WWII Survival and Glory

Out of tune with the times when it was released in 1980 in a
truncated cut, Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One has now
been reconstructed by film critic and historian Richard Schickel,
with an additional 50 minutes of footage. Having shown at the New
York Film Festival, the movie is opening at Film Forum. Though epic
in its length and geographic scope, the episodic story of a World
War II infantry squad (the First Infantry Division, dubbed
“the Big Red One”) never falls prey to even an ounce of
inflated self-glorification. For Fuller, war is simply about
surviving. We’re plunked down with a pack of young soldiers
(among them, Mark Hamill and Robert Carradine), led by Lee Marvin
as the hard-bitten veteran Sergeant, as they move from North Africa
to Sicily to Omaha Beach to the liberation of a concentration camp.
Though other earlier Fuller movies may be tighter, more jolting
works overall, and this film’s narration seems unnecessary,
Fuller’s dream project is a one-of-a-kind, ramshackle
chronicle of unflagging energy. Conceived in the late 1950s, it
yokes some of this long-overlooked artist’s most outrageous,
off-the-cuff moments to a number of his greatest sequences.