User Reviews

Newspaper writer Samuel Fuller, a combat soldier, relives his WWII experiences in the European Theater through the eponymous Big Red 1 the US Army First Infantry Division whose symbol is a large numeral 1 worn on the left shoulder patch. Lee Marvin, Mark Hammill, and Robert Carradine play the major parts with good support from Kelly Ward and Bobby Di Ciccio. The squad fights from North Africa to Sicily, Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany. The reconstruction adds continuity and elaborates on the scenes with quality additional footage rather than filler. In addition to all the combat you could want there is great dialog and several welcome moments of comic relief. The Big Red One is much improved by this positive reconstruction.

I had never seen the theatrical cut of The Big Red One.

By the time I became aware of the director Samuel Fuller (The Steel Helmet and Park Row being especially good), The Reconstruction was available on DVD.

As sometimes happens with a cinephile (especially a cinephile with a family), I bought the Special Edition DVD, and it sat on my shelf for years.

I finally watched the movie last night, and it was worth the wait. It was different than I expected (some really funny scenes), but even better than I expected. It has the best D-Day sequence this side of Saving Private Ryan.

It was action-packed and heart-wrenching.

When I first saw this film I gave it two stars because of the bad acting, lack of realism, and choppy scenes.

The Restoration version shows a little more of the reality of war, but it's still definitely a 1970s mentality film. There's one scene in which a soldier pulls a pin on a grenade in the dark, starting the 4-second fuse, tosses it up an embankment to a buddy, who tosses it up to the Sergeant (Lee Marvin), who tosses it up to Zab (Robert Carradine), who then tosses it up onto a German truck, causing an explosion that is much too spectacular for a grenade (like most films portray). Time from pin pull to detonation: 7 seconds. Real troops would have never done something like that. With the director and leading actor both being World War II combat veterans one would think that that scene would not have been shot, but it just goes to prove that it was more important back then to portray impossible heroics rather than realism.

In another scene, the squad comes under fire in Italy from a German with a sub-machine gun and they start to return fire. Then the director cuts to the squad aboard an LCI en route to the Normandy landings, with no resolution to the firefight. This is just one example of the choppy scene cuts that keep the viewer disoriented.

Near the end of the film, the squad is shown liberating a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in May 1945. The only German concentration camp in Czechoslovakia after 1943 was Terezín (Theresienstadt), which was liberated by the Soviets after the SS guards had fled.

If I was writing this review in the early 80s I might have given it a third star because this was the best you could expect from a World War II film during that time, and nobody would question the veracity of the concentration camp scene. Lee Marvin was one of the top action film stars, and Mark Hamill was famous because of Star Wars, and I was in my early teens, so this film would have appealed to me.

If you're a fan of the genre, you probably should watch the film because of how well-known it is, if you haven't seen it already. If you're looking for an accurate portrayal of war or combat, this is not a good example.