"This is fictional life based on factual death" (The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (2 DVDs))

Name: hogsflesh

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Product:	The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (2 DVDs)
Date:	01.03.08 (43 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Well made, exciting and convincing

Disadvantages: Perhaps a bit too long

A review of the DVD.

In 1980 veteran director Sam Fuller's World War 2 movie, The Big Red One, was released. Based on Fuller's wartime experiences, it's a great film. But the version that was released was heavily cut down by the studio. In 2004 the reconstructed version, with almost an hour of restored material, was released. That's what you get on this DVD, and unlike the restored version of The Wicker Man, the extra footage is seamlessly integrated.

(Bizarrely, this did actually find itself on an early version of the video nasties list in the UK; that's not why I like it, though.)

We follow the fortunes of four young American riflemen and their older sergeant in the First Infantry Division (aka The Big Red One) as they go through the Second World War, from North Africa to Sicily to Normandy to Germany.

This film is almost a dry run for the likes of Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan, except that it's better. It doesn't have the same budget (the D-Day sequence doesn't compare favourably to Private Ryan) and the battle scenes don't have the ersatz CGI intensity that you get in Band of Brothers. But it also lacks the exaggerated sense of reverence that I find quite hard to take in the Spielberg projects, perhaps because Fuller was making a film about people he knew.

There's never any sense that the characters in the Big Red One are heroes, they're just ordinary guys trying to survive. In fact it's often quite callous in a way that would be unthinkable in a film made about World War 2 nowadays. It feels more relevant, more like a film about a current conflict - it doesn't turn the war into a museum piece like Spielberg does. Comparing the concentration camp scenes in this film and Band of Brothers is instructive; it takes a rather shallow artistic sensibility to fill the screen with prosthetic Holocaust victims, while Fuller's minimal details (probably a symptom of the low budget) are far more effective, leaving the actors' reactions to convey the horror of the situation.

The characters aren't really very clearly defined - the film isn't really about the people so much as what happens to them, so they can get away with not being fleshed out so much. But the actors do well with the parts (Mark Hamill plays one of the four; this is the only decent part I've ever seen him in that didn't involve Star Wars). The standout is Lee Marvin as the Sarge, giving an iconic performance as the ageing soldier, hard as nails but with a sliver of compassion underneath. You can't imagine him being anything other than a soldier, ever - he's an implacable character, and is realistically human and utterly archetypal at the same time. It's my favourite Lee Marvin role.

In lots of ways this feels rather old-fashioned. The battles are notably not bloody - there's very little visceral war horror, which occasionally makes the film feel a little anaemic, especially compared to something like Cross of Iron. The music is also quite traditional, orchestral work that could have fitted into a film made decades previously (one theme is a lot like the music from Errol Flynn's 1938 Robin Hood).

But the film's episodic structure seems quite modern, and the quirky details have enough oddball humour to feel quite contemporary. There's a lunatic asylum sequence that's very nice, and a Hitler youth sniper - two scenes that seem almost Buñuelian. The German soldier trying to snog Lee Marvin is a bizarre but inspired moment. I think the delivering-a-baby scene is perhaps going a bit far, though.

The restored film is slightly too long, clocking in at two and a half hours. There's a subplot about a German sergeant that takes up a lot of screen time without really repaying the audience. But this is a great movie, managing to be both epic and small at the same time; it's one of the great war films.

There are plenty of extras - a whole disk full, in fact. The film has a commentary from the man who oversaw the reconstruction, but as ever with those kinds of commentaries, I couldn't get through it all. There's a 45-minute documentary about the making of the film and the reconstruction. It contains some great anecdotes from the cast about Fuller and Lee Marvin, but gets bogged down in the reconstruction side of things (film reconstruction is important work, but I don't really care about the technical details).

There are various extra scenes that couldn't be fitted back into the film and a few shots where they've left in Fuller's audible direction - these are pretty cool. And there's a newsreel from the 40s about the real-life Big Red One which isn't quite as interesting as I'd hoped.

This can be had for less than a fiver on amazon. It's probably more of a bloke film than a date movie, but I think it's excellent.

Summary: Sam Fuller's classic war movie on DVD