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THE BIG RED ONE
(SAMUEL FULLER, 1980)
PG
1 HOUR 53 MINUTES

**.5/****

Pro: The meat of this story comes from the characers. Lee Marvin. The bookends. The scope of the story, and the way it is presented in an episodic fashion. The wrist watch.

Con: Tame compared to today's standards. The fighting scenes can be very lame. You can see the limited budget throughout.

I don't really know what I was expecting from The Big Red One. All WWII films are compared to Saving Private Ryan, which I thought was artificial and staged. I'm not really sure I want to get into my historical film rant, where I hate the use of realism in historical film because ultimately, its all a recreation, and that should be acknowledged. A few war films do this, most notably Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now which have scenes where a documentary filmmaker is shown recording the war by barking out commands the soldiers.

So how does relate to Big Red One? Well, Fuller was certainly trying to make it "real" the same way Speilberg did in Saving Private Ryan, with moderate success. Obviously, special effects in film have gotten a great deal better in the last 20 years, so the film did seem dated. Strangely, Apocalypse Now seem more modern, and its a few years older than Big Red One. But it didn't ever seem real to me.

What Fuller is really good at in the film is the little details, like using a watch on a dead soldier to depict the passage of time during the Normady invasion, and there is one incredible scene in a lunatic asylum that couldn't help but remind one of Shock Corridor. Lee Marvin is the reason to see the film, though. He is the character that Hanks was going for in Saving Private Ryan.

I guess want annoys me is all the comparisons to Saving Private Ryan? I just did it, but why is Ryan the basis for all war films? I'm also bothered somewhat by the outpouring of love that many critics have given the reconstruction of the film. Why is it on many top ten lists? I expected it to be brilliant, or at least a film that was groundbreaking. It wasn't either.

I'm going to spend a chunk of the day working on my end of the year top ten list, and Collateral will win best cinematography of the year, and this piece in City of Sound appreciates it as well.

The movie I'm most looking forward to next year, Sin City, has a great trailer out. There was a huge trailer from Comic-Con on-line awhile ago that made me blow in my shorts, but I can't find it now. Maybe I'll upload it one of these days.

The trailer for The Weather Man also looks great, but I can't find any release date for the film. Honestly, I'm a sucker for any trailer with kewl music, and I love that Iggy Pop song.

Well, let's see how this works. The users' ratings under the movies is a nice feature. Either it's new, or I hadn't noticed. Maybe both.

I have seen many war movies like this one but better. Its decent.

The Big Red One: The Reconstruction in my humble judgment, is the best war movie ever made. It has explosions, gunfire galore, the gallantry of an elite group of four members of the 1st Infantry, led by a crusty old sargeant (Lee Marvin) whose face is nearly a death mask as he trudges through his second World War. It has humor, sometimes light (Marvin and two of his squad attempt to help a Parisian woman deliver her baby without the aid of a French translator) and sometimes dark (Lee's squad of four, known as the "four horsemen", walk in and out of battles... Algiers, Sicily, Omaha Beach... with barely a scratch, while other infantrymen die around them).

This was director Samuel Fuller's last film. It was a tribute to his own experience as a 1st Infantry soldier during WWII. Released in 1980, the film ran an even two hours to some mixed reviews, most likely due to an editing job forced by the Hollywood school of "make it palatable for an audience with an attention span shy of 120 minutes". The Reconstruction was conducted in 1997, the year of Samuel Fuller's death, and as a tribute to his original vision, forty-seven minutes were seamlessly grafted to the original release, resulting in the addition of 15 new scenes and the augmentation of 23 others. The result is magnificent. It is a film that gives enough of an overall scenario of war, while retaining the personal perspective of Marvin and his four horsemen in their collective realization that "the only glory in war is surviving."

The Big Red One strikes me as a realistic view of the war, but what it lacks is a coherent goal. It seems just like a slice of life of the soldiers who travel from place to place, enduring conflict and battle. I will say that it is a success for its depiction for war, but it isn't a success in any other way. Touching and emotional are some of the scenes - like the break in the battle when they visit the civilians and when, at the end, the Jewish boy is finally given some food and dies in the soldier's arm at the end of the war. Unless you are really interested in World War 2 and war movies in general, I would not recommend this film.

This vintage WWII movie has been reconstructed to something approaching what the director Sam Fuller intended. In that sense its a bit like a couple of Sam Peckinpah movies in that its taken 20-30 years for the 'Director's Cut' to appear. Basically it tracks a rifle squad and their sergeant thru the European theater, from Vichy-held Algeria and into Czechoslovakia. It is very much an anti-war movie, as the scenarios and dialog make it unmistakeable what a rotten thing war is.

The cast does really well. Lee Marvin was perfect for the role of the old sergeant. Good chemistry among the main characters gives an edge to the dogfaces' struggle to survive the war. There are no extant WWII German tanks to speak of so vintage US tanks were substituted. Some of the filming was done in what was then a more peaceful Palestine.

The flow of this extended cut is better. Its about 45 minutes longer, pushing 3 hours. The DVD looks great, but even more of a surprise is the remastering of the audio. Big Red... always had a flat, dull soundtrack, but the 5.1 remaster uses all the drivers with LFE to boot. Many older movies get a audio remaster that amounts to some patching here and there, but Big Red One got the real deal, and it sounds much better than it ever did. I watched some of the 2nd DVD of reasonable interesting extras. the DVDs get a 9/10.

Lee Marvin is so good in this film. So good. So understated. As much as the film depicts the terror of war and its tragic consequences, I found myself laughing. The fellas were funny, and probably soldiers are. I am not a soldier. Too scary. I prefer my wars on the big screen.

(***)