The Big Red One: The Reconstruction

Introduced by Samantha Fuller

“This Is Fictional Life, Based on Factual Death.”

An American rifle squad led by the grizzled Sgt. Possum (Lee Marvin) embarks on campaigns in North Africa and Europe in writer-director Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One, a long-gestating passion project based on the filmmaker’s own experiences as a soldier in World War II. Initially conceived for Warner Bros. in the late 1950s, with John Wayne attached to star, development of the film stalled for two decades until Fuller was able to revive the project in 1978 as an independent production shot on a shoestring budget. 

A decidedly inglorious and unsentimental epic, The Big Red One’s rough cut reportedly ran over four hours long, but distributor United Artists demanded significant cuts to its runtime, and the resulting theatrical cut that screened in competition later that year at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival had a truncated length of only 113 minutes. It wasn’t until over twenty years later that an attempt was made to restore The Big Red One into something approaching Samuel Fuller’s original vision, when film critic Richard Schickel assembled a new cut of the film, billed The Reconstruction, working from Fuller’s script and excised footage stashed in a Warner Bros. Kansas City vault. The Big Red One: The Reconstruction premiered to great acclaim at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival and runs fifty minutes longer than the film’s original theatrical cut, to much greater effect.