“The real glory of war is surviving.”

One of Hollywood's biggest crimes of the last quarter-century is being set right this week with the release of "The Big Red One: The Reconstruction", a beautifully restored version of Samuel Fuller's butchered 1980 masterpiece. The stunning new version restores some 15 scenes and more than 40 minutes of footage to Fuller's grittily autobiographical film about his World War II stint as a GI with the Army's First Infantry Division. Filmed in Israel, the film stars Lee Marvin in his greatest performance. The cut version of the film flopped, and Fuller went to his grave in 1997 bemoaning the fate of "The Big Red One," telling every journalist he met that he dreamed of seeing his original vision up on the big screen. Richard Schickel, critic and documentary filmmaker, printed 70,000 feet of film from negatives stored in a vault in Kansas City and supervised the editing according to Fuller's original shooting script. "What they released in 1980 wasn't a bad movie," Schickel said. "What the studio wanted was a gung-ho war movie. What we've added is the real Sam stuff: the boredom, the absurdity of an ordinary soldier caught up in a vast war". [from MetaFilter.com]