Invasion Europe (World War II Collections) (Warner, Blu-ray)
True Stories of WWII (World War II Collections) (Warner, Blu-ray)
The Big Red One (Warner, Blu-ray)
Memphis Belle (1990) (Warner, Blu-ray)
Memorial Day is traditionally the occasion for studios to roll out their war movies again. This year, Warner upgraded a couple of titles to Blu-ray and then dropped them into new collections of vaguely curated box sets. Thematically speaking, Invasion Europe and True Stories of WWII are a little arbitrary, each a collection of three features on Blu-ray and a bonus DVD of non-fiction extras, but at least one set is defined by rip-roaring World War favorites.
Invasion Europe is anchored by Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980), which was also newly released individually on Blu-ray earlier in May. Fuller’s semi-autobiographical story of one American rifle squad’s tour of duty from North Africa through D-Day stars Robert Carradine (standing in for the cigar chomping, pulp-fiction writing Fuller), Mark Hamill, Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward as the green recruits who become hardened survivors under the gruff tutelage of Lee Marvin’s tough, taciturn Sergeant. We never learn his name – this World War I retread is simply Sarge and Sarge teaches these raw recruits that in war you don’t murder, you kill. The only glory in war is surviving, in Fuller’s clear-eyed portrait of combat, and this quartet of survivors become Sarge’s “Four Horsemen,” the eternal figures in a rifle squad filled out by a couple of hundred replacements whose names they finally give up trying to learn.
“This is a fictional life based on factual death,” begins the film. We land in North Africa for a trial under fire, scramble through the mountain villages of Italy, and charge Omaha Beach on D-Day, all on a fraction of the budget and a sliver of the cast that Steven Spielberg had at his disposal for “Saving Private Ryan.”
The Big Red One has the scope of an epic sculpted with a spare, suggestive visual style. Isolated, deserted locales dominate their odyssey. Death is abrupt and brutal, ready to strike at any moment. It verges on the unreal, and these boys learn to respond instinctively to the unreality of it all. A World War II vet himself, Marvin’s face is a road map of the war, the worn, battered, yet unusually calm and warm face of a survivor. His heart is hidden under a helmet and three day stubble, but the weary serenity behind his eyes can turn warm and protective when the children of liberated villages follow Sarge around like puppies and he wordlessly adopts them for a few heartbreaking moments.
The version that Fuller released in 1980 was not the version he intended. In 2004, film historian, critic, and documentary filmmaker Richard Schickel uncover hours of footage and, using Fuller’s original script as a guide, embarked on a reconstruction. The result is not quite the mythic 4 hour rough cut Fuller bragged about (which may not have ever existed), but it’s the closest we’re likely to get to Fuller’s intentions. It fills out Sam Fuller’s “compromised” 1980 war drama with over 45 minutes of new and expanded scenes that restore characters lost in the cutting, fill out experiences, and give the film a shape completely missing in the original cut. Both versions are included here, but the longer reconstructed version is not HD: it’s encoded at 480i, basically the same as a DVD.
Also features the supplements from the earlier DVD release, notably commentary by Schickel and a 48-minute documentary that features the surviving actors and provides a detailed look at the inspiration for the reconstruction, the process of searching for and restoring missing scenes, and the technical tools used in the reconstruction. Further discoveries not included in the reconstruction are included in a gallery of deleted scene, and comparisons of original and newly restored extended scenes are provided with commentary by reconstruction editor Bryan McKenzie and post-production supervisor Brian Hamblin. Archival materials include a Fuller-produced 30 minute promo reel and Richard Schickel’s 1973 documentary The Men Who Made the Movies: Samuel Fuller.