Directed by Emil Weiss
Expectations: Moderate.
As its title suggests, Tell Me Sam is a film where Sam Fuller tells stories. You can imagine the director Emil Weiss, just off camera, asking Fuller things like, “Tell me about your days in journalism, Sam,” or “Tell me about I Shot Jesse James.” Fuller doesn’t seem the type that needs such provocation to tell these stories — I can only imagine the kinds of things he discussed over the dinner table — but the idea that the questions are in the air informs a lot of the experience in Tell Me Sam. Frankly, I’d have preferred these questions to be heard, so that the film was a document of a conversation instead of a 75-minute monologue from the aging director.
Tell Me Sam is a companion piece to Weiss’s 1988 documentary about Sam Fuller, Falkenau, the Impossible. Where Falkenau focuses specifically on Fuller’s experiences at the end of World War II when his unit helped to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, Tell Me Sam broadens out its focus to the entirety of Sam Fuller’s working life. One of the most interesting tales comes from before he was in the film industry, and it’s one that helped shape the way he made films and looked at the world. During his days in journalism, Fuller worked the homicide beat and was only allowed to write the facts without the use of any adjectives. Fuller relates that this specifically made him well up with unspent emotion, as he felt all kinds of intense feelings about the cases he saw and wrote about, but was unable to express them.