Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One
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Sun 25 September 2005 // 20:00
(Samuel Fuller / 1980 / USA / 160 mins / Cert 15)
(Sun 25th / 8pm / £2)
By the time cinema's foremost pulp-poet came to make his magnum opus, he was considered by many to be all washed up. He hadn't made a film in almost ten years, and was seen as belonging to an earlier era of B-movie crime pictures that no longer had a place in the post-Jaws world of spectacle and horror. Fuller's films were primarily about character, about people. Often comic, always political he made films which, as a result of their modest budgets, could tackle ideas and themes considered too contraversial by the mainstream.
The Big Red One was planned as a comeback, though after advance previews signalled that audiences didn't respond well to the largely character based approach to telling a war story (largely based on his own experiences in North Africa), much of the film was cut, and the result was a box-office failure. Despite a successful period during the 1980s being championed by younger filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Tim Robbins and Jim Jarmusch, the glory days of Fuller's filmmaking were to be lost forever.
In 2004, film critic Richard Schickel restored this film to a new director's cut length of approximately 160 minutes. Using Samuel Fuller's production notes and the full-length, unexpurgated script, Schickel restored the footage that was forced to be cut by the studio upon its original 1980 release. Whilst still not a patch on the hard-bitten dynamite if films such as "The Steel Helmet" and "Shock Corridor", the film still managed to present the humanist side of war far more than a dozen "Saving Private Ryan"s could ever manage.
(Sun 25th / 8pm / £2)
By the time cinema's foremost pulp-poet came to make his magnum opus, he was considered by many to be all washed up. He hadn't made a film in almost ten years, and was seen as belonging to an earlier era of B-movie crime pictures that no longer had a place in the post-Jaws world of spectacle and horror. Fuller's films were primarily about character, about people. Often comic, always political he made films which, as a result of their modest budgets, could tackle ideas and themes considered too contraversial by the mainstream.
The Big Red One was planned as a comeback, though after advance previews signalled that audiences didn't respond well to the largely character based approach to telling a war story (largely based on his own experiences in North Africa), much of the film was cut, and the result was a box-office failure. Despite a successful period during the 1980s being championed by younger filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Tim Robbins and Jim Jarmusch, the glory days of Fuller's filmmaking were to be lost forever.
In 2004, film critic Richard Schickel restored this film to a new director's cut length of approximately 160 minutes. Using Samuel Fuller's production notes and the full-length, unexpurgated script, Schickel restored the footage that was forced to be cut by the studio upon its original 1980 release. Whilst still not a patch on the hard-bitten dynamite if films such as "The Steel Helmet" and "Shock Corridor", the film still managed to present the humanist side of war far more than a dozen "Saving Private Ryan"s could ever manage.