Long ago, In 1980, the film The Big Red One debuted in theaters. It’s a WWII picture starring Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, and Robert Carradine.
The Big Red One is a poignant anti-war film about a group of four young men and their Sergeant in a war they are ordered to fight but only endure.
As WWII movies go, it’s unique in that it spans the whole of the war. Some research I did on WWII triggered a memory response to search for this film to watch it again. I ended up buying the Reconstruction DVD on eBay, new and unopened, and was glad to have all the extras on the 2-DVD set.
But the film released in 1980 was cut by the studio prior to release, and even though it flopped at the box office, I believe it’s a gem in its class, one of those movies that goes unnoticed and then develops a cult-like following.
IMO, though, the studio cut is not quite, but almost, as good as the Reconstruction version with its extra 47 minutes of “lost” footage.
Even so, a few scenes of the restored material could have been left out and would have been had I been its editor. Here and there, the studio was correct, in that day and time, to delete some scenes prior to release, even though it meant those scenes were truncated almost too much.
The Reconstruction film’s editor Bryan McKenzie made many excellent choices in how and where he re-entered the original film with the reconstruction footage.
If you like WWII films, whether you watch the original or the Reconstruction version, this one is a well-cast classic.
The Big Red One is a poignant anti-war film about a group of four young men and their Sergeant in a war they are ordered to fight but only endure.
As WWII movies go, it’s unique in that it spans the whole of the war. Some research I did on WWII triggered a memory response to search for this film to watch it again. I ended up buying the Reconstruction DVD on eBay, new and unopened, and was glad to have all the extras on the 2-DVD set.
But the film released in 1980 was cut by the studio prior to release, and even though it flopped at the box office, I believe it’s a gem in its class, one of those movies that goes unnoticed and then develops a cult-like following.
IMO, though, the studio cut is not quite, but almost, as good as the Reconstruction version with its extra 47 minutes of “lost” footage.
Even so, a few scenes of the restored material could have been left out and would have been had I been its editor. Here and there, the studio was correct, in that day and time, to delete some scenes prior to release, even though it meant those scenes were truncated almost too much.
The Reconstruction film’s editor Bryan McKenzie made many excellent choices in how and where he re-entered the original film with the reconstruction footage.
If you like WWII films, whether you watch the original or the Reconstruction version, this one is a well-cast classic.
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