any illusions, he lost them by the time he was shooting 16mm footage of mass burials in the woods outside Falkenau. Fuller’s films are typified by a sense of moral urgency, the feeling that the stakes are too high to be polite. This is how he was the opposite of a director like Ernst Lubitsch: elegance of structure and fluidity of style were never his concern.

This insolence, this brashness, is perhaps why Fuller has always been more popular with other directors than he has been with critics or film historians, and more celebrated by the French than by us. It has taken many years for a properly researched, in-depth account of Fuller’s work to appear in this country (Lisa Dombrowski’s The Films of Samuel Fuller: If You Die, I’ll Kill You!, a workmanlike historical monograph published this year by Wesleyan University Press), but the power of Fuller’s legacy has been evident for nearly half a century, since the first salvos of the French new wave hit our shores. Classics like Breathless and The 400 Blows—and even Hiroshima, Mon Amour—are all directly and profoundly marked by Fuller’s abrupt way of cutting through a scene, his disinterest in naturalistic acting, his continuity-shattering sense of outrage. Similarly, there would have been no New Hollywood—no DePalma, no Coppola, no Spielberg or Scorsese or even Robert Altman—without The Steel Helmet or Verboten! or Shock Corridor, whose self-propelled production and freedom from constraint were mighty precedents for the film-school generation. (Spielberg, who gave Fuller a cigar-chomping cameo in his underappreciated 1941, apparently used to keep a print of Fuller’s 1954 Cold War submarine drama Hell and High Water in the trunk of his car—for late-night roadside emergencies, no doubt.)

Fuller is sometimes described as a “primitive” or a “sensationalist,” terms that explain the peculiarities of his style by drawing together his lack of formal education (he dropped out of high school) and his bam-kapow narrative training in the copy rooms of the New York gutter press. The implication is that Fuller didn’t “know what he was doing,” that he lacked restraint, that he was tone-deaf, that his sincerity was actually naïveté. Perhaps that’s all true. But as Dombrowski points out, Fuller was perfectly capable of following standard Hollywood film grammar—or at least he had acquired those skills by 1951, when he signed with 20th Century-Fox—and from the start he was also trying to achieve odd, atonal effects that old pros like his friends Howard Hawks and John Ford could never have imagined. There was no match cut too incorrect, no reaction shot too unmotivated, no line of dialogue too hard boiled for Fuller, who at his best was aggressively, even sublimely dissonant, a politicized combination of Michael Powell and Ed Wood. Many of his most startling gestures, like the abrupt cut to the smiling face of a beautiful woman seen through a gun barrel in 1957’s Forty Guns, or the endlessly-cited shock opening of The Naked Kiss, blur the line between “good” and “bad” filmmaking in a way that continues to flummox the uninitiated. (Fuller certainly racked up some bad movies, but no one can agree on which ones they are.)

Fuller’s view of the human character was no less unorthodox than his command of film style. He always deified children—it remains one of his most charmingly bewildering traits—but any grown character in any Sam Fuller picture is capable of shocking ruthlessness, of noble sacrifice as well as bestial selfishness. This is part of what makes movies like Shock Corridor (his 1963 story about a reporter who feigns insanity to investigate a murder in an asylum) so unpredictable: any hero can turn into a villain (and vice-versa), sometimes in the space of a single cut. And yet those moments of pure sadism are invariably balanced by scenes of such maudlin treacle that it’s difficult for a viewer to keep his balance: what is Fuller trying to do?

Still from Shock Corridor

The question becomes especially urgent when one looks at those films in which Fuller confronts American racism. Starting with his 1951 breakthrough, The Steel Helmet (a Korean War tale that was denounced by the right wing for its attention to the Japanese internment camps and other dubious American actions), and continuing through pictures like the outrageous White Dog (his 1982 movie about a dog trained to attack black people), Fuller excoriated racial prejudice with an insistence and an intensity that Hollywood films almost never achieved. However, his racists—snarling figures, held in the grip of irrational hatred—were always among his most striking and electric characters, while the objects of their scorn, such as the Asian children in China Gate (1957) and The Steel Helmet, are pure and innocent and noble: sacrificial lambs for Fuller’s allegorical tendencies. (This tension is at its peak in Shock Corridor, in which a black mental patient imagines himself to be a white-sheeted rider for the Ku Klux Klan; it turns out that the emotional stress of his participation in the civil rights movement drove him mad.) If it weren’t for Fuller’s utter sincerity and his obvious disinclination to think commercially, these films might be accused of being opportunistic—racist documents about racism—and indeed this is what Paramount feared White Dog to be. (In the face of protests they shelved the film, and to this day it has never had a proper theatrical release in the United States.)

Strangely, Fuller effaced his own Jewishness; in A Third Face, he mentions it only obliquely, and he wasn’t known to mention it in interviews. (While researching this piece I took an informal poll of my cinephile friends, and not one of them knew that Fuller was Jewish.) This erasure (or denial) may have been part of Fuller’s attempt to keep his own world free of ethnic difference; he evidently wanted to live in a color-blind America, and certainly in his own eyes he was an American before he was anything else. Other than the hollow-eyed children Lee Marvin helps to liberate from a death camp in The Big Red One (1980), his films are almost completely free of Jewish characters, and this, in turn, becomes a kind of structuring absence in his work—although the horror of the camps, in one way or another, undergirds every movie he made.

Still from Forty Guns

There are many critics who consider his primary achievements to be his war pictures, and indeed Fuller introduced into films like Fixed Bayonets (1951) and The Big Red One a sense of the insanity and moral ambiguity of combat that had rarely appeared in American cinema. But Fuller’s greatest moments, his most baroque set pieces, all occur in other genres, the crime picture or the Western or the topical melodrama: the climax of Underworld U.S.A., with the mortally wounded Cliff Robertson careening up an impossibly wide city street, or the savage Wild West gunfight that perforates Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns, or (perhaps especially) the entirety of Shock Corridor and Park Row—both of which really seem as if each take commenced with Fuller firing a gun into the ceiling.

And then there’s The Naked Kiss, Fuller’s masterpiece and an utterly lunatic document of his private moral universe—his Vertigo. Built around a recurring musical number of rare tastelessness (hesitatingly performed by a clutch of disabled children) and featuring a Fassbinder-worthy gallery of hysteric, discordant performances, The Naked Kiss confronts patriarchy with the delicacy of a Peterbilt smashing through an art gallery. The heroically overwrought Constance Towers—one of John Ford’s preferred actresses and a featured scenery-chewer in Shock Corridor—plays a call girl who decides to get out of the game by wrapping herself in anonymity and moving to a small town;

Still from The Naked Kiss

naturally she lands in a hotbed of sexual hypocrisy and moral blindness. The film is relentlessly cringe-inducing, but for those with strong constitutions, the history of cinema offers few pleasures quite as rarefied—and few sequences as forcefully edited—as the murder-by-telephone-receiver that upends the heroine’s world and closes the film’s second act, a real stunner that begins with a tape playback of that musical number and ends with an ice-cold, Antonioni-inflected spatial montage: a stairwell, an empty foyer, a dead man on the carpet.

No one who sees The Naked Kiss can ever forget that scene, or the speech that follows it (in which our heroine explains the significance of the movie’s title). It’s one of the greatest traps any filmmaker has ever sprung on an audience—a brilliant use of the viewer’s expectations as a weapon that has decisively influenced generations of filmmakers. (The brutal shift of gears in the last scene of There Will Be Blood is only the most recent example of a director speaking in Fullerese.) Like the rest of Fuller’s work, The Naked Kiss defies criticism—no canon can comfortably contain it—and in its strange power it stands alongside Jerry Lewis’s The Ladies Man as a definitive rumination on the psychosexual politics of postwar American life.

Fuller may have made more controversial pictures, but he never made a stronger one than The Naked Kiss. The weird sense of uplift, of redemptive possibility, that closes the film is pure Fuller; he believed that everyone deserves a second chance, even if that chance is always doomed to failure. That must be what “democracy” meant to him. Right up to his very last film, the garishly plotted 1989 Euro-potboiler Street of No Return, he yoked his (and our) sympathies to the waylaid, the misled, the abandoned; he knew them to be the real core of any honest society. Perhaps this is what some critics mean when they call Fuller a primitive: he was without irony—and without condescension. “I come from a generation for whom telling the truth meant everything,” Fuller wrote in his autobiography. “See, I still believe what James Cagney said in one of his movies: ‘You shake a man’s hand and look him straight in the eyes and everything will be all right.’” If only we were all so primitive.