The Big Red One: The Reconstruction

Iconoclastic film director Samuel Fuller spent decades nurturing his dream project, a movie about his experiences in the Army's First Infantry Division during World War II, but it wasn't until 1979 that he was able to finally bring the picture before the cameras. Unfortunately, Fuller was forced by ...more

Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One is generally well regarded, but it does suffer from excess ambition; it wants to examine the second world war's every oddity, irony, combat philosophy and battlefront (excepting the Pacific). And so it was that character development and plot continuity were sacrificed when the studio cut it to under two hours, prompting Fuller to publicly air his disappointment. Six years after Fuller's death, Richard Schickel set out to correct that via The Big Red One: ...more