The Big Red One (Fuller, 1980): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 5.50pm
This film is being shown in the Passport to Cinema season and will be introduced tonight by Dominic Power. The movie also screens at BFI Southbank on July 28th and 30th. Details here.
Chicago Reader review:
A heroic effort by critic Richard Schickel to reconstruct Samuel
Fuller's most ambitious feature--a semiautobiographical account of his
own fighting unit during World War II, severely truncated by
distributors when first released (in 1980). This isn't a director's cut,
but it's 50 minutes longer than the original release, with 15
previously missing scenes and 23 extensions of existing scenes supplied
from surviving footage, with Fuller's script and notes used as
guidelines. Starring Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, and
Bobby Di Cicco as well as Stephane Audran and Christa Lang (with a cameo
by Fuller himself), this multifaceted, earthy, and philosophical
reflection on war runs the gamut from realism to surrealism. What it
lacks in cohesion it more than makes up for in comprehensiveness, as it
follows Fuller's combat experience from North Africa to Sicily, France,
Belgium, Germany, and Czechoslovakia. It's a grand-style, idiosyncratic war epic, with wonderful poetic
ideas, intense emotions, and haunting images rich in metaphysical
portent. Packed with energy and observation, it is full of unforgettable,
spellbinding moments.
Jonathan Rosenabum
Here is the trailer.
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