This is great news for all us fans of "The Big Red One." The original long version of the movie will finally be released!
www.insidebayarea.com/bayarealiving/ci_2344845
Bigger 'Red One' restores director Sam Fuller's vision
By Kenneth Turan , Los Angeles Times
CANNES, France
IN Sodankyla, Finland, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, a street is named
after him. He's the director Martin Scorsese says influenced him the most.
He so inspired the filmmakers of the French New Wave that Jean-Luc Godard cast him as an iconic American director in "Pierrot le Fou," the man who famously says, "Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. In one word, emotion."
"Believe me," Sam Fuller later grumbled, "I'd be rich if I had a nickel for
every film magazine and festival program around the world who printed that ... line."
Brash, colorful, strong-minded, the kind of guy who could look you in the eye and seriously insist, "I worked for giants in this ... town, giants," Fuller (who died in 1997 at age 85) was a legend both before and after his death.
Intensely cinematic low-budget films such as "Pickup on South Street,"
"Shock Corridor," "Merrill's Marauders" and "Forty Guns" led the Midnight
Sun Film Festival to name that arctic street in Finland after him and caused
critic Andrew Sarris to call him "an authentic American primitive whose
works have to be seen to be understood." "Sam was a marvelous character; I never met anyone who didn't adore him," says critic and filmmaker Richard Schickel, who made a documentary about Fuller a few years back. "He was undaunted and feisty; nothing was going to
stop him from whatever he was going to do."
The project that was closest to Fuller's heart, because it was based on his own World War II years, was "The Big Red One." The film filtered his own
experience of combat through the lives of four soldiers and their sergeant
(Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, Kelly Ward and Lee
Marvin) serving in the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division as it invaded North
Africa, Sicily and finally France.
It's a film Fuller talked about for decades before he shot it, a film that only now, 24 years after it was made, will have its world premiere Friday at the Cannes Film Festival in a version close to the one he envisioned.
This is technically "The Big Red One's" second time at Cannes. The original
Lorimar release version of 1 hour, 53 minutes was in competition here in
1980, and although Fuller was publicly supportive ("a hell of a job, I love it,
I love it"), his real feelings, as revealed in "A Third Face," an autobiography
released after his death, were quite different.
Here he talked longingly of the "four and a half-hour version of the movie"
he'd turned in and how he was "obviously burnt up by the way they'd cut it
down."
"The studio took it away from him at some point, and he accepted that,"
Schickel says, explaining the difference in reaction. "It wasn't the version he
wanted, but it was a version. Still, it was a huge disappointment, and he kept talking about his hopes that someone would recover the cut footage. And at least for the last decade, people have been trying."
The missing version of "The Big Red One" has been one of cinema's elusive
holy grails, like Orson Welles' cut of "The Magnificent Ambersons." Now
Schickel and Warner Bros. (which acquired Lorimar) have assembled what
is being billed as "a reconstruction" just in time to debut in France for the
60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.
The new "Big Red One" has added 15 entirely new sequences and enhanced 23, adding nearly 50 minutes to the film. While this does not add up to the legendary 41/2-hour version Fuller rhapsodized about, Schickel now believes for several reasons that that cut was more a myth than an actual piece of cinema.
"We have Sam's shooting script, he carried it with him every day -- that was
our guide," Schickel says. "I can account for everything in the script, and with only two exceptions, we have representations, at least a little bit, of every scene in the script. When you add that Sam shot very lean -- he was no Willie Wyler, there were no 40 takes of everything -- I think Sam's cut was closer to three hours and change.
"I really believe every significant thing he shot is here. This is the feasible
cut, as full and fair a representation of this film as it's possible to make."
Even at a shorter running time than everyone fantasized about, this new "Big Red One" has gotten major movie world players excited. The New York Film Festival has expressed serious interest, a cover story in Film Comment is in the works, and numerous festivals worldwide are already eager to show it in advance of a DVD scheduled for release around the anniversary of V-E Day in 2005
www.insidebayarea.com/bayarealiving/ci_2344845
Bigger 'Red One' restores director Sam Fuller's vision
By Kenneth Turan , Los Angeles Times
CANNES, France
IN Sodankyla, Finland, 100 miles north of the Arctic Circle, a street is named
after him. He's the director Martin Scorsese says influenced him the most.
He so inspired the filmmakers of the French New Wave that Jean-Luc Godard cast him as an iconic American director in "Pierrot le Fou," the man who famously says, "Film is like a battleground. Love. Hate. Action. Violence. In one word, emotion."
"Believe me," Sam Fuller later grumbled, "I'd be rich if I had a nickel for
every film magazine and festival program around the world who printed that ... line."
Brash, colorful, strong-minded, the kind of guy who could look you in the eye and seriously insist, "I worked for giants in this ... town, giants," Fuller (who died in 1997 at age 85) was a legend both before and after his death.
Intensely cinematic low-budget films such as "Pickup on South Street,"
"Shock Corridor," "Merrill's Marauders" and "Forty Guns" led the Midnight
Sun Film Festival to name that arctic street in Finland after him and caused
critic Andrew Sarris to call him "an authentic American primitive whose
works have to be seen to be understood." "Sam was a marvelous character; I never met anyone who didn't adore him," says critic and filmmaker Richard Schickel, who made a documentary about Fuller a few years back. "He was undaunted and feisty; nothing was going to
stop him from whatever he was going to do."
The project that was closest to Fuller's heart, because it was based on his own World War II years, was "The Big Red One." The film filtered his own
experience of combat through the lives of four soldiers and their sergeant
(Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Bobby Di Cicco, Kelly Ward and Lee
Marvin) serving in the U.S. Army's 1st Infantry Division as it invaded North
Africa, Sicily and finally France.
It's a film Fuller talked about for decades before he shot it, a film that only now, 24 years after it was made, will have its world premiere Friday at the Cannes Film Festival in a version close to the one he envisioned.
This is technically "The Big Red One's" second time at Cannes. The original
Lorimar release version of 1 hour, 53 minutes was in competition here in
1980, and although Fuller was publicly supportive ("a hell of a job, I love it,
I love it"), his real feelings, as revealed in "A Third Face," an autobiography
released after his death, were quite different.
Here he talked longingly of the "four and a half-hour version of the movie"
he'd turned in and how he was "obviously burnt up by the way they'd cut it
down."
"The studio took it away from him at some point, and he accepted that,"
Schickel says, explaining the difference in reaction. "It wasn't the version he
wanted, but it was a version. Still, it was a huge disappointment, and he kept talking about his hopes that someone would recover the cut footage. And at least for the last decade, people have been trying."
The missing version of "The Big Red One" has been one of cinema's elusive
holy grails, like Orson Welles' cut of "The Magnificent Ambersons." Now
Schickel and Warner Bros. (which acquired Lorimar) have assembled what
is being billed as "a reconstruction" just in time to debut in France for the
60th anniversary of the D-Day invasion.
The new "Big Red One" has added 15 entirely new sequences and enhanced 23, adding nearly 50 minutes to the film. While this does not add up to the legendary 41/2-hour version Fuller rhapsodized about, Schickel now believes for several reasons that that cut was more a myth than an actual piece of cinema.
"We have Sam's shooting script, he carried it with him every day -- that was
our guide," Schickel says. "I can account for everything in the script, and with only two exceptions, we have representations, at least a little bit, of every scene in the script. When you add that Sam shot very lean -- he was no Willie Wyler, there were no 40 takes of everything -- I think Sam's cut was closer to three hours and change.
"I really believe every significant thing he shot is here. This is the feasible
cut, as full and fair a representation of this film as it's possible to make."
Even at a shorter running time than everyone fantasized about, this new "Big Red One" has gotten major movie world players excited. The New York Film Festival has expressed serious interest, a cover story in Film Comment is in the works, and numerous festivals worldwide are already eager to show it in advance of a DVD scheduled for release around the anniversary of V-E Day in 2005
