“A fictional life based on a factual death.” So begins Sam Fuller’s sprawling WWII epic, “The Big Red One”. The film follows the first infantry brigade in a series of vignettes; from their landing in North Africa, to a battle in Sicily where they square off against snipers, to the blood-soaked beaches of Normandy for D-Day and on across Europe, finally ending in a Czech concentration camp.
This is Fuller’s autobiographical story, mostly un-sentimental, told with stark images and, surprisingly, lots of humour. The film was originally released in 1980, but had been heavily edited by Warner Bros. and was, to both the director and his critics, a disappointment.
What we have now, though still choppy in parts, restores nearly an hour to the film and gives it the epic weight needed for this film to work.
“The Big Red One”, perhaps more than any other war picture, gives you a sense of the life of a solider – not in small details, but in large brush strokes over the course of years. At nearly three hours, you feel like you are living this war along with the men. By the time we get to Normandy, only four of the original soldiers still survive, and we are told that they no longer bother to learn the names of replacement soldiers – it makes it too hard.
But even our four main characters exist more as soldiers than people. This is a film that resists at every turn the manipulation present in most war movies. There are no inspirational speeches from the general, no heroic acts of self-sacrifice. There is only war.
And all of this is present in Lee Marvin, the commanding officer, a character who is nearly impossible to imagine without a rifle slung over his solider.
As the film begins, we find Marvin on a French battlefield hours after WWI has ended. A German officer approaches him with the good news and Marvin kills the man, figuring it to be only a ploy. When he finds out the truth he takes it hard, a burden he carries with him through the rest of the film.
The sentiment is clear and repeated often: in war you don’t murder people; you kill them. This is the law of war and the only winners are survivors. The performances, from the likes of Mark Hamill (“Star Wars”) and Robert Carriadine (“Revenge of the Nerds”), tend to be a little over-the-top but it hardly matters.
This is not a film about characters; it is a film about action. In the end, this fictional life presents no moral position, only the vivid memory of a survivor.
The newly restored director’s cut of “The Big Red One” is playing at Cinema du Parc.
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