Word: fullers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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World War II veterans lauded Steven Spielberg for his chaotically realistic representation of the storming of Omaha Beach. Fuller was a veteran of that invasion himself, and he strove for something other than purely visual realism. Like Spielberg, he was working to convey the brutality of war but, as Connor explains, “unlike in Saving Private Ryan, it was never an exercise in verisimilitude but rather an exercise in filmmaking.” A master of the overstatement, Fuller’s abrupt humor, drama, and violence serve as a means—not an end?...
However, this movie has been a long time coming. First proposed in 1959 as a big-budget feature film starring John Wayne in the Lee Marvin role, Fuller pulled the plug on the project due to an understandable suspicion that his vision would be subsumed by the Duke’s blindly patriotic all-American identity. From there, he put the idea on hold for 20 years until he set off to film it independently...
Nonetheless, true to the nature of this story, this movie’s path was still an uphill climb. The ambitious expedition that Fuller proposed with this movie found itself seriously truncated by Warner Bros. Studios, the distribution outlet to whom he—according to legend—presented his four-and-a-half hour finished product...
Fortunately, The Big Red One’s missing footage was not lost forever. While making a documentary about Fuller, film historian and Time Magazine film critic Richard Schickel made it his personal quest to find this lost footage in the bowels of Warner Brothers’ storage. Upon retrieving these long misplaced reels, he restored them to the film in an effort to make the “director’s cut” that—after Fuller’s death in 1997—was no longer truly possible. The recoveries comprised by this restoration...
...tagline and moral of this movie is “the only glory of war is surviving.” It is this primacy of survival above all else that Fuller learned when he fought his way through World War II, propelling his journey back home and inspiring his life as a filmmaker and crime journalist. Accordingly, his masterpiece has survived him, surpassing its own particular obstacles to complete its own journey and finally arrive on the silver screen in its proper form...