"They love me in France" is the last, best hope of a Hollywood filmmaker in search of a second act. This refrain is the farcical residue of an aesthetic revolution that shook France half a century ago. In the nineteen-fifties, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and their fiercely intellectual circle of young Parisian film critics hailed certain Hollywood directors who were generally considered craftsmen (like Howard Hawks) or showmen (like Alfred Hitchcock) as artists of the first order and—despite the compromises inherent in studio filmmaking—as the sole "authors" of their films. The controversy provoked by this paradoxical politique des auteurs helped these critics to break into the field as directors themselves. They quickly won fame under the rubric of the French New Wave, and the American filmmakers they championed became culture heroes in France.

Besides Jerry Lewis (who really is as good as they said he is), the prime beneficiary of this adulation was probably Samuel Fuller. American critics tended to see Fuller, who was making movies during this period with titles like "Hell and High Water," as just another director of low-budget action films; but the young French enthusiasts recognized him as one of the most original filmmakers working at the time. Godard, writing in a 1957 article for Cahiers du Cinéma about Fuller's Western "Forty Guns," compared his extravagant inventiveness to that of Erich von Stroheim; in 1959, Luc Moullet, also a Cahiers critic and future director, extolled him as the Marlowe to Orson Welles's Shakespeare.

Although Fuller's acclaim abroad never really boosted his status here (except among cinephiles, who followed the French lead), it exerted an odd and uniquely powerful influence on his career and on his life. At the very least, it is safe to say that "A Third Face: My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking" (Knopf; $35), Fuller's posthumously published autobiography—the director died five years ago—would not have come about without the French enthusiasm for his work.

Fuller was born in 1912, to working-class Eastern European-Jewish immigrant parents, in Worcester, Massachusetts. In 1923, his father died and his mother brought her seven children to New York. At the age of twelve, Samuel started working as a copy boy on William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal, and hustled to become personal copy boy to the editor-in-chief. Energetic, ambitious, and precociously curious about the city's underside, he left the respected Journal and became, at the age of seventeen, a full-fledged crime reporter on the New York Evening Graphic—a photo-heavy paper of such spectacular sensationalism that it was nicknamed "the Pornographic." To appear older, Fuller started smoking cigars, which became his enduring trademark. Fuller's crime reporting provided what he later called his "hellbox" of insider information on the stool pigeons, gangsters, pickpockets, prostitutes, corrupt cops, and perverts whose exploits would be his cinematic stock in trade. It also provided him a rude schooling in the photographic craft, as Fuller noticed that "from the same cadaver, each photographer obtained a different, singular result, according to the angle, the light."

In 1931, at the age of eighteen, Fuller decided that he wanted to write the Great American Novel. In quest of a different sort of gritty realism, he bummed his way across the country by truck and freight train with his typewriter tied to his back, earning a living as a cartoonist and freelance journalist. The effects of the Depression were everywhere; Fuller reported on strikes, race riots, and the daily struggles of the homeless, whose Hooverville shantytowns he made his hostels. Then his brother became gravely ill, and he returned to New York, where he began to churn out pulp-fiction novels with such premonitory titles as "Test Tube Baby" and "Burn, Baby, Burn." This facility earned him an invitation to Hollywood; he arrived in 1936 and quickly found lucrative work, first as a ghostwriter and script doctor, then as a screenwriter.

Fuller was twenty-nine when the Second World War began, but he turned down a commission writing military P.R. and instead volunteered for the infantry, hoping that he'd get some great material if he survived. As a corporal in the First Infantry, he fought in North Africa, in Italy, in the D Day invasion of France, and in the final eastward thrust through Germany. He asked his mother to send him an amateur movie camera, with which he documented the outfit's shocking discovery of a concentration camp in a town in the Sudetenland. The war may have given Fuller more experience than he bargained for—a new hellbox of severed heads, burning flesh, limbs floating in a blood-red sea. He later described his wartime life in words that could equally be used to describe his films, a reality in which "death rained down without notice or design" from projectiles launched "out of nowhere." He returned home traumatized, and recuperated at his mother's apartment in New York before returning to Hollywood to look for work.

Through his prewar connections, Fuller, a rapid and prolific writer, sold some screenplays, but he hated what became of them afterward. He decided that he had to become a director, in order to protect his scripts from "any other banana head," but he didn't have sufficient influence to get work directing major studio productions. Thus he did B pictures, which were made very cheaply and under difficult conditions, and which quickly proved both artistically and financially successful. His first film, "I Shot Jesse James," from 1949, got him noticed; his third, "The Steel Helmet" (1951)—a raw film about a hothead survivalist officer in the Korean War—made him and his producer rich. Fuller swiftly rose to the top of Hollywood's bargain basement, winning a six-picture deal with Darryl F. Zanuck, of Fox, who granted him control over the script, direction, and editing of his low-budget movies.

Fuller thought of himself as a storyteller: he never made a film that he didn't write, and his work as a director was fanatically centered on what he insisted on calling, with mannered casualness, his "yarns." But Fuller's morbid melodramas would have been genre clichés in the hands of a less gifted artist; the titles alone—"Fixed Bayonets," "The Crimson Kimono," "Verboten!," "Shock Corridor," "The Naked Kiss"—suggest the lurid tone that characterized his work. Fuller concealed the thinness of his material with flamboyant details and acrid, flashy dialogue, but then redeemed it through his masterly cinematic technique. His closeups were intensely close and ominous; he probed every corner of his modest sets with extraordinarily long and elaborate tracking shots. To heighten the tension both offscreen and on, he wired his actors with body mikes, forcing them to deliver lines in the midst of long and complex action shots. Inspired by the highly textured realism of films by such Italian postwar directors as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica, he often filmed on location, and shot chase scenes with hidden cameras on crowded city streets.

But the most original and personal element of Fuller's films was their relentless violence. His characters stalk through his pictures with a hair-trigger fury, which periodically bursts forth in images of great visceral impact. Fuller revered the tabloid style of photographic shock—a New York politician being shot in the mouth as he opens it to speak, the explosion of the Hindenburg—and his technical daring and mastery were most effective when simulating such moments. His prime visual trope is the unforeseen eruption of violence that intrudes from offscreen, suggesting a boundless universe of ambient menace. Characters are felled by bullets from unseen guns, by shells from unseen mortars, by fists from unseen attackers.