It was Samuel Fuller’s stated wish that his movies give the viewer “a hard-on.” As the director once explained to a French interviewer, “That means an erection.”

Like his films, Fuller (1912–97) was nothing if not emphatic. He left nuance for the birds — and the Hitchcocks and Welleses; emotion in his films is raw, with conflict written across the screen in capital letters. His heroes — soldiers, cowboys, gangsters, and prostitutes — are hot-blooded types who act first and think later, and he captured their primal energy on celluloid as few other filmmakers have. The critic Andrew Sarris once called Fuller an “authentic American primitive,” and a young Jean-Luc Godard raved about his “barbarian cinema.” (Fuller later claimed, “I didn’t know what the hell that meant, but I was happy if it helped sell tickets.”)

Fuller’s mad, bad world is the subject of a 24-film series beginning tomorrow at the Museum of the Moving Image. But what emerges most clearly from the retrospective, the first in New York devoted to Fuller since his death a decade ago, is that within all the madness and badness lay a scathing social critique.

“He had something to say about war and hypocrisy and American society and racism,” the museum’s head curator, David Schwartz, said. Fuller, of course, wasn’t the only postwar director to sow seeds of unrest in his films. Douglas Sirk and Vincente Minnelli, to name two, often took a similar tack, but Fuller dispensed with the veneer of propriety. “They would build in messages under the surface and be subtle about it. Fuller wouldn’t,” Mr. Schwartz said. The director wrote his own scripts, eschewing big stars and big budgets to retain creative control, and in general played it tougher with the studios than was the norm in the 1950s and early ’60s, when he did most of his best work.

Fuller’s unsentimental education surely had something to do with his self-possession as a filmmaker. The Massachusetts native dropped out of high school to become a crime reporter for the small New York Graphic, spending so much time at the morgue that his “clothes stank of formaldehyde,” he recalled in his memoir. As a member of the 1st Infantry during World War II, he took part in the invasion of Normandy, which earned him a certain degree of blacklist immunity during the McCarthy era. When J. Edgar Hoover had problems with “Pickup on South Street,” Fuller’s 1953 thriller about a petty criminal who refuses to help the government track down communist spies, the director basically told the FBI chief to stick his nose elsewhere.

That gritty, low-budget noir, the sixth film Fuller directed, is arguably his best; like many of his works, it reserves an unusual sympathy for the criminal demimonde. The three main characters are a streetwalker, a stool pigeon, and a pickpocket named Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), who happens to snatch some microfilm containing nuclear secrets. After Skip’s victim, a prostitute named Candy (Jean Peters), breaks into his place to take it back, he finds her there and punches her lights out. To bring her to, he pours beer on her face. They’re not exactly classic Hollywood’s idea of a leading pair, but they’re as alive as any couple you’ll find on the screen, and Fuller’s humane, hard-boiled film dared to give them a happy ending.

Fuller once said that “the struggle to be free of boundaries” was the major recurring theme in his work, and his films are constantly chafing against the idea of the traditional Hollywood hero. In the climactic scene of “Forty Guns” (1957), a vicious young hothead takes the marshal’s woman hostage and starts taunting him. What’s the marshal going to do, shoot her? Actually, yes — and then pump the punk full of lead. In the first frames of Fuller’s Korean War film “The Steel Helmet” (1951), and again in “The Big Red One” (1980), a soldier’s helmeted head pokes up over a foxhole in close-up. It’s a defiantly unheroic image of modern warfare, as blunt and pithy as a political cartoon.

Fuller owes much of his reputation as a “tabloid philosopher” to two films he made in the early 1960s. “Shock Corridor” (1963) tells the story of an undercover journalist (Peter Breck) who enters an insane asylum where the patients personify contemporary America’s mass psychoses. There’s a feeble-minded nuclear scientist and a black man who acts like a member of the Ku Klux Klan, and the journalist moves from one to the other as if examining Exhibits A and B. (In one priceless scene, he wanders into a room full of nymphomaniacs, who set upon him like a pack of hyenas.) “The Naked Kiss,” released one year later, opens with the now-infamous scene of a prostitute (Constance Towers) knocking the stuffing out of her pimp, with much of the beating filmed from his point of view. She leaves the city to begin a new life in a small town, where her selfless work with handicapped children isn’t enough to deflect the prejudice of the narrow-minded locals. The film’s “gotcha” moment arrives when the community’s most upstanding citizen turns out to be a child molester.

Fuller unapologetically aimed for the gut, especially in these two films. Crippled kids who burst into song? “I didn’t give a damn if people thought it was corny,” he would say later. Maybe he should have, because his career took a dive after “The Naked Kiss” was released.

But Fuller managed to continue making movies, notably his autobiographical war epic “The Big Red One,” which he spent a good deal of his life trying to get made. The MMI will screen a newly restored print of that film with 45 additional minutes. Also being shown, for the first time in public, is Fuller’s complete footage of the Falkenau concentration camp, captured on the 16 mm camera he carried during his stint in the army.

Also, two documentaries, Mika Kaurismäki’s “Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made” (1994), and Adam Simon’s “The Typewriter, the Rifle, and the Movie Camera” (1996), offer portraits of the director as a growling old man, chomping on cigars and eager as ever to tell stories. In Mr. Simon’s film, several well-known directors describe the influence of Fuller’s bare-knuckled filmmaking. Martin Scorsese says a few interesting things; Quentin Tarantino, not so much. The 55-minute film is worth seeing, especially because it’s being screened along with “Pickup on South Street.” But in the end, a Samuel Fuller movie is like a good crack to the jaw. It pretty much speaks for itself.

Through June 10 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Astoria, 718-784-0077).