A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review
by Max Allan Collins

   

SAMUEL FULLER – The Dark Page. Duell, Sloan & Pearce, hardcover, 1944.Mercury, digest-sized paperback, 1951, as Murder Makes a Deadline. Avon, paperback, 1982. Film: Columbia Pictures, 1952, as Scandal Sheet.

   Film director Sam Fuller is a stylish, iconoclastic auteur whose movies transform tabloid trash into cinematic art. The characters in his films are larger than life, their dialogue often sounding like the copy off the back of a paperback; yet the broad strokes of his scripts are turned to poetry by fluid camera work and startling visual imagery, redeeming graces his novels tend to lack.

   His career as a novelist is, then, considerably less significant, although perhaps no other film-maker of his stature has written so many novels. Prior to his film-making career, Fuller wrote lurid topical tales (Burn Baby Burn, 1935; Test Tube Baby, 1936), foreshadowing such “out of the headlines” Fuller films as Pickup on South Street (1953) and Underworld USA (1960).

   His later books are novelizations either of films he made (The Naked Kiss, 1963) or of films he failed to make (144 Picadilly, 1971). His claim to fame as a novelist, however, rests upon The Dark Page, a fast-moving, effective crime novel that reflects Fuller’s love for Hearst-school yellow journalism, that lurid National Enquirer style of reporting that Fuller’s movies hinge upon and transcend.

   City editor Carl Chapman throws a Lonely Hearts Ball at Madison Square Garden, a cynical media event designed to boost the circulation of his paper, the Comet. At the party, which is attended by his wife, Rose (to whom he’s happily married), he encounters Charlotte, a former wife from his former, secret life. Returning with Charlotte (whom he had never divorced) to her shabby apartment, an argument ensues and Charlotte is killed, more or less accidentally.

   Chapman’s star reporter, Lance McCleary, latching on to the fact that the murdered woman had attended the Lonely Hearts Ball, pursues the story vigorously, not realizing he is closing in on his mentor, editor Chapman. Chapman, too, cannot resist the headline-making story, and feels just as proud as he does threatened, as Lance’s muckraking tactics lead Chapman into further deceit and murder.

   Fuller’s style in The Dark Page is lively, the melodrama made palatable by the short, choppy sentences and paragraphs that are right out of his newspaper background. Well worth reading for its own merits, The Dark Page is a fascinating footnote in the story of a major, if offbeat, American film director.

   A tidy little B movie was fashioned from The Dark Page, but, ironically, Fuller didn’t make it: The adaptation, Scandal Sheet (1953), with Broderick Crawford as the city editor and John Derek as his metaphorical son, was directed by fellow B-movie magician Phil Karlson.

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.