With Father's Day looming just around the corner, I thought I'd do those potentially looking for a gift, as well as war movie fans in general, a solid, and re-post this review of the DVD release of The Big Red One, which bowed in a very special extended, restored edition in May of 2005. A slightly redacted version of my original review is as follows:

As a filmmaker, Samuel Fuller developed a reputation for shock and coarseness, but nothing ever compared to the horrors that he lived through as a decorated combat veteran of the First Infantry in World War II. In 1980, he made a movie loosely based on his own experiences, but it was taken away and re-cut prior to its theatrical release. Digitally restored and re-mastered, with 47 minutes of never-before-seen footage overseen by Time critic and filmmaker Richard Schickel and Warner Bros. archivist Brian Jamieson — who in 2005 were justly lauded with special citations from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and National Board of Review for their work — The Big Red One: The Reconstruction rights that wrong, and stands as a riveting renovation of one of the most underappreciated war dramas of our time.

Clocking in at 162 minutes, The Big Red One is introduced by a title card as “a fictional life based on factual death,” a notation Schickel mentions was part of Fuller’s original screenplay as well as the novelization of the film. It centers in undemonstrative fashion on the war years of a gruff, unnamed sergeant (Lee Marvin, above right, painting in stark, effective strokes of surly reticence) who heads up a fresh-faced 12-man rifle squad anchored by four men who just keep living through a litany of hellish assignments, from the North African invasion of 1942 through Sicily in 1943, D-Day and the liberation of a concentration camp. Those men are Bronx writer Zab (Robert Carradine, Revenge of the Nerds’ Lewis Skolnick), at-odds sharpshooter Griff (Mark Hamill), lanky Italian Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco) and Johnson (Kelly Ward). Hamill and Carradine easily make the strongest impressions, likely because their characters are the most obvious stand-ins for Fuller himself, and his feelings of conflict on war.

The bracing success of The Big Red One, though, chiefly stems from the fact that it transposes the theorem that war reduces everything to irrationality to even the setting of a “just war” like World War II, something a nation still reeling psychologically from the Vietnam War had yet to come to grips with. In fact, the movie opens with a black-and-white World War I sequence where a then-young Marvin unknowingly slays a German soldier after an armistice has been called, and the hollowed-out, ant-encrusted eyes of a wooden saint statue make clear that there are no right and certain answers on the battlefield.

While Hollywood battle choreography had not yet progressed to the level where actors were put through intensive, grueling boot camps (and thus some of its action still consists of the generic, run-around variety that looks silly in the wake of expansive, real-time sieges like in Saving Private Ryan), The Big Red One retains an impressive scope. Still, Fuller is more interested in pre-battle moments — the tension, camaraderie and even surrealities of massive armed conflict. Sometimes these details are as darkly comedic or touching as they are horrific (a solider attempting to wade ashore with a dry roll of toilet paper, a wounded “wet nose” checking his privates after Marvin deceives him in an effort to keep him from going into shock). Sometimes, though, the results are less convincing: a pregnant woman on the battlefield and a gay German doctor who plants one on a wounded Marvin in a brief sequence of detainment come across as absurdist flourishes, and a parallel subplot involving a German officer akin to Marvin’s (some of their dialogue is even the same) doesn’t fully connect.

Available alongside director Ken Annakin’s new-to-DVD 1965 film Battle of the Bulge, itself a recreation of one of the most crucial confrontations of World War II, The Big Red One is delivered on a great two-disc special edition, eclipsing by miles the previous bare-bones, theatrical cut DVD incarnation. Reconstruction producer Schickel provides an erudite and humble if waning commentary over the feature on its first disc; the second disc houses alternate scenes, before/after comparisons of the restoration work, a profile on Fuller, radio spots and trailers and a photo gallery. There’s also a 1980 promo reel narrated by Marvin, a 1946 short on the company produced by the War Department, and a wonderful, 45-minute making-of documentary that features new interviews with cast and crew, as well as archival footage of the director himself, who died in 1997. For fans of brawny but intelligent war drama, The Big Red One delivers a heckuva punch. B+ (Movie) A (Disc)