“When I enter his suite at the Plaza, he’s finishing lunch, expressing his regret about missing Godard in Cannes, remarking on the absurdity of prizes at film festivals, asking me what Soho News and Soho are. (The one he knows about is in London—he fondly recalls a cigar store on Frith Street.)
We stayed in touch over the remaining decade of his life—he died in 1997—and I dedicated my book “Movies as Politics” to him. That’s why I can’t regard dispassionately film critic Richard Schickel’s effort to reassemble Fuller’s version of The Big Red One.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In The Big Red One Marvin’s sergeant is an allegorical death figure, a benign yet gruff surrogate father to the dogfaces (much like Fuller), a comic straight man, an action hero, a device for spouting diverse kinds of information, and an almost documentary rendition of a soldier repressing emotion under stress. (It’s only in the longer version of the film that the performance given by Marvin, who also saw combat, registers as one of his best.) Even some of the film’s single images have an eerie way of serving double or triple duty. One of the most vivid recurring ones—close-ups of a wristwatch on a corpse lapped by waves at Omaha Beach on D-day—seems like it could have come directly out of one of Fuller’s nightmares, yet it also registers as painfully real rather than simply imagined.
Directed and Written by Samuel Fuller
With Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, Stephane Audran, Christa Lang, Kelly Ward, Siegfried Rauch, and Fuller
