Big Red One returns!

[Liam]

EVERY director has a dream project and for Sam Fuller it was The Big Red One. The legendary, tough-talking filmmaker had served with distinction in the Second World War. He saw action in North Africa, marched into Sicily, crawled through the bullets and bloodshed at Omaha Beach during the D-Day landings and helped liberate a Nazi death camp in Czechoslovakia.

A member of the 16th regiment of the US army’s 1st Division, he received the Bronze Star, Silver Star and Purple Heart. He knew war from intimate, frontline experience and wanted to make a film that captured the chaos and tedium of it and one that also honoured his fallen comrades.

The chance to make The Big Red One finally arrived in the late 1970s when Fuller, Lee Marvin and a cast of relative unknowns journeyed to Israel and Ireland to film what should have been the crowning achievement of his career.

As the director of films like Shock Corridor, I Shot Jesse James and Pickup on South Street, Fuller had been out of favour with American financiers and Hollywood studios in the 1970s. The Big Red One was his comeback and his last hurrah. Legend has it that his personal cut of the film ran to four and a half hours. A running time of nearer to three hours would seem more realistic. Just before its release, the film was savagely chopped down to under two hours by the distributor and has consequently carried a reputation as a blighted masterpiece.

Until his death in 1997, Fuller always hoped that one day the missing footage might be restored and his version of the film would finally see the light of day.

It may have taken a little longer than expected, but a restored version of The Big Red One has finally emerged and will be screened next weekend at the Film Festival. It now runs close to two hours and 40 minutes, restoring eight sequences not in the original print, including appearances by Fuller as a combat cameraman and his wife, Christa, playing a German countess.

It seems fitting that the film is screening at Edinburgh, as Fuller was a repeat visitor to the Festival and mentions it fondly in his autobiography. As his career dimmed in America, his reputation soared in Europe as an uncompromising talent. In 1965, he appeared in Jean-Luc Godard’s Pierrot le Fou uttering his famous dictum: "Film is like a battleground; love, hate, action, violence, death... in one word - emotion."

He became a familiar figure in his later years, making acting appearances for Dennis Hopper, Steven Spielberg and Wim Wenders.

Fuller returned to Edinburgh in 1982 for a premiere of his powerful anti-racist drama White Dog, the last American film that he directed. He was not easy to interview. Not because he had nothing to say; on the contrary, it was difficult to keep him on the subject.

"Ask me anything," he would bark, inviting you over with a commanding wave of the king-size cigars that were a trademark. He would be off and running, galloping from memories of the Cold War, skirmishes with John Wayne, reflections on Richard Widmark and much, much more. He thought in headlines and spoke as if he were dictating copy.

The slightest thing gave him an idea for another movie. He was simply irrepressible. I recall his belief that Edinburgh would make a wonderful location for a chase movie. "I can see it all now," he growled as he started to sketch on a napkin. "You start off with two cars roaring up to the castle. There’s a shoot-out on the esplanade. A chase. Someone disappears. You see them climbing down the rock face. A bullet rings out…"

One of the few things he didn’t touch on so readily was what he had experienced during the Second World War. He seemed to believe that unless you had been there yourself, there was no way to explain it properly. "There’s no way you can portray war realistically, not in a movie nor in a book," he later wrote.

"You can only capture a very, very small aspect of it. If you really want to make readers understand a battle, a few pages of your book would be booby-trapped. For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you’d have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen."

Fuller didn’t position snipers in cinemas but he did pour his heart and soul into The Big Red One, hoping to create something that would stand alongside All Quiet on the Western Front as a lasting statement on the hell of war and the strange glory of surviving.

A quarter of a century after it was completed, we finally have a chance to see if he succeeded.

The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, UGC, Saturday, 2pm

[Reb]

Liam

I finally saw part of that movie (the original) recently and it was so bad I didn't know whether to laugh or throw tomatoes at the screen.

It was like watching that goofy old TV series "Combat" - one scene had a bunch of Germans playing dead (around a knocked out post war American tank with crosses on it.) This fooled the Americans - most of whom still acted like rookies after three campaigns.

I turned it off at that point. Any soldier can tell a dead man from a breathing person - dead bodies look so different that there is just no missing it. (not to mention the fact that 'old' soldiers get that way by being careful - bodies without holes in them attract gun fire - as an experienced guy told me when I was a rookie, "Shoot 'em till it shows")

I found that scene typical of the movie - which even made Omaha beach look tedious and yes, silly.

The guy may be a vet - but he ain't much of a film producer.

cheers
Reb

[Nibelung]

Well I kinda liked that movie...when I was around 10 But I ask you again; do you think that people making those movies think that every viewer would be a Reb or a Nibelung? If they make silly movies, so be it...I guess we'll just have to wait for the perfect WW2 movie a little longer.

best,
Nibelung

[Reb]

Nibelung

Well - I always feel that since excellence is possible - why not go after it? In the case of Big Red One I hope that was not their goal - it would be too embarrassing to contemplate!

cheers
Reb

[Liam]

I have to be honest - it does seem a very artificial kind of war movie (too many cliches for one thing), but anything with Lee Marvin in it is worth watching!

[Reb]

Liam

I have to agree about Lee Marvin. A great guy with much screen prescence. He was also a Marine on Iwo Jima.

But he did get stuck in some lemons - Dirty Dozen comes to mind. BRO was really just silly - an given the casualty stats for 1 Div - the chance of most of a squad surviving to the end of the war were almost zero - they had something like 200 % turnover in the rifle companies.

Marvin used to have a tv show years ago in the States called "M Squad" which I watched religiously - there was always some shootin'!

His classic line was in the Professionals when he told a guy "I'm a bastard because my parents weren't married - but you're a self made man!"

cheers
Reb

[Hawk]

One more thing about the movie, which is really a stretch, is the soldier played by Mark Hamill. The sole purpose of this guy was to reflect the trauma of finding the concentration camp. If you recall, he never fire a shot since his first action in Africa, you can not trust your life to a guy who is not willing or able to shot at the enemy, and the movie kept doing it for 3 years.

[Reb]

Hawk

Yep - in the search for fake drama the producers managed to miss all the real drama of the many campaigns in which 1 inf div was involved.

Even D-Day at Omaha beach seemed kind of dull!

cheers
Reb

[Thomhasj]

One more thing about the movie, which is really a stretch, is the soldier played by Mark Hamill. The sole purpose of this guy was to reflect the trauma of finding the concentration camp. If you recall, he never fire a shot since his first action in Africa, you can not trust your life to a guy who is not willing or able to shot at the enemy, and the movie kept doing it for 3 years.

Why shoot when you wield a lightsaber??


No serious now... I thought the movie wasn't that bad. Since I don't give much about realism (I appreciate it when it's there, but if it isn't - I still can enjoy that movie), I thought the movie was quite nice to watch. Maybe it is a bit 'silly' but 'Perfection cannot be achieved in an unperfect world"

[Tom Houlihan]

Y'know, there's a new book out, about the 18th Infantry, one of the Big Red One's regiments. It's entitled American Iliad, from Aberjona Press. I'm reading it now, and it's pretty good![/i]

[Hawk]

Why shoot when you wield a lightsaber??

I wonder how he would have handled not been hit by a MG42, would the bullets bounce or disintegrate.

[101stDoc]

the chance of most of a squad surviving to the end of the war were almost zero - they had something like 200 % turnover in the rifle companies.

1st ID is a unit I am involved in research on.

There is a great, and actually pretty accurate article that appeared in Yank magazine towards the end of the war. THey interview quite a few members of various units within the division, and it was no surprise that many companies had literally so few of the original North Africa landers left that you could count them on your hands (sometimes even on one hand).

Doc

[101stDoc]

I have seen a few cuts of this movie over the years.

There is one cut that I believe has ppeared on occassion on stations like HBO.

The guy that is WIA in Sicily when he steps on the mine has at least one of his testicles blown off. The Sarge (Marvin) picks one of them up and gives one of his "witty" remarks to the wounded solider.

Bleh.

Doc

[Reb]

Doc

Ouch! That's the wound that makes men carry pistols or an extra grenade. They should have castrated the script writer and see if he thought that was funny...

cheers
Reb