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MovieMail's Review
Although the 1980 version of Samuel Fuller's autobiographical war film was relatively well received, an aura of disappointment hung over it. Fuller hadn't directed in a decade and The Big Red One was his much-awaited labour of love. The film's producers (Lorimar), however, were not impressed: they took the film away and butchered it.
Time has been kinder to Fuller's reputation than it has to Lorimar's. Twenty years after its release, critic Richard Schickel went back to the film's shooting script and unearthed 70,000 feet of unused footage. His resulting reconstruction has turned a patchy, rough-edged jaunt through a series of battles into a sprawling, personal epic that ranks with the great Hollywood war films.
Loosely following a First Infantry Division squad's movements from a North African beach assault in 1943 to the end of WWII, The Big Red One now serves to bridge the gap between the gung-ho actioners of the sixties and the contemplative, exploratory war films of recent years. But where, say, Saving Private Ryan wrings emotion from its unflinching depiction of men in combat, Fuller's heart lies with the earlier movies. His battle sequences are punctuated with macho theorising and male bonding. The key to surviving war is not to understand the human condition, he says: it's to try and stop your balls from being blown off.
Fuller never lost his visual assurance - some of the images here rank with the most stirring ever captured in a war film and the reconstruction embellishes the director's vision, whilst retaining his 'machine-gun' approach. The Big Red One can either strike you with power and precision or surround you with a bloody mess. Either way, Fuller's point is underlined: war is barbaric, chaotic and tragicomic - and surviving it is an ugly business.
Julian Upton
The Fighting First: A War Department Film Featurette
Reconstruction Trailer
Alternate Scenes
Anatomy Of A Scene
The Men Who Made Sam Fuller Featurette
The Real Glory: Reconstructing The Big Red One Documentary
Original Promo Reel
Stills Gallery.
Film Description
This reconstruction of Fuller's war film, headed by Richard Schickel who worked from Fuller's shooting script, adds over 40 minutes and is close to the late director's original cut. A film that has survived only in a truncated version now becomes the epic it was meant to be and shows that, in Fuller's words, 'The real glory of war is surviving'.
