ESFS Movie of the Week - "The Big Red One" + Sneak Previews - "The Battle of Algiers"

In many ways, "The Big Red One" feels like the culmination of the two earlier Fuller war pictures. This movie was Fuller's white whale for several decades - it's his most personal movie (he was a soldier in the First Infantry during WWII, and the film contains numerous biographical elements), based on his own novel, and he nearly made it with Warner Brothers in the 1960's. It's more sprawling than the 1950's war movies, yet no less compact and focused on the psychological mechanics of a group of soldiers waiting for certain death. The film even dramatizes a line from "The Steel Helmet" about an officer leading a charge onto the beaches of Normandy.

So why do I feel that "The Big Red One", while fascinating and filled with bravura sequences, is the least of the three Fuller films we've watched? Curiously enough, I feel that shooting the film on location (as opposed to the in-studio shoots of "Fixed Bayonets!" and "The Steel Helmet") robbed the film of a crucial "realism". The more claustrophobic sets of the earlier films gave those films a raw intensity lacking in "The Big Red One", which too often struggles to make epic battles look like they weren't shot on a shoestring.

A bigger problem is that the four soldiers that we follow from their first assignment in North Africa to their liberation of a Czechslovakian death camp fail to compel us. Even if Robert Carradine had never gone to make "Revenge of the Nerds", he still would have been a tepid substitute for Sam Fuller as the cigar-chomping narrator (and is so often the case, the narration reduces rather than elucidates the material). None of the other three soldiers engage us on a personal level (including Mark Hammil as a baby-faced version of Richard Basehart's coward from "Fixed Bayonets!") and their performances lack the gnashing brio of the 1950's films. Even Lee Marvin - playing a version of Gene Evans' snarling anti-hero - plays it a little too laid-back.

That said, "The Big Red One" is Sam Fuller on a grand scale, and the nearly three-hour-long Reconstructed version gives him ample space to indulge in his penchant for savage poetry, bizarre contradictions, and cruel coincidence. In this longer, R-rated version, he also gets to link the penetrative violence of war and the sexual appetite of young men much more graphically. It also gives a much larger part to the Nazi officer who shadows Marvin throughout the war, and we can see how easily the two could switch places.

Still, I can't help but wonder if I made a mistake watching the Reconstructed version first; if someone had never seen "Apocalypse Now", I would strongly dissuade them from watching the Redux cut before seeing the original. I can't be certain if the new scenes expand the original material or simply dilute the effect of the theatrical cut.

Like I said, "The Big Red One" has one daring sequence after another, most of them trampling all over the line between the sublime and the ridiculous. In that sense, it has to have been a strong influence on Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds". It may be that three hours of Fuller is a bit much, considering that this a filmmaker who, in the judgment of David Thomson, "has dealt with every major phase of American experience and returned with the conclusion that the world is a madhouse where ferocity alone survives."

GRADE: B.

Here is the Sam Fuller cameo from "Pierrot le Fou":



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Have a great weekend! Here is a preview for next week's film, Gillo Pontecorvo's "The Battle of Algiers":