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The Big Red One

Screening: Monday 19 March, 6:00pm

The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller, USA 1980)

The newly restored version of Fuller’s career topping epic, painstakingly reconstructed by film critic and historian Richard Schickel. Steely Lee Marvin in a career-topping performance plays the grizzled, cynical leader of four young soldiers, members of "The Big Red One," as the First Infantry Division was known. From their landing in North Africa in 1942 through the last battles in Europe, the film draws on Fuller’s experience of the Second World War. "I decided the film should be a very intimate story," Fuller said, "where the heart was exposed, the brain bared, the private emotion stripped to the bone."

Seemingly old-fashioned when first released after such Vietnam films as Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter, the film’s garish, nightmarish sense of American innocents just trying to stay alive in a hostile, chaotic world suddenly seems more apropos to the Iraq War. The hallucinatory battle footage of the D-Day landing, obviously an influence on Saving Private Ryan, is even more powerful in its elaborated form, and a restored sequence in a Nazi-run asylum in Belgium reveals Fuller in full auteur mode, nodding to an early work of his (Shock Corridor).

The emotional amplitude of the new version, emphasizing the motif of abandoned children — "the first victims of war," according to Fuller — is far greater; with fifteen new episodes added, and more than twenty expanded, the film is funnier, weightier, sadder, and there is now no question that Lee Marvin’s performance is one of his greatest. What was hailed in its original truncated form as "a constantly arresting and appallingly powerful cinematic dream, laconic and hard-boiled and hideous and memorable, a war movie by way of Raymond Chandler" (Jay Scott, The Globe and Mail) is now less laconic but all the more memorable. As star Robert Carradine says about the restored version: "It is now light years beyond what it was. It’s like night and day."

Written by Fuller, Photographed by Adam Greenberg. With Lee Marvin, Mark Hamil, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, Kelly Ward. (35mm, Colour, 158 mins, M violence)

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