The Big Red One is Fuller's most autobiographical film, at once an old-fashioned war thriller and a portrait of the insanity and senseless destruction of combat, and the most expensive and ambitious production of his career. It charts the journey of his own real life unit (1st Infantry, 1st Platoon) through the experiences of four riflemen. Robert Carradine, Mark Hamill, Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward play the "four horsemen," as their tough, taciturn Sergeant (Lee Marvin) names them, the eternal figures in a rifle squad filled out by a couple of hundred replacements whose names they finally give up trying to learn over the four years of combat. The rest are simply "dead men with temporary use of their arms and legs," explains one of the riflemen, and in Fuller's clear-eyed portrait of combat, the only glory in war is survival.
We never learn the platoon leader's his name--he's just The Sergeant or Sarge--but this retread (the film opens on him during the final day of World War I) guides them from green volunteers to hardened survivors. A World War II vet himself, Marvin's face is a road map of the war, the worn, battered, yet unusually calm and warm face of a survivor. His heart is hidden under a helmet and three-day stubble, but the weary serenity behind his eyes turn warm and protective when the children of liberated villages follow Sarge around like puppies and he wordlessly adopts them for a few heartbreaking moments.
Carradine's cigar-chomping, pulp-fiction-writing Zab stands-in for Fuller--his journal entries provide the narration and commentary and at one point in the film he finds out that his novel, "The Dark Deadline" (a twist on Fuller's "The Dark Page") has been published and sent to the front in a military edition--but there's a little of Fuller in all of the young men. Hamill's Griff is a marksman who doesn't think he can murder another human ("We don't murder, we kill," explains Sarge); Di Cicco's Vinci the smart aleck Brooklyn kid; and Ward's Johnson the artist who sketches his impressions along the way.
Fuller gives us North Africa, Italy, even D-Day on Omaha Beach, all recreated on a fraction of the budget and a sliver of the cast that Steven Spielberg had at his disposal for Saving Private Ryan. He shoots with a spare, suggestive visual style, largely in close-up, in part to keep the focus on the immediate experience, but also to make the most of his limited resources. Isolated, deserted locales dominate their odyssey. Death is abrupt and brutal, ready to strike at any moment. It verges on the unreal, and these boys learn to respond instinctively to the unreality of it all. For such a sprawling portrait, it is all about the details: condoms used for everything except sex, a wooden crucifix with the crucified dead-eyed Jesus in the desert presiding over scenes of death and destruction, the indescribable, cold fury that hits Griff when he discovers the horrors that the Nazis perpetrated at the concentration camp they liberate.
Fuller's original rough cut reportedly ran over four hours. That cut is lost to time and commerce (its ownership bounced around as studios sold off libraries) but in 2004, film critic, historian, and documentary filmmaker Richard Schickel oversaw a reconstruction using a trove of unearthed footage and Fuller's original script as a guide. It doesn't come close to the lost cut but The Big Red One: The Reconstruction fills out the film with over 45 minutes of new and expanded scenes that restore characters lost in the cutting, fill out experiences, and give the film a shape missing in the original cut. Schickel also gives the film the perfect opening Fuller quote: "This is a fictional life based on factual death." The most defining addition (apart from the sense of heft that the accumulation of details gives the experience) is a structural element: a Nazi Sergeant (Siegfried Rauch) whose journey mirrors the Sarge's. In the theatrical cut he appear at the end of the film in a collision with Sarge that bookends the opening scene. In the expanded version he's a ruthless Nazi (he kills his own soldier in one scene) and a brutal officer who winds through the film in parallel to Sarge, a warped mirror double. It gives the climactic echo of the opening scene a much more complicated resonance that reflects Fuller's distinctive approach to the war film. At the end this Nazi is, like Sarge, just a soldier and soldiers don't judge. They kill and when the war is over they stop killing.
The Blu-ray debut of The Big Red One only upgrades the theatrical cut to high definition. It looks superb, with noticeable improvement in clarity, detail, and color. The expanded 2004 Reconstruction is included in standard definition only, making it more like a supplement than what it should be: the featured attraction. Given that, it looks very good, just not 1080p good.
The Blu-ray imports all of the supplements from the two-disc DVD special edition. Film historian and reconstruction producer Richard Schickel provides commentary on the reconstructed version, discussing the changes in terms of story and theme. The Real Glory: The Reconstruction of the Big Red One is a 48-minute documentary from 2005 that opens with the young stars (now 24 years older) doing their impressions of Fuller growling and barking orders with a gruff energy ("That was what it was like to be directed by Sam Fuller in The Big Red One") and concludes with a journey through the legend of Fuller's long lost original cut, the inspiration for the reconstruction, the process of searching for and restoring missing scenes, and the technical tools used in the reconstruction.
There are over 30 minutes of further deleted scenes, including an eight-minute "French Vichy" scene that was an entire subplot originally shot for the opening sequence but unused in the reconstruction (for editorial as much as technical reasons). Two scenes are shown in their rough form (Sam Fuller's voice is heard in one) and there are comparisons of the Amphitheatre Cavalry Battle and the "Tank Baby" scenes from before and after the reconstruction. All are presented with commentary by reconstruction editor Bryan McKenzie and post-production supervisor Brian Hamblin (which is, frustratingly, not an optional track--you can't view the scenes without their commentary). They explain why some scenes were not incorporated and point out the differences in extended reconstruction scenes.
It also features the complete Fuller-produced 30 minute promo reel which tantalized film historians with footage cut out of the original release and inspired the reconstruction project when it was discovered in 1999, Richard Schickel's 1973 documentary The Men Who Made the Movies: Samuel Fuller, the archival War Department documentary The Fighting First, a still gallery, original TV and radio spots and trailer and the 2004 reconstruction trailer.
The disc is available as a stand-alone single-disc Blu-ray release and as part of the four-disc set World War II Collections: Invasion Europe, along with the feature films The Dirty Dozen, which also stars Lee Marvin, and Where Eagles Dare with Richard Burton and young Clint Eastwood, both on Blu-ray, and the documentary George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin, which is included as a "bonus DVD."
By Sean Axmaker
