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DVD The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Sam Fuller's The Big Red One was already one of the best films of 1980, despite the fact that the version released to theaters ran barely half as long as the director's cut. Fuller had been America's ballsiest B-movie auteur, an ex-newspaper reporter of the hardnosed breed who made fiercely personal, radically stylized, and politically outspoken films between the early '50s (The Steel Helmet,Pickup on South Street) and the early '60s (Shock Corridor). The Big Red One was his long-dreamt-of account of World War II as experienced by his own squad of the 1st Infantry Division, USA, from the first shot fired (by a dead man, on the coast of North Africa) to the last (in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia).
Even in the studio-truncated version, there was no shortage of astonishing moments and sequences: the squad choking on dust in a bat-filled cave in North Africa as German tanks clatter past the entrance; Fuller's cold-blooded distillation of the D-Day slaughter on Omaha Beach, with a wrist watch on a dead arm in the surf marking time as the water slopping over it grows redder; the rifle squad delivering a Frenchwoman's baby in a German tank on a battlefield full of corpses; a commando-like raid on Nazi troops bivouacked in a Belgian insane asylum. A quarter-century later, film critic Richard Schickel and Warner Bros. executive Brian Jamieson succeeded in restoring 15 never-seen sequences and fleshing out 23 others to create The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, a "new" film nearly an hour longer.
Above all, BR1: The Reconstruction has a rhythm the 1980 cut lacked. The arc of years, battles, and battlegrounds is so much more satisfying. Greater play is given to Fuller's feeling for children caught up in the sidewash of history and atrocity. And the 2004 cut puts sex back into the movie, not orgiastically but as a fact of life and a rarely forgotten driving force. We can see now that Fuller touched, bluntly and shockingly, on the phenomenon of infiltrators--English-speaking German warriors who donned GI khaki and moved among their enemies waiting for a chance to strike.
It's also apparent, as it was not in 1980, that Lee Marvin as the eternal Sergeant leading the young squad is magnificent. This was Marvin's greatest role, rivaled only by his walking dead man in John Boorman's Point Blank. Just beneath the masterly implacability, we glimpse the tenderness, rage, dark humor, experience, and wisdom beyond guilt that have enabled him to survive, to preserve others and to soldier on. His performance, like Fuller's film, is a masterpiece. --Richard T. Jameson
Review(s): DVD The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (Two-Disc Special Edition)
A Classic American Film
Don't let the nay-sayers have their way, those weaned on loud, big budget, thought challenged contemporary war films like Black Hawk Down, Glory, Pearl Harbor, and the like. This is the real thing. Sam Fuller, finally given a reasonable budget (though no where near the budget of the films mentioned above: Josh Hartnett's make-up was probably more than what Fuller could spend on costumes), produced in 1980 a strange, not thoroughly satisfactory but weirdly affecting and anachronistic little movie about a rifle squad in World War II. What became known once this film quickly disappeared from the theatres was that it was not what Fuller intended, that the studio had cut it significantly. To Fuller fans, this was his Greed, his Magnificent Ambersons, the film that could have been but wasn't. That it was his perhaps his most polished film, that it took a decidedly unsentimental view of war and American soldiers, that it contained one of Lee Marvin's final great performances, none of this could make up for the nagging question of what could have been. Now, with this reconstruction, we know, and it is indeed his masterpiece, and one of the best movies made ever about men in war. It is still a relatively low budget affair, which will turn off those used to CGI and big recongnizable stars. But what concerns Fuller is the grunt eyed view of battle, and for that he doesn't need a Bruckheimer budget. If this film can be compared to something recent, it would be Band of Brothers, another relatively unsentimental depiction of American soldiers in WWII. But Spielberg nor Tom Hanks would ever go as far as Fuller does in showing how hard and deeply cynical war can make a person, as Fuller does in the great scene of the GI partially blown up by a booby trap and Marvin chuckling as he shows the poor guy his blown off testicle and proclaiming something along the lines of "Hey, that's why you got two." The film is full of these moments. The squad doesn't give a damn about the replacements that show up to take the place of the replacements just killed. As one of the men says, the new guys are just "walking dead men." Are Marvin and his squad heroes? Fuller would laugh at that. His men have one goal in mind, and that is survival. Fuller, an infantryman himself in the First Division during the war, knows what war is. And that first hand knowledge is evidenced in every frame of this movie. The reconstruction gives the original film a much greater scope, giving it the feel of the tiny epic it promised to be in 1980. Fuller doesn't romanticize his heroes--this isn't Spielberg, this isn't Bruckheimer. He makes them hard, bitter men, boys really, who do what they have to in order to live another day. At the end, the Fuller stand-in, the wanna be writer in the squad, says, "I'm going to dedicate my book to the men who survived." This is that story, and as we slog away in another way where young men and women are dying every day, Fuller's cautionary tale is needed more than ever.
Fuller's mild war jamboree
Other reviewers here, including ones giving the film a 5-star rating, have noted the inaccuracies in The Big Red One--the American tanks dressed up as German ones, Jews playing Nazi camp commanders, etc. But those are truly superficial gripes, ones that do a disservice to the film, even if those reviewers raise those points only to (properly, I think) dismiss them. The film is Fuller's war odyssey, after all, his anecdotal recollection of his own experiences in WWII, and that should be our starting point for a real dicussion of the film's merits.
But there aren't many merits. For the most part the script conveys these anecdotes without force or focus. The scene of delivering a baby inside a German tank, for example, shows us a baby delivered inside a German tank. Alright, so this was presumably part of Fuller's war experience, but it comes across in the film as a giddy invention, the woman's legs suspended in stirrups made of bullets, the adolescent joke confusing the French word for "push" with a vulgar English word.... Even in the film's construct, it is finally inconsequential. Worse, it is gaudy and inconsequential. The film's entire tone actually suggests that the platoon is on something like a really long hike, where the dangers of war carry the same heft as walking through bear country. Death arises throughout, but usually with as little impact for us as in a bad Chuck Norris film, and always to the chipper strains of the film's just awful score--a poorly recalled version of Fanfare for the Common Man. So that celebrated birth scene--we can't even relievedly celebrate life during that scene because the film hasn't made death a matter of any genuine weight. Life is inside the tank and dead guys are outside, because Fuller tells us so.
Lee Marvin's deadpan tone, that dull growl, does little to enliven the oracular war-dictums he utters every three to five minutes. It's not his fault. The script itself is the absolute opposite of the chcracter Marvin tries to create. Where he is hardened and resolute, the script is woozy and uncertain. His role is evidence of that--since the scenes themselves fail to create their own consequence and meaning, the screenplay has Marvin and the voice-over narrator speak things a better film could have illustrated. Blaming all of this on poor pre-Saving Private Ryan WWII filmmaking (as other reviwers have done) is just beside the point. I too like Ryan much better (or just do like it, whereas Fuller's film is almost empty.) But my goodness, films had been successfully conveying structure and sense for 60 years before Fuller's movie. Friends of mine have blamed the budget, but frankly the costumes and most of the sets seem pretty solid, so that defense just sentimentalizes an allegedly gritty filmmaker and his outsider relation to Hollywood.
And nothing in the film suggests that Fuller's point is, somehow, the pointlessness of it all, or the shapelessness of the experience. After all, Marvin and the narrator keep summing things up for us, with marginal insight. So it seems to want to be a conclusive, exploratory film. And, again, it's not a film that actually manages the idea of emptiness or that captures some broad ambiguity about war--those fractures are part of the film itself, a problem in the artwork, not its subject. The camera work, for example, is always zooming in and out, and the edits don't make clear sense out of who's where, even in the slower scenes. It's a tough film to even follow on a visual level. In fact, the hell with this. I'm using film vocuabulary to wonder about Fuller's effects, but frankly the film is just carelessly shot and sloppy in its scene-making. Griff is totally unstable as a creation--not just as a guy, but as Fuller's bad creation--nervous at first, assured and responsible in the Normandy invasion, then derranged in the concentration camp scnee (a startlingly good scene, actually) and then loose and chatty at the very end. He's just an incoherent character, not a developed one. The other guys have no individuality, though the narrator chomps a cigar. We keep hearing about how pointless it is to learn the names of the new guys, but I can't tell you which of the original crew--if any--died, or when. The film is careless about its own people--not war-careless, but film-careless. Marvin is alternately tough and human, but only because the script says so, not because his sargeant is. He's still the best thing in the film, a suspended hope of in the midst of sustained disappointment.
Big Red One Has Not Aged Well
I really enjoy war films and purchased this "reconstruction" with great anticipation, but it was not worth it. In comparison with some very fine, more recent films - Gettysburg, Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan and the like - Big Red One comes across as a little melodramatic and the combat footage often seems unrealistic. It is simply not as sophisticated as some more current films on the subject.
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