(1980) “The real glory of war is surviving.” Time ticks away on Omaha Beach on a dead man’s wrist; horsemen battle a tank in a Roman amphitheatre; an inmate enthusiastically joins in a firefight in an insane asylum, shouting “I’m sane!”; a German artillery spotter perches behind the arms of a giant crucifix; two men have a final confrontation within a concentration camp oven. Grizzled Sarge Lee Marvin (an actual Purple-Hearted veteran of the Pacific) leads his 1st Infantry Division squad (their shoulder patch: a big red number One) from the landings in North Africa, to D-Day, to an extermination camp in Czechoslovakia, with platoon members Mark Hamill (post-Luke Skywalker), Bobby Di Cicco, Kelly Ward, and Fuller alter ego Robert Carradine carrying on while nameless replacements bite the dust. Samuel Fuller’s semi-autobiographical chronicle was a decades-long dream that was false-started in 1959 when he nixed a big-budget version with John Wayne, fearing it would degenerate into a typical Wayne flag-waver. Then, green-lighted again in 1980, it suffered budget shrinkage and massive cutting over Fuller’s objections. While the original release was a box office and critical success, the “director’s cut” gradually became one of the legendary films maudits of the American cinema, ranking, in the words of critic/documentarist Richard Schickel, who spearheaded the current restoration, “right up there with the 44 missing minutes of The Magnificent Ambersons as a dream quest.” Now, after the discovery of 70,000 feet of camera negative, nearly 50 minutes of lost footage has been restored, including 15 completely new scenes, a major character (once minor), and a cameo by Fuller himself as a newsreel director, with all but two minor scenes in Fuller’s script present and accounted for. As Schickel wrote recently in Film Comment, “What was a pretty decent war movie is now a true Sam Fuller movie, full of that tabloid absurdity — sudden death and sudden laughter wildly mixed — that was his trademark. And his glory.”
A WARNER BROS. RELEASE

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A THIRD FACE
Samuel Fuller’s autobiography