Samuel Fuller's epic WWII film The Big Red One premiered over the weekend at the NY Film Festival, and has been expanded by 40 minutes in what the New York Times calls...

I remember wanting to see this one when I was a kid, just because it co-starred Mark Hamill.

Heck, I STILL want to see it for that reason.

(But not JUST for that reason.)

Well, I'm still searching for release dates in theatres, but unfortunately I'm coming across dates that have recently passed. The most recent screening I have found (and one that I'm kicking myself for not knowing about because of its close proximity to me) was this past Saturday Oct. 9th, at the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Well, at least it is on the move, and the NY Film Fest screening wasn't an isolated event.

No listing on the Warner Brothers website, either for screenings or the DVD release.

I saw this at the NY Film Festival (my first time), and I was really excited. I wanted to like this film so much, but I didn't. To me, the film seemed more like a memoir of war, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but I just couldn't get into it. I wish there were stronger narrative to the film as opposed to episodic events in the film.

Note to Vancouverites -- this film is playing at the Pacific Cinematheque (just three blocks from my new home!) between Wednesday and the following Monday, March 2 - 7 (every night except Friday).

Excellent film for the big screen. Hope I get to see it again here.

Any news on the DVD release?

DFT is showing this all weekend. I think I'll stay downtown after church to see it on Sunday. I'm gonna make inquiries to the staff about DVD release as well if ther is nothing in the material provided.

Checking it out this evening. Read about it last spring in Film Comment, hoped I'd get a chance to see it. Very curious: will I find it the quasi-revelatory experience some see it as, or a rather corny plain old war movie? Sounds like one of the things to watch for is the kids.

Talk to you later, Rich. et al. (That is, if Al is going to see it?)

Possible unintended

Just got home from seeing it. Staff told me to email the DFT curator with these questions and I will to find this out. I'd like to see the DVD if for no other reason than to scour the credits that went by way too fast. For example, is that really Fuller manning a movie camera as part of a war documentation platoon? Seems to look like him.

Yeah, the kids are almost universally great! This makes me want to go through my old video of this to check the differences. Newer films like Private Ryan and We Were Soldiers capture the frenzy of battle way better. One must be solicitous of Fuller doing this on a low independent budget, particularly D-Day. This captures the hurry up and wait aspects of war narratives rather well though. The pace of the film as sometimes agonizingly slow. I don't remember this from the shorter version. This could be part of the comparison with some of the more frenetic modern war films on my part though.

Those who dislike war films and war in general will quite possibly like this film more than others. What do you say about that, Ron? I think that I like this film on the level of liking some of the more gnarly and personal films of Peckinpah. This is obviously a very personal film passionately done by an old fashioned film maker.

Rich Kennedy wrote:
: Those who dislike war films and war in general will quite possibly like this film more
: than others.

I'm planning on seeing it with a friend from church tomorrow, and he told me today that both Lee Marvin and Sam Fuller were war vets, which certainly ought to make this film interesting.

I have never seen a film DIRECTED by Sam Fuller, though I HAVE seen at least one film in which he co-starred, namely that modernized version of the Ruth story directed by Amos Gitai. (Interestingly enough, Gitai's own war film Kippur has been compared to Fuller's work, I believe.) But one anecdote about Fuller that I've long remembered, and which is perfectly appropriate for this thread, is this bit from Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of Saving Private Ryan and Small Soldiers:[indent]I'll never forget escorting the late Samuel Fuller, the much-decorated World War II hero and maverick filmmaker, to a multiplex screening of Full Metal Jacket, along with another critic, Bill Krohn, 11 years ago. Though Fuller courteously stayed with us to the end, he declared afterward that as far as he was concerned, it was another goddamn recruiting film -- that teenage boys who went to see Kubrick's picture with their girlfriends would come out thinking that wartime combat was neat. Krohn and I were both somewhat flabbergasted by his response at the time, but in hindsight I think his point was irrefutable. There are still legitimate reasons for defending Full Metal Jacket -- as a radical statement about what conditioning does to intelligence and personality, as a meditation about what the denial of femininity does to masculine definitions of civilization, as a deeply disturbing experiment in sprung and unsprung narrative, and perhaps as other things as well. But as a piece of propaganda against warfare, it's specious, providing one more link in an endless chain of generic macho self-deceptions on the subject.[/indent]As you can imagine, I am very curious to see what a war movie is like when it is made by someone who thinks Kubrick made a "recruiting film," of all things!

Less of a recruiting poster than FMJ, eh? Can't make any sense of that myself. TBR1 didn't glorify war, but it didn't convey a whole lot of horror either. I wasn't bored or anything, but still, not sure what the hubbub is about.

Curious to know which episodes weren't in the original release.

What was with the concentration camp kid? Why wouldn't he eat? What what was the bit about Lee Marvin's shoulders? Did he die or something? That was one thing about the film I found unsatisfying, perhaps because they were missing pieces of film to tell the story clearly, but there were gaps and unclarities here and there that didn't really seem intentional. I wonder.

Ron

What do you make of the crucified Jesus in the middle of the battlefield? Or the dead mother in the cart with the Holy Mother pictured on the side?

Possible
I'm not satisfied with using it as some sort of signifier. If the "Christ on the Cross" were such, would it not be profaned by using it tactically in the second "CotC" episode? I see it as a military reference point and a full circle plot device (many battlefields in France were recycled in WWII). Besides, I'm not sure that Fuller was into religious imagery, or even a religious man. Though I've seen a few of his pictures, I'm not really well schooled in his bio as I am with a few other directors.

As to the mother in the cart sequences I'd say that this is how rural Sicillians buried their dead so it would be logical to use it. Other than the fact that the kid seems to be in unusually good humor for such an enterprise (or maybe he's burned out and cynical from his experiences, it's a mystery), the stories that evolve from this encounter are some of the more delightful and suspenseful in the film.

I tend to percolate up more insights either in the next day or so, or in discussion of a film immediately afterwards. Some of my feelings now are better understood. I'd say that the episodic nature with such gaps as Ron has mentioned is the prime reason for my not being highly favorable to the film.

I'd like to know what prompted Schickle and his team to pick the additions they picked as opposed to so many others. A.O.Stark's review for NYT back in October 2, '04 was reprinted for this film. DFT's custom for each film they exhibit is to reprint something contemporaneous to the initial release of what they exhibit.
It refers to the fact that Fuller made a four and a half hour film for Warner Bro.s and agreed to the cuts to just under two hours (piecing together other fragments of information I've gleaned of the "reconstruction", WB seems to have forced cuts on him and he must have agreed over a barrell just to get the film to the screen). That means there is a lot of material still in the vault. From the narration I therefore deduced that the concentration camp kid did die soon after dropping his apple. Abbreviated signifier of the many kids soldiers tried to save after their liberation from camps? Maybe. Not a well executed sequence IMO. There is a lot of that among the episodes.

The best things about the film are Marvin's sardonic and fatherly performance and the commeraderie of the sargeant (Marvin) and his "four horsemen of the Apocolypse". I find the survival of the four horsemen to be at times arbitrary and convenient in a way that makes the story somewhat affected. Marvin's character seems to have an effective homocide "on/off" switch. He has a taste for the knife that masks the fact that sometimes a gunshot would not be a liability in a particular situation. In the end, some episodes are excellent, some tedious for me.

I will say that I didn't find anything tedious. But neither was it aesthetically brilliant, or deeply affecting. So I'm not sure what that leaves to mark it as "great."

I am thinking that perhaps the film's greatest distinctive is its matter-of-factness. It feels like a series of war stories, reminiscences, neither explained, sentimentalized or moralized. "This happened, and it was strange: I don't know why that kid did that." And "One time this bunch of guys did such and such..."

And yes, I agree, Lee Marvin was strong, and the scenes with him with the kids very nice.

Yeah, I really liked the matter-of-factness, too -- and the way the film highlights the absurdities of the various situations, yet still treats even the absurdities in a matter-of-fact way ("It would be bad for public relations if we killed the insane." "But it's good for public relations if we kill the sane?" "That's right."). But parts of it felt just a little too pulpy: that scene with the countess, that scene with the gay doctor (though Lee Marvin did have a nice punchline...), etc. Moments like that weren't exactly realistic, or matter-of-fact, per se.

I haven't seen the film, but The Pinocchio Theory, a favorite blog of mine, has a pretty interesting write-up on it. Makes me curious to see it. Here's an excerpt:

That's an interesting paragraph. There are some other interesting nods to homoeroticism, too -- like when the soldiers are trying to sleep, and one says "Stop poking me with your rifle," and the other soldier says "That isn't my rifle," and the first soldier ... doesn't do anything.

BTW, there's a scene of Sam Fuller himself, playing a war documentarian who asks everyone to smile and wave. I thought that was an interesting contrast to Francis Ford Coppola's cameo in Apocalypse Now, which came out just a year earlier, in which Coppola tells soldiers NOT to look at the cameras.

The countess scene seemed odd, to me. Perhaps because the German soldier through-line was underdeveloped, and then we got an extended scene, and its focus wasn't even on the soldier himself?

But the gay doctor bit actually fits with the "matter of factness", for me. I can see such a thing having happened, and a war vet telling about it in just such a "can you believe it?" and rather embarassed (but too tough to admit embarrassment) way.