The Real Glory: Reconstructing 'The Big Red One'

3-in-1. The actors who played the infantrymen and were novices at their craft when The Big Red One was made reminisce in 2005 about what it was like to shoot a film with two uncompromising war veterans (Lee Marvin and Samuel Fuller). Their stories from filming, recalling the light version of military service, are interspersed with more valuable items of information about the director recorded by Schickel in 1990 (that interview comprises the foundation of the documentary The Men Who Made the Movies: Samuel Fuller). The second, more technical half is focused on the reconstruction of The Big Red One (as Schickel concedes, the result is something between the director’s cut and Schickel’s cut). The search for shots considered to have been lost, the cleaning-up of the picture, improvement of the soundtrack. Those who are interested in the restoration of films should not miss this. In the space of one standard film about a film, you will get an extraordinary amount of information provided from the proper perspectives and from a different distance in time. (28/08/2013)