When even a competent film director gets to make a movie based on personal experiences of historic events a great film is often the result.  Oliver Stone made Platoon based on his own experience ‘coming of age’ in the hell of Vietnam where he served as a LRRP.  Of all the Stone films, love ‘em or hate ‘em Platoon resonates across the board.  The same can be said for Samuel Fuller a cigar chomping “tough guy” of a film director known for his hard boiled film noir and violent westerns.  In the Big Red One, Sam Fuller got the chance to make the movie he always wanted about his personal experiences in the Second World War as an infantryman with the Big Red One, the nickname of the US Army’s first infantry division.

The original theatrical release of The Big Red One had been savagely trimmed by producers which broke Fuller’s heart when it was released to theaters in 1980.  Despite cutting out many details in the movie it was still one of the classic films of World War II.  Sam Fuller died in 1997 and always spoke of restoring his original film, unfortunately he never lived to see it.  Last April (2005) we got to see this classic digitally restored on DVD with all the missing bits.  Samuel Fuller’s Big Red One The Reconstruction makes this classic war film even better with over 40 minutes of extra scenes.  Of course, the first time I saw the film at theaters I was too young to remember much of it, so picking up the Big Red One on DVD was a long awaited revisiting of a classic that would be much like seeing this film for the first time, all over again. 

The Big Red One stars Lee Marvin as simply “The Sergeant”, and four young soldiers of a first infantry division rifle squad.  Other young soldiers come and go throughout the various episodes of film, but they tend to die before the four get to know their names so by mid way through the film they stop trying.  Two of the fours survivors are played by Mark Hamill (easily Hamill's best movie outside of Star Wars) as a sensitive soldier who doesn’t want to have to kill and Robert Carradine is a cigar chomping writer and an overt embodiment of Sam Fuller himself.  The movie gives you a sense the wide scope of the war.  The squad goes from North Africa, the island of Sicily, Normandy and the forests of Germany.  At Normandy the restored footage shows us a D-Day invasion that comes close to portraying the stark terror of the same invasion depicted in Saving Private Ryan. 

The other notable factor of this film is the style.  This is above all a Sam Fuller movie, who is known for giving us the unexpected.  The obvious undertones are that of an anti-war film, but this is no sympathy laden, politically correct picture.  When Mark Hamill's character explains to the sergeant he can’t murder anyone for war, Marvin (The Sergeant) explains curtly that they don’t murder, they kill.  There are no flowery speeches in this film and that’s one of the things I appreciate.  Late in the film when Hamill’s character is overwhelmed by inhumanities he witnesses at the liberation of a concentration camp, he unloads an entire clip of ammo into a German soldier he finds hidden in one of the ovens ready to snipe whoever opens the door.  The Sergeant finds Hamill continuing to fire into the already dead soldier even though he’s run out of ammo.  In a lesser (perhaps modern) film the Sergeant might have tried to console Hamill, but here, Lee Marvin passes Hamill another clip.

The restoration process is well done, very little artifacts for a restoration of a 25 year old film.  The soundtrack is simply amazing, the 5.1 effects are very well done and surprisingly aggressive, used in almost every battle scene to give a sense of chaos.  The weapons fire seems very realistic, the crack of those M-1 Garrand rifles sounds like a heavy .30 caliber rifle should, each round eloquently grazes the subwoofer.  The musical score was completely restored and much of it recreated from scratch, it sounds fresh and new without being too modern and out of place. 

Special features

A secondary factor at best when deciding on a DVD purchase, but this one’s got some good ones.  A list of alternate scenes plod through scenes that weren’t used in the reconstruction and they explain why, good insight if you’re interested.  The real stand out is the ‘The Men Who Made the Movies” a close up of Sam Fuller’s career made in a true film student approach.  This documentary goes through his career and really shows what Fuller made in his life and what he was thinking with many of the important scenes in his work.  I haven’t seen a documentary on film this good since watching Martin Scorsese’s Il Mio viaggio in Italia.

• Encoding: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only.)
  
• Format: Dolby, Widescreen, Special Edition, Color
  
• Rated: Unrated
• Studio: Warner Home Video
• DVD Release Date: May 3, 2005
• Run Time: 163
  
• DVD Features:
  • Available subtitles: English, Spanish, French
  • Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 5.1), French (Dolby Digital 5.1)
  • Commentary by reconstruction producer Richard Schickel
    
  • Over 40 minutes of added footage
    
  • Alternate scenes
    
  • Anatomy of a Scene: Watch the director at work and examine the before/after restoration comparisons
    
  • New documentary The Real Glory: Reconstructing The Big One
    
  • Profile: The Men Who Make the Movies: Samuel Fuller
    
  • War department film: The Fighting First
    
  • 1980 promo reel, theatrical trailer, and TV and radio spots
    
  • 2004 reconstruction trailer
    
  • Stills gallery
    
  • Number of discs: 2