Fuller’s dream of making an epic autobiographical film closely based on his own experiences as member of the legendary 1st Infantry Division began in the late 1950s when he first developed the project for Warner Bros, directing Merrill’s Marauders for the studio as a “test” for the larger-budget picture. But after balking at Jack Warner’s insistence on John Wayne as lead, Fuller was forced to wait more than twenty years before realizing The Big Red One, true to his original vision, starring his friend and fellow WWII veteran Lee Marvin as a hardened officer leading a troop of young soldiers along the same harrowing path traversed by Fuller: from North Africa to Sicily, to Omaha Beach and to Germany and the liberation of the concentration camps. At its Cannes debut, The Big Red One was immediately recognized as a different kind of war movie whose detached realism of action and character was shaped by bracing violence, dark absurdism and a welcome lack of sentimentality. The great strength of the film lies in Fuller’s refusal of any simplifying, overarching narrative by instead unfolding a series of fragmentary episodes, each a floating variation on the theme of survival and focused on four young recruits watched over by Marvin’s nameless Sergeant. Outstanding among the cast is Mark Hamill as a reluctant soldier destined to look deep into the dark eyes of death. Before its 1980 release, Fuller was reluctantly forced to cut the original four-and-a-half-hour version by forty-seven minutes. In 2004 this wrong was corrected by the premiere of a scrupulously researched 158-minute restoration of The Big Red One supervised by veteran film critic Richard Schickel. Print courtesy of Warner Bros.