The Big Red One

Rich, detailed and all-encompassing, this masterpiece follows the 1st US Infantry Division from North Africa to Czechoslovakia. The film is essentially director Samuel Fuller’s telling of his own wartime story, giving The Big Red One a haunting sense of realism, isolation and dislocation. But despite its masterful storytelling, the film was largely overlooked until a 2004 remastering, containing an extra 47 minutes, was released at the Cannes Film Festival, seven years after Fuller’s death.