The Big Red One: The Reconstruction

One of the activities planned for this year’s KVIFF will take place in the town of Sokolov: a commemorative ceremony dedicated to Sam Fuller, veteran of the American army’s 1st Infantry Division. Fuller’s advance during the Second World War came to a climax in Czechoslovakia’s Sokolov region (once bearing the German name Falkenau), and it would be more than 30 years before he realized the film version of the horrific events he lived through in the first week of May 1945. The Big Red One, one of the most celebrated war films of the 20th century, was drastically cut at the time of its creation, and unfortunately Fuller didn’t live to see its well-deserved reconstruction in 2004. An assemblage of vignettes, Fuller’s work exposes the absurdity of war and resoundingly rejects the myth of heroism at any price. Lee Marvin portrays a sergeant of the 1st Infantry Division (the red numeral on the division’s shoulder patch lent the film its title) who leads the four young men entrusted to him on an odyssey across North Africa, Sicily, infamous Omaha Beach, and on to Czechoslovakia. Although the geographic sweep signals an epic blockbuster, Fuller constructed his story on precisely drawn characters and their reactions to events that would cause many a man to lose his mind.