10 more favorite films
I’m following up on “10 favorite films” with numbers 11-20. I make no claim for them other than that they are movies I love. My emphasis is on lesser known and offbeat movies rather than classics like
Citizen Kane or
The Godfather or
The French Connection. With the long holiday weekend coming up next week, I thought some readers might find the list of interest or perhaps of use one way or another.
11.
The Big Red One: If you love movies, you are probably familiar with the work of Sam Fuller. This was his labor of love and dream project. Fuller wrote and directed this autobiographical film depicting an unnamed “Sergeant” (the absolutely brilliant Lee Marvin) leading an Army platoon in World War II from North Africa in 1942 to the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia at war’s end in 1945. Saturated in Fuller’s cynicism and black humor, the movie “is an enduring monument to Samuel Fuller, the writer, soldier, raconteur, and prodigal filmmaker who virtually invented the now familiar form of the war-film-as-memoir.” The two-disc DVD set restores 47 minutes to the original version that had been cut without Fuller’s consent before its release in 1980. (I loved it, too.) The restoration was produced by critic Richard Schickel, who provides commentary on it for the first disc in the DVD set. Schickel is so knowledgeable that he all but speaks in Fuller’s voice.