Phil Karlson and Samuel Fuller

[A poster at The Blackboard wondered why Phil Karlson didn't have a reputation similar to that of the much-celebrated Samuel Fuller.]

Fuller and Karlson are about even through 1960. But from that point on, Fuller burnished his resume with eccentric masterpieces such as Shock Corridor, The Naked Kiss, and White Dog, while Karlson worked mainly on indifferent commercial assignments such as The Young Doctors, Ben (the sequel to the "rat horror" film Willard), Kid Galahad with Elvis Presley, and a couple of Matt Helm films with Dean Martin. His most celebrated later film is Walking Tall, which tends to hit liberal viewers as well-done right-wing action fascism -- the same criticism that Don Siegel's Dirty Harry and Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs took a long time to recover from.

So Karlson did his reputation no favors by his seeming indifference to the shape of his filmography. Fuller kept it personal, which rightly endears him to historians, critics, and buffs.