The Bigger Red One
Stars, restorers discuss the movie and the story behind the new version of Fuller's film
Just before the 25th anniversary of Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One, a team of preservationists led by critic Richard Schickel set about restoring the film long after its heavily truncated initial release. Last month at the New York Film Festival, a panel gathered to discuss the film, with the presenters including Schickel, Fuller's widow Christa, stars Robert Carradine, Mark Hamill and Bobby DiCicco, and the widow of star Lee Marvin. Christa Fuller condensed the 30-odd year genesis of the film effortlessly.
"He was initially supposed to do the film in the '50s with John Wayne," said Fuller, whose own role as a treacherous countess had been cut from the first release. Instead, The Big Red One ended up getting made three decades later with Lee Marvin, and mention of the actor's name led to an intricate and overlapping discussion of what he brought to the film. "Sam said that, in retrospect, Lee Marvin was a much better choice as the Sergeant than Wayne," Schickel explained, "because Wayne carried certain expectations of stepping forward and blowing away anyone who stood in his military way, and Lee brought a much more authentic sense of character to that role. Taking nothing away from Wayne, of course. But I find it Lee's greatest performance in a film."
One thing Marvin brought to the role was firsthand experience. As Robert Carradine recalls, "He took [the principal cast] out to a rifle range to learn how to handle an M-1 with live ammo, so that we could mimic the recoil accurately while filming the movie. I remember Lee taking a gun and unloading an entire clip about a foot-and-a-half from where we were standing, and he said, 'That's combat.' "
Marvin's widow Pamela was more circumspect. "Lee was a Marine in the Second World War, so he brought all that experience that he had in four years in the USMC and having been badly wounded on the island of Saipan," she said. "Sam brought his own experiences with the real-life Big Red One, and the two men brought all that to the film. They'd seen these horrors of war, and they wanted to talk about it." According to Hamill, "it was like a living history, to have these two men bringing their experiences to the film. Lee actually re-creates the way he was shot in the South Pacific in the movie."
As a result, the film is both haunted and graced by the dual histories of Fuller and Marvin. Bobby DiCicco noted that "both of these men, more so Lee than Sam, would just go somewhere else, and you would catch them in these moments, and what ghosts they were dealing with. There were a lot of poignant moments on those sets."
In the 24 years between the film's initial release and this restoration, plenty has changed in the movie industry. But even today, the quest to restore a film can be as fraught with peril as any action/adventure programmer. "We knew going into it that Warner Bros. had in a vault in Kansas City about 70,000 feet of camera negative, plus about 112 reels of recorded location sound," Schickel explained. "We had Sam's shooting script, and stuff would drift in from Kansas City, a few reels at a time, and we just kept the faith, saying, 'It's got to be there.' We have in the film 24 entirely new scenes, and 30-odd scenes where we have substantially augmented what exists. It's as close as anyone can come to what Sam intended. We can't say it's the director's cut, but we have representations of virtually everything that's in the shooting script."
Even the most permanent and enduring examples of film art have only a few decades before decomposition takes its toll, leaving film enthusiasts to rely on new ways of preserving cinema history. What Schickel and his team have done with The Big Red One is not so much a reconstruction as a resurrection. As Mark Hamill put it, "Now you can see what it is that we all signed up to do."
—Jason Shawhan
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