The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (Two-Disc Special Edition)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Howard Delman, Joseph Clark (II), Ken Campbell, Robert Carradine, St?phane AudranBrand: Warner Brothers
Primary Contributor: Marvin, Lee
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language); French (Original Language); German (Original Language); Italian (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 163 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-05-03
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Warner Home Video
Movie Reviews of The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Movie Review: A Solid WWII Movie Which Went From Good To Very Good
Summary: 4 Stars
This "reconstructed" DVD, a version that came out several years ago, adding 49 minutes to the original 1980 movie is a very good one. The "old" version was good,too, but this newer version makes the film even better.
For men - and that's who will primarily watch this movie because it's a guy's flick with no romance and no women leads - this keeps the action coming, but without overdoing it. You can different kinds of action scenes, too, not just people shooting at one another.
I also appreciated the photography. It's a good visual movie. The added footage looked sharper and clearer than the previously shown, but either way it was nicely filmed and directed. Of course, the director is the famous Sam Fuller, who did a number of tough film noirs, among other things.
Speaking of tough, the person who makes this movie a notch above average is Lee Marvin. He is just excellent as the tough-on-the-outside-but-soft-hearted underneath commanding officer, known only as "The Sergeant." With his deep voice and weathered face, The language was much milder in here than you find in more modern films, although it can be crude in a few spots. There are no f-words, for example.
The story with narration by one of the soldiers, tells of Marvin and his handful of men who travel and do battle from North Africa to Sicily, then Italy, the beaches of Normandy on D- Day and into Germany in addition to a few other memorable stops such as "an insane asylum."
It's long, but I never found it boring and the men never stay too long in one spot.
Summary of The Big Red One - The Reconstruction (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Sam Fuller's The Big Red One was already one of the best films of 1980, despite the fact that the version released to theaters ran barely half as long as the director's cut. Fuller had been America's ballsiest B-movie auteur, an ex-newspaper reporter of the hardnosed breed who made fiercely personal, radically stylized, and politically outspoken films between the early '50s (The Steel Helmet, Pickup on South Street) and the early '60s (Shock Corridor). The Big Red One was his long-dreamt-of account of World War II as experienced by his own squad of the 1st Infantry Division, USA, from the first shot fired (by a dead man, on the coast of North Africa) to the last (in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia).Even in the studio-truncated version, there was no shortage of astonishing moments and sequences: the squad choking on dust in a bat-filled cave in North Africa as German tanks clatter past the entrance; Fuller's cold-blooded distillation of the D-Day slaughter on Omaha Beach, with a wrist watch on a dead arm in the surf marking time as the water slopping over it grows redder; the rifle squad delivering a Frenchwoman's baby in a German tank on a battlefield full of corpses; a commando-like raid on Nazi troops bivouacked in a Belgian insane asylum. A quarter-century later, film critic Richard Schickel and Warner Bros. executive Brian Jamieson succeeded in restoring 15 never-seen sequences and fleshing out 23 others to create The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, a "new" film nearly an hour longer.
Above all, BR1: The Reconstruction has a rhythm the 1980 cut lacked. The arc of years, battles, and battlegrounds is so much more satisfying. Greater play is given to Fuller's feeling for children caught up in the sidewash of history and atrocity. And the 2004 cut puts sex back into the movie, not orgiastically but as a fact of life and a rarely forgotten driving force. We can see now that Fuller touched, bluntly and shockingly, on the phenomenon of infiltrators--English-speaking German warriors who donned GI khaki and moved among their enemies waiting for a chance to strike.
It's also apparent, as it was not in 1980, that Lee Marvin as the eternal Sergeant leading the young squad is magnificent. This was Marvin's greatest role, rivaled only by his walking dead man in John Boorman's Point Blank. Just beneath the masterly implacability, we glimpse the tenderness, rage, dark humor, experience, and wisdom beyond guilt that have enabled him to survive, to preserve others and to soldier on. His performance, like Fuller's film, is a masterpiece. --Richard T. Jameson
"The real glory of war" Samuel Fuller said "is surviving." A decorated combatant with the famed U.S. First Infantry in WWII Fuller survived. His 1980 film version of his war experiences did not until now. Working with 70000 feet of vault materials and Fuller's shooting script critic/filmmaker Richard Schickel heads a reconstruction that adds over 40 minutes and transforms a truncated but admired war film into an epic masterwork. Lee Marvin in a richly layered performance now revealed as one of his finest stars as the sergeant of peach-fuzzed riflemen fighting from North Africa to Normandy and across Europe. The film is the squad's combat diary war as it's fought and sweated and bled and maybe survived. Running Time: 163 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE UPC: 012569705906
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