"The Big Red One"

The only sad thing about the gloriously reconstructed version of Sam Fuller's World War II film "The Big Red One" is that Fuller isn't around to see it.

By Charles Taylor

Nov 12, 2004 | If Lee Marvin's face were not already part of American movie iconography, the reconstructed version of Sam Fuller's "The Big Red One" would place it there. Fuller takes a face we think we know, a pulp, tough-guy version of D.H. Lawrence's description of the essential American soul, "hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer," and brings out the other qualities -- "the love, the democracy" -- which Lawrence said were just "by-play" in the American character. They are qualities most of Marvin's other movie roles left out.

You think of Marvin tossing a pot of boiling coffee in Gloria Grahame's face in "The Big Heat" (and having Grahame toss it back in his face later in the movie), or gut-shot and going after mob boss Ronald Reagan in "The Killers," or standing as imposing and impervious as King Kong while Angie Dickinson wears herself out slapping him senseless in "Point Blank." You don't think of Marvin tenderly accepting the flowers a little Italian girl has woven into his combat helmet, or nursing a young boy he's liberated from a concentration camp, as he does in Fuller's movie.

Our "Lee Marvin" is too tough for that. Doesn't his face prove it? That long mug, with the sunken cheeks and hard jaw, the nose and full lips seemingly the only flesh on it. It's the kisser of a hangdog sociopath and at first glance it's immobile, impossibly hard. And yet all through "The Big Red One," Marvin's face is riven by tremors of guilt, fear, pride, disgust and fatherly concern -- as if his skin were made of rubberized granite.

Marvin will never be classed with Brando or Olivier. He didn't have the range or the ferocity. But as the American infantry sergeant shepherding a group of "dogfaces" through combat in the European theater during World War II, Marvin gives the kind of performance that is the essence of movie acting.

He connects with the four young actors playing his platoon -- Robert Carradine, Mark Hamill, Bobby Di Cicco and Kelly Ward -- but he's scaled his acting to the camera. Each gesture, each line reading, is precise, modest, on a pitch equal to the moment. Nothing sticks out -- not even that trademark purring snarl; you never see him "acting." But the smallest gradations of expression register large and clear on screen. Marvin is so convincing that by the end of "The Big Red One" you expect to encounter his face in a documentary or a book of photojournalism on the American soldiers who fought in World War II (as Marvin himself did, lying about his age to get into the Marines).

For Sam Fuller, "The Big Red One," based on his own experiences with the Army's 1st Infantry Division ("the Big Red One") in World War II, was something like a documentary. It was the project that obsessed him through most of his career. Even after he made it.

When Fuller finally got that chance to make the film in the late '70s, he was working with a budget that kept being scaled downward (it wound up being less than $4 million for the entire movie). In his marvelous, posthumously published autobiography, "A Third Face," he says that the final cut he turned in ran to four-and-a-half hours. Predictably, the movie was cut further before its release (though not by Fuller) and the version that opened in 1980 ran only 113 minutes. Until his death in 1997, Fuller wished that someone would restore the film to its original form.

The only sad thing about the new 158-minute cut spearheaded by the critic Richard Schickel is that Fuller isn't here to see it. The reconstruction premiered to a rapturous reception this past May at Cannes, and it plays in the New York Film Festival before its theatrical run starts in November. Based on Fuller's shooting script and notes, it may not be his four-and-a-half hour dream cut, but I can't imagine that Fuller wouldn't be thrilled by it. This "The Big Red One" is a complete work, coherent and forceful, though it fights its way to that distinction past a host of flaws. As the longest and biggest of Fuller's movies, it magnifies the essence -- good and bad -- of his work.

Next Page: Fuller spent his career looking for stories to "grab them by the balls"

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