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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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)
