Big Red One, The - The Reconstruction Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

"Factual Life based on actual death"

This is the restored version of Director Sam Fullers WW2 epic, the original was deemed too violent by the studio (Imagine, a violent war film…..tsskk) and cut to ribbons so it made no narrative sense. Original material has been added by a restoration team and now this is a film with the resolute stamp of empirical authority. Fuller fought in WW2, taking part in the Omaha beach landings and his minds eye view of proceedings lends this film a veracity few can match.

The main characters are all part of the 1st Infantry, the “Big Red One” of the films title, named after their insignia,. Ex Marine Lee Marvin in his last great role plays the gruff Sergeant along with Privates Griff, Zab Vinci and Johnson. Griff is played by Mark Hamill at the peak of his “Star Wars” fame. We follow them from North Africa to Sicily onto Omaha Beach and through Europe until they liberate a Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia. The film is a series of intense battle sequences, interspersed by periods of quiet reflection, jokey banter and the cold dread of death.

There is grim humour in the script, but also poetry and understated emotion. Modern films about war are now made by people referencing other war movies and while The Big Red One doesn’t have anything as viscerally shocking as the opening sequence of “Saving Private Ryan”, unlike that jingoistic preposterous movie it rings true with an almost documentary realism.

Messy War Film

For anyone who isn’t aware, the stress is on the ‘one’ of the title, not any other word, as the action centres on the US Army First Division, (five members of it specifically) who wear a red 1 on their uniforms. Apparently director and writer Sam Fuller carried this story around with him for several years, following his experiences as an American GI in WWII, and it’s dead obvious - it’s extremely episodic, and doesn’t really have a focus beyond “this happened, then this happened, and then we did this and talked about this”. With one exception, perhaps, that being the journey taken by Mark Hamill’s character (the actor riding high in the middle of the Star Wars saga when this was made).

It begins with an assault on North Africa, where we are introduced to the unnamed sergeant played by Lee Marvin (seemingly in a totally different, higher-class film to all the other actors) and his four cocky comrades who just can’t get killed. From there they storm a beach, battle tanks and evade snipers in Sicily, then are involved in Omaha on D-Day and we follow them as they push on through Belgium, Germany and finally to the liberation of a Czech concentration camp. And really, that’s the story. It’s extremely episodic, and might have worked better as a mini-series (which, in my opinion, Das Boot didn’t when it was broken down).

There are some moments of fairly extreme violence and bloodiness, as would be expected from a war film, but lots of the killing is also done with relatively little gore, and swearing is minimal, which makes a change. There are some very affecting emotional notes too, mostly centred around Marvin’s character and how he relates to the children he comes across in particular - he treats them with respect and love, and lots of the film’s heart comes from these moments. But these are isolated incidents in a very messily-directed and poorly-structured film, in my opinion. Fuller makes some very odd editing decisions which did distract; if you’re going to make a “war against nature” picture, à la The Thin Red Line, then fair enough to include gorgeous shots of birds, animals etc. But that’s not what this film is about, so when a tense moment arrives and Fuller chucks in a shot of a pretty bunny rabbit in the snow, it doesn’t make sense. And the depiction of the inmates of the insane asylum was quite shocking by today’s standards; maybe that’s how it actually was when Fuller experienced it, I don’t know, but what you saw showed a terrible understanding of mental illness on the part of the director.

That said, the final sequence focussed around the concentration camp is rightly harrowing, and the actors pull it off well, considering they themselves fully knew of the horrors of the Holocaust when making the film in 1980, but had to play grunts with no idea what they would find when they opened certain doors in that camp. And Mark Hamill is key to this sequence; in the rest of the film, he doesn’t acquit himself particularly well in terms of acting (I really don’t rate him apart from in Empire and Jedi, when by some miracle he was able to pull off good performances), but he just about makes it work at the end.

We nearly turned it off after half an hour, and we would have missed some good moments. But there are much better war films around, ones not hampered by personal experience and a weak-willed editor.