BIG RED ONE, THE 33
Fuller confessed to being “thrilled by the almost universal esteem. Yet I can’t stop
thinking about my four- and- a- half- hour version of the movie, which is somewhere
in the vaults at Warner Brothers, who bought the rights several years ago” (Fuller,
2002, p. 482). In 2004, eight years after Fuller’s death, film critic/historian Rich-
ard Schickel brought Fuller’s unrealized dream of a director’s cut to fruition. Using
70,000 feet of vault footage and Fuller’s original shooting script as a guide, Schickel
produced The Big Red One: The Reconstruction: a 158- minute version that removes a
gratuitous voice- over device and restores 45 minutes of missing content, allowing
for more depth and scope, more detailed characterizations, and a more meaningful
narrative shape than was evident in the original theatrical release in 1980. Reviews
this time were even more enthusiastic. Roger Ebert awarded the film four out of four
stars and wrote, “The restored [The] Big Red One is able to suggest the scope and
duration of the war, the way it’s one damned thing after another, the distances trav-
eled, the pile-up of experiences that are numbing most of the time but occasionally
produce an episode as perfect as a short story” (Ebert, 2004).
Reel History Versus Real History
In the words of military historian Clayton Odie Sheffield, “The Big Red One is his-
torically accurate in the macro sense, but incorporates a good deal of dramatic
license” (Sheffield, 2001, p. 117). Sheffield then goes on to enumerate some of the
film’s embellishments or omissions. For example, in depicting the 1st Infantry Divi-
sion’s landings near Oran, Algeria (8 November 1942), the movie shows French
troops reading American leaflets that urge nonre sis tance, which is actually not pos-
si ble because the landings took place at 0100 hours— too dark for any defender to
read a leaflet. It also shows the Vichy commander initiating a brief exchange of
gunfire, resulting in a few casualties on both sides, after which the French and
American soldiers join each other and celebrate their union on the beach. Shef-
field says: “In all accounts from the 16th Regiment sector, re sis tance was either
non- existent or light and unor ga nized, and there were no beach reunions com-
memorating a cease- fire with the joining of two armies in a truce” (Sheffield, 2001,
p. 118). Sheffield also notes that the 16th Regiment “was hit with winter rains and
snow while deployed in the Kasserine Pass area,” but the movie depicts almost no
inclement weather (Sheffield, 2001, pp. 118–119). Sheffield finds the movie’s depic-
tion of action in Sicily credible but notes a number of chronological and tactical
inaccuracies in the film’s rendition of the landings at Normandy on D- Day. He fur-
ther notes that insofar as The Big Red One “provides very little replication of large
combat formations of soldiers,” it does not need to feature much heavy equipment
(Sheffield, 2001, p. 121). As was true of other cash- strapped WWII productions
(e.g., The Battle of the Bulge), Fuller deploys M4 Sherman tanks with German decals
to stand in for German panzers, but Sheffield finds the discrepancy “irrelevant.”
Fi nally, some critics thought Lee Marvin, 54 at the time of the film shoot in 1978,
was too old to play a WWII U.S. Army sergeant. Yet he was just a few years older
than his own father, Lamont Walter Marvin (1896–1971), who was a sergeant in
World War II in his late forties. Indeed, after the film came out, Marvin told an
interviewer, “I really played my father” ( Johnson, p. 39).