If you missed the theatrical release of Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One: The Reconstruction last fall, now is your chance to see it on DVD. Along with Kino's Edison box set, it's my favorite DVD of the year so far. In 1980, Fuller saw his film butchered and hacked down to two hours for general theatrical release. In 2004, Film critic/historian Richard Schickel spearheaded an effort to get Fuller's magnum opus restored to something closer to the director's original vision. Fuller boasted that the film should have run four hours, but Schickel discovers that two hours and 42 minutes does the trick quite nicely. Lee Marvin stars in one of his finest performances as a crusty sergeant who leads a platoon of dogfaces (Mark Hamill among them) around the European countryside during World War II. There's no real plot, just a series of incidents loosely based on Fuller's own experiences, but they range from comical to clever to heartbreaking to downright awe-inspiring. I loved the original, but this new cut is a true masterpiece, and one of the two or three greatest war pictures ever made. Warner Home Video's new DVD comes with a slew of wonderful extras, both on the restoration and on the making of the film itself.
| :: posted by Jeffrey M. Anderson, 5/03/2005 | Comments (0) Links to this post |
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