Audience Rating: R (Restricted) Binding: VHS Tape EAN: 9780790734897 Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Original recording reissued, NTSC ISBN: 0790734893 Label: Warner Home Video Manufacturer: Warner Home Video Number Of Items: 1 Publisher: Warner Home Video Release Date: April 28, 1998 Running Time: 114 minutes Sales Rank: 28706 Studio: Warner Home Video Theatrical Release Date: 1980
Amazon.com: 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
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Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
Rating: - 3 stars out of 4
Though The Big Red One should not be mistaken for a realistic movie (the platoon somehow is involved in every single campaign of the war), the film moves very quickly for an 150+ minute movie and is consistently engaging; it's not a great movie, but it will stay with you.
Rating: - A true masterpiece!
No need to rehash plot points, but suffice it to say that The Big Red One - in all it's restored glory as Fuller intended - is a true masterpiece. One of the best WWII films ever made, with heartfelt performances and great action. Watching Mark Hammill empty a clip into the german soldier who took cover in the oven towards the end is one of the most chilling scenes in movie history - showing the reality of war and how brutal an affair it always is.
Disregard the idiotic complaints here...they are obviously written by kids with no appreciation for real film making. "Too long?" laughable. And for those who didn't find it believable, reality often is stranger than fiction - everything in the film is based on Fuller's own experiences.
Rating: - Fuller rocks
Having seen the original version of Sam Fuller's The Big Red One, years ago, on television, I could see glimmers of something far grander, but did not know what it could be, and given the callowness of my youth, even had I known what was missing, I could not have mentally interpolated back what the studio that financed the film, Lorimar, had cut. Fuller was basically a B film auteur, having made his reputation on 1950s and 1960s B war films (The Steel Helmet, Merrill's Marauders), and the famous- or infamous, Shock Corridor, yet The Big Red One, which was a fictionalization of his real World War Two experiences with the First Infantry Division of the U.S. Army, was, even in its bowdlerized version, considered his masterpiece. And it's a good solid war film. However, The Reconstruction version, adding in over forty-seven minutes on this two disk DVD version, is a truly great war film, and ranks only below Terrence ... Read More
Rating: - The Big Borrrring One
This movie SUCKED Lee Marvin leading a bunch dopey looking GIs ! It was confusing to follow . The Longest Day was cool but this movie with Marvin dressed as a arab in a German hospial . The movie was foolish from beginning to end !
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- 3 stars out of 4
- A true masterpiece!
- The Big Borrrring One
