Product description A dramatic war story of five fighting men who composed a rifle unit in the desert of North Africa. Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure Rating: PG Release Date: 5-OCT-2004 Media Type: DVD Amazon.com In Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg depicts the D-day landings with a realism lauded by veterans. The Big Red One depicts the D-day landings, too, and it was made by a veteran. Writer-director Samuel Fuller, who served in the First Infantry Division from North Africa to Czechoslovakia (including the Normandy landings), made a career out of swift, punchy B movies, such as Pickup on South Street and The Naked Kiss. The Big Red One became Fuller's nod to A-movie filmmaking, yet it has the solid, matter-of-fact perspective of the ground-level infantryman. The episodic action ranges all over the European theater, as a tough squad of American GIs (including Mark Hamill and Robert Carradine) follow their hard-bitten sergeant (Lee Marvin, at his best) and try to stay alive. Filmed mostly in Israel, the film delivers on the requisite war-movie conventions and tough-guy humor but also introduces notes of poetry. Fuller's D-day doesn't match the pyrotechnics of Spielberg's version, but it creates power from the simple image of a dead soldier's watch, ticking away in blood-soaked surf. A fine and memorable picture, The Big Red One might have been even greater had it been released in Fuller's full-length cut--not until 2005 did a reconstruction allow the director's vision to be seen for the first time. --Robert Horton
ASIN: 0790741814
VSKU: LFV.0790741814.N
Condition: New
Author/Artist:Lee Marvin|Mark Hamill|Robert Carradine|Bobby Di Cicco|Stéphane Audran|Siegfried Rauch|Serge Marquand|Charles Macaulay|Alain Doutey|Colin Gilbert|Kelly Ward|Bryan McKenzie|Brian Jamieson|Douglas Freeman|Gene Corman|Richard Schickel|Samuel Fuller|Maurice Marsac|Adam Greenberg
Binding: Dvd
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