The comeback kid: "Logan Lucky"

The big story with Logan Lucky is the return of Steven Soderbergh, the Sinatra of modern American cinema, unretiring himself after an absence of fully, ooh, four years. (Since the theatrical release of 2013's Behind the Candelabra, he's worked exclusively in television - overseeing two seasons of period hospital drama The Knick - and confined his communication to gnomic Twitter missives.) One sadness within the wider tragedy of the 90s indie bubble bursting in the first decade of the new millennium was watching one of the Sundance scene's brightest and most inventive filmmakers strike out time and again with ideas he seemed invested in only up until the first morning of the first day of shooting - wisp-films, doodle-movies, something to focus a brilliant yet restless mind until the money for the next project came together. (See also: the sprawling filmographies of Michael Winterbottom in the UK and Johnnie To and Takashi Miike in the East, those of creatives whose reserves of ready funding have outweighed any reserves of patience.) For an idea of where Soderbergh was at the start of this decade, one need only contrast his enervated and infuriatingly vague 2009 film The Girlfriend Experience with the stunningly sharp and precise TV series later Sundance alumni Lodge Kerrigan and Amy Seimetz fashioned from it.

We sense how refreshed Soderbergh is very early in the new movie: here is a heist film making moves not unlike those of his Ocean's movies - a lark that turned into the kind of lumbering studio franchise liable to exhaust any right-thinking director - and yet it's possessed of a markedly different feel. For one thing, this here's a rural heist movie - shot around Georgia and North Carolina - and we shouldn't discount the possibility that being out in the open, and taking the country airs, has had a positive effect on Soderbergh. (Bonus: it takes him further beyond the reach of meddling executives.) It's here we find Channing Tatum's Jimmy Logan in the course of being fired from a construction job because his medical insurance will no longer cover a pre-existing leg injury. (Rural America, then, but also real America.) This, as Rebecca Blunt's script would have it, is but the latest manifestation of a family curse that also saw Jimmy's younger brother Clyde (Adam Driver) lose his upper left arm while fighting in Iraq. Over the bar Clyde now tends, a plan is hatched to reverse the pair's fortunes: raiding the loaded bank vault beneath the local NASCAR track. To this end, they - and Jimmy's poised sister Mellie (Riley Keough), just maybe the brains of the operation - assemble the expected motley crew, the participation of any one of whom would be enough to cast doubt over the plan's likely success: their explosives expert, an Aryan-blond hulk nicknamed Joe Bang (Daniel Craig), is presently behind bars for his troubles, while their scrawny computer whizz (Jack Quaid) undermines any air of expertise via the "DANGERUS" tattoo he flaunts on his right shoulder.

Soderbergh's goal would appear to be regaining the rhythms that sustained his best work, and in this, Logan Lucky (the reversal may be colloquial, as in Country Strong) is a success, loose - wholly relaxed in the manner it goes about introducing its characters - yet strikingly confident and composed. The first half gathers up funny, memorable scenes as one might strawberries with a picnic basket: Jimmy tanning his precocious daughter (Farrah Mackenzie) in his garage using a paint sprayer, or bumping into a nurse (Katherine Waterston) on a corner outside a 7-Eleven and being invited into her mobile surgery for a tetanus booster. Here is the kind of life, not necessarily crucial to the plot, which generally has to be sheared off in the editing room on more mechanical productions, and which was conspicuously lacking from some of Soderbergh's more abstruse and eggheaded experiments: from first frame to last, the new movie is precious good company. You could argue it's a shade too casual about the specifics of the heist itself, in a way a control freak like Danny Ocean (speaking on behalf of his paymasters at Warner Bros.) would never allow: one of Joe Bang's ad hoc explosive devices is a plastic bag holding Gummi Bears and topped up with bleach, a concoction that causes Clyde to mutter (on behalf of the audience) "We're supposed to believe that that's the thing?" Yet it hardly seems to matter so long as Soderbergh remains this deeply engaged with every last one of his characters.

There was a danger that Logan Lucky would turn out to be Soderbergh's impression of an Alexander Payne movie, raining down liberal-elite condescension on its ensemble of hicks, but the casting of Jim O'Heir, the endlessly put-upon Jerry in that beacon of televisual tolerance Parks & Recreation, in a supporting role seems more telling of where the film is coming from. (An aside: between O'Heir and Keough - star of the small-screen Girlfriend Experience - it may well be that Soderbergh spent his time off, as so many of us do, sat on the sofa huffing boxsets. Again, our better movies absorb and learn from Peak TV.) These "hee-haw heroes" are both dumber and smarter than they first look, which accounts for the film's unpredictable energy and kick. Joe Bang explains that concoction by chalking a chemical equation onto the stadium cinderblocks; two scenes later, Clyde has his prosthetic arm sucked into a vacuum. The second half is all punchlines; everything and everyone is paid off in a manner Preston Sturges would have appreciated. Yet if Soderbergh has finally made his peace with that old showbiz axiom "give 'em what they want", he's still smart enough to realise he doesn't have to give it us in the order we were expecting, and that he can also slip in business we didn't know we want - the pleasing sight of Tatum hiding behind a NASCAR-sized candyfloss, say, or a singalong to "Take Me Home, Country Roads" that goes towards the project's essential sincerity. (Opening with Tatum dissecting the significance of "Some Days Are Diamonds", this is very much Soderbergh's John Denver movie.) If the spirit of invention that gave cinephiles sex, lies & videotape, Kafka and the Solaris rethink looks to have been set aside for now, this director has rediscovered his urge to entertain, and we should happily take that for starters.  

Logan Lucky is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Where the river ends: "Hotel Salvation"

The BFI's current India on Film season has done much to illustrate how, even in these commercialised times, there remains a good deal more to the country's cinema than those Bollywood extravaganzas that sing and dance their way into our multiplexes every weekend. Shubhashish Bhutiani's comic drama Hotel Salvation offers an accomplished case in point: the family at its centre, the Kumars, have far too much weighing down on them to consider tripping the light fantastic, not least an ageing patriarch, Daya (Lalit Behl), who has decided the time is right for him to die. How he goes about this is cause for both stress and hilarity. Forcibly removing his overworked middle-aged son Rajiv (Adil Hussain) from his office cubicle, Daya hails a taxi for the pair of them to set out for the eccentric institution of the title, a halfway house between this life and the next situated on the banks of the Ganges - not a million miles from Masaan territory - where oldtimers go to spend their final days. 

What it is not, pointedly, is a Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, blessed as that destination was with a Fox Searchlight budget: the paint's peeling, other residents fall between dotty and woebegone, while the shifty proprietor (Anil K. Rastogi) is insistent Rajiv should rent his own room for no small fee. (It's not surprising this hotel should have the reputation of being a portal between worlds: none of its wiring looks up to code.) Yet this extended spa weekend forces squabbling man and boy to look Death - a mutual foe - in the eye, and here's where the film becomes both funny and poignant. We derive a sense of the pair's contrasting worldviews just from that first, fraught taxi ride, Rajiv insisting their driver speed up so that he can knuckle down again, Daya urging patience, so that he can enjoy whatever time he has left. The relaxed nature of life in the sticks - nightly boat trips, breathing exercises, marijuana lassis - give Bhutiani himself time to examine the roles these men were born into, and those they assumed; it's soon clear they haven't talked properly for years, because of the resentment that bubbles up when they do. (Rajiv seems fated to continue the approach with his twentysomething daughter, who has ideas other than being married off at the first available opportunity - a subplot that can feel a bit like a well-meaning footnote.) 

Generally, Bhutiani's work here is observational and quietly revealing: the rebonding process he describes is authentically tricky in its emotional labour, but never forced. Like many Indian filmmakers working beyond Bollywood, he gets a lot more out of his locations by using them not to frame glamorous stars - Behl and Hussain are unmistakably lived-in character performers - but a centuries-old way of life (and death), a pre-existing philosophy that appears a good deal more in touch with nature and the elements than the obsessive development of Modi's India (or May's Britain, or Trump's America) would perhaps allow. Either way, the time and space Bhutiani opens up before the audience allows us to notice some exceptionally skilful and dignified playing, how the years seem to drop off the leads once they're removed from the status quo and obliged to embrace the moment, how the furrows in their brows come to be reclaimed as laughter lines. Already enshrined as a crowdpleaser on the festival circuit - and a worthy successor to 2013's The Lunchbox - it's never sentimental, and finally very touching: a restorative 100 minutes, to say the least.

Hotel Salvation opens in selected cinemas from today. 

Brooklyn rumble: "Bushwick"

If they're lucky, a filmmaker might capture something in the air when they set their cameras to rolling - a whiff of the zeitgeist that doesn't require undue elaboration for an audience to get where they're coming from. If they're really lucky, then twelve-to-fifteen months after shooting, when the movie finally emerges, that something will not only still be in the air, but will have intensified to the point where their new release feels torn from that morning's headlines. Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott, directors of this week's Bushwick, are pretty lucky guys. Here is a nimble B-movie fable about a red-hooded innocent (Brittany Snow) making her way from school to her grandma's house only to find her previously quiet neck of the woods under attack from black-clad gunmen. She picks up a useful protector in former WWE wrestler Dave Bautista, playing a weary janitor trying to get home to family in Hoboken, yet as the pair edge their way between explosions and sniper fire, it becomes apparent the carnage is the work of domestic terrorists - a white supremacist militia who've choppered in from Texas with the aim of taking America back and making it great again.

The basic scenario, co-authored by Stake Land's genre-savvy Nick Damici, suggests a US equivalent to Went the Day Well? or It Happened Here, and a good deal of Bushwick's charge derives from seeing apparently nondescript backstreets (as Snow wonders, "who the fuck invades Bushwick?") and everyday destinations (schools, bodegas, laundromats) assuming their place in what's been reconfigured as a warzone. Given that the film opens with the terrorists' helicopter buzzing towards the former site of the World Trade Center, one passenger's rifle poking menacingly into frame, you might just wonder how on earth the movie got filmed without anybody being hauled into custody under the Homeland Security Act: luck and good permits, presumably. Though Murmion and Milott make their limited number of panoramas count, a lot more of Bushwick is suggestive, the threat posed by the militia expanded by cunning sound design and a skittering, newly immersive camera style - an evolution of the found-footage approach - that refuses anything so simple as a cut when the operator can turn a corner and hustle the leads pell-mell into the next state of siege.

The tactics are both inventive (kudos to whoever thought to send on the Hasidic resistance to this occupation, and those taking to the streets carrying lacrosse sticks, a touch that somehow seems very Bushwick) and slightly, perhaps understandably evasive: we seem forever to be skirting the boundaries of some catastrophic social breakdown, where a major studio production like Cloverfield was possessed of the money to throw us right into the thick of things, and Murmion and Milott never quite outrun the suspicion they have to keep everyone moving because they only have so much to show and tell us. Stop to apply a moment's thought to Bushwick's central impasse, for one thing, and you start to wonder just how closely it applies to the reality of 2017. These militiamen want their beloved Texas to secede from the United States in protest at the actions of the Government - they're Obama-era stragglers - whereas the Nazis of Charlottesville somehow gained Presidential support, if not full approval. 

Again, it would seem we've reached a point where reality is more dysfunctional and therefore terrifying than anything a movie can venture - although I'll concede the despair of the final act helps to better tether Bushwick to our moment. So, too, the hefty presence of Bautista - breakout star of the Guardians of the Galaxy series, a Rock purged of the easy irony - who here resumes his usual skin tone and works appreciably hard amid all the huffing and puffing to sketch a battle-exhausted last bulwark between the forces of civilisation and chaos ("I'm just trying to get through the day"); even slumped in silhouette on a windowsill at the back of one frame, his circular bulk draws the eye, like Big Hero 6's Baymax powered down for the night. The film haring around him feels like a fluke or fly-by-night, the kind of dual-directed flash of inspiration that almost invariably proves impossible to follow up, as Messrs. Myrick and Sanchez discovered after The Blair Witch Project and the Neveldine/Taylor partnership found in making Crank II: High Voltage. Still, it hooks and diverts us skilfully enough for ninety minutes - and Bautista, for one, is surely here to stay.

Bushwick opens in selected cinemas from Friday. 

Queen of hearts: "In Bed with Victoria"

Despite her triumphantly regal name, the heroine of Justine Triet's leftfield charmer In Bed with Victoria is fighting several losing battles all by herself. A single mother in her mid 30s, Victoria (Virginie Efira) juggles taking care of two adorable yet demanding pre-schoolers with her day job, defence lawyer in a Paris bringing no shortage of crimes to her attention - among them those of an old pal (Melvil Poupaud) accused of stabbing his wife, and an ex (Laurent Poitrenaux) hellbent on defaming her with allegations of promiscuity via his blog. Scant wonder she should be left feeling so jaded and overwhelmed, prone to overthinking her life choices even while abed with her lovers, a crisis that sends her to seek answers for her failing libido from a shrink, a psychic and the world's creepiest aromatherapist. Never mind I Don't Know How She Does It: here is We All Know Why She Can't Do It.

The basic ingredients of Triet's film would do for any number of glossy Hollywood timewasters - with her hair scraped back, Efira boasts a superficial resemblance to a worldlier Katie Heigl - yet from the off, it's marked and distinguished by a strain of wildness. The opening wedding, for instance, numbers a gorilla among its guests and puts a Dalmatian on the dancefloor - you wonder whether they're imagined symbols of our heroine's desperate need to reconnect with nature, only for them to return as star witnesses in the closing courtroom showdown, a development that the Hawks of Bringing Up Baby and Monkey Business would surely have stood up and applauded.

Some of this wildness evidently ran on into post-production, which gives In Bed with Victoria radically different rhythms to the stock slick romcom. Early Godard would appear another influence: the restless Triet is forever yanking her music cues prematurely, or running the dialogue of one scene over the images of another. At one point, she even intercuts three separate encounters, so that her heroine appears to be dealing with her inquisitive shrink, a needy client and a oversharing gigolo simultaneously. It's not surprising Victoria should have such problems in the sack: in the bedroom, as in life, this woman doesn't know whether she's coming or going. 

Bolstering some already choice set design - you'd expect Victoria's child-infested bolthole to be stuffed to the rafters with baggage of one kind or another, but even her shrink's office is cluttered with books - such tactics come to evoke a very modern set of conditions: the feeling, exacerbated by social media, that one's dirty laundry is perpetually on display, that one is constantly being surveilled (a recurring phrase here, laced with irony given the legal context: "I'm not judging you"); the sense there is too much going on at once, or at least too much to hit the off-switch and power down for the night - the conditions in which pleasure is best received.

Triet - on this evidence, a singular mix of social satirist, psychologist and sage Supreme Court justice - treats her heroine's plight with the kind of generosity we've come to associate with Mia Hansen-Løve's auteur films. Not that Victoria has time to notice it, but she's surrounded by men who plainly adore her: a sometime client (Vincent Lacoste) who offers to install himself as her PA, au pair and general helpmeet, not for money but affection; a Craigslist pick-up who bills himself as "Hot Paris Intellectual", but turns out to be almost as burned out as she is, more Tom Paulin than Bernard-Henri Lévy. Even the president of the bar before which Victoria is brought to answer charges of fraternising seems inclined not to come down too hard on her, hinting that he understands hers was a misstep taken under extreme pressure.

Easy to see why everyone's so smitten: Efira, who lit up the screen during the agreeable nonsense of last year's Up for Love, spends every frame tying herself in recognisable knots, a walking embodiment of those struggles we have with ourselves, our sex, and every other living creature around us. Triet doesn't shy away from the trickier aspects of contemporary living. She uses her midfilm montage to describe Vicky's slip into vodka-swigging, bed-bound depression, while the closing trial doesn't merely generate battle-of-the-sexes back-and-forth, but mirrors how ugly relations can get between men and women. Yet her film rules entirely - and I think most viewers will conclude justly - in its heroine's favour: it does about everything it can to give both its central character, and its leading lady, the break she very much deserves.

In Bed with Victoria opens in selected cinemas from Friday.  

"American Made" (IndieWire 18/08/17)

There’s a strong argument that insists Tom Cruise is a more compelling screen presence the more desperate he’s seen to get. Much evidence for this claim was gathered in that millennial run – 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut and Magnolia, 2001’s Vanilla Sky – in which varyingly forceful writer-directors did their level best to chip away at their star’s glib toothpaste-salesman confidence and expose the very human doubts and frailties behind it. After those box-office failures, Cruise retreated to the surety of known properties and franchises; though we got glimpses of other Cruises – notably Tropic Thunder’s Comic Cruise – this was his fall-back position up until this June’s disastrous The Mummy. Possibly audiences had grown tired of watching a performer playing it so consistently safe: as Kubrick and P.T. Anderson had twigged, it’s always more revealing watching a control freak losing control.

American Made, which feels like a career progression if not the awards-season bar-setter all involved maybe hoped, hands Cruise a very promising character part: that of Adler Berriman “Barry” Seal (1939-1986), prime mover in one of those just-declassified, you-couldn’t-make-it-up stories that sporadically present to grateful producers. A morally flexible TWA pilot handpicked by the CIA at the dog-end of the 1970s to assist with their Central American operations, Seal wound up flying for both the Agency and local drug cartels, profiting hugely from his own machinations while holding court with the likes of Pablo Escobar and Oliver North. Buffeting around inside the fuselage rather than clinging clench-jawed to its exterior, Cruise’s Seal is something like Top Gun’s Maverick gone to seed; the welcome surprise of Doug Liman’s film is that the character’s cockiness comes to be tested rather than hymned.

The first time we see him, he’s literally going nowhere: restlessly holding his position in runway traffic in 1978. (Liman has already set the stagnant scene with President Ford’s doomy prediction “the next five years will be worse than the past five”. 2017 audiences may wonder what, if anything, has changed.) Seal’s yen for risk-taking is established when he pushes his craft into a nosedive just for the shits-and-gigs of waking up a dozing co-pilot (“just a little turbulence, folks”). Subsequent misadventures will grant him excitement, mobility and more turbulence yet. Impressing CIA operative Schafer (Domhnall Gleeson) with his flak-dodging surveillance work, he’s soon trafficking U.S. guns to the Contras; with those passed on, the Medellin cartel invites him to fill his Cessna with cocaine for transportation north – a lucrative offer this gadfly couldn’t refuse, yet came to regret.

Liman – whose work has grown steadily more engaged since his blithe breakthrough Swingers, initiating the Bourne series and the recent Iraq-set genre quickie The Wall – gives a lightly satirical swing to Seal’s uplift. Breezily sketching in geopolitics with hand-drawn maps (which occasions a sharp joke on the inability of some to tell one Central American destination apart from another), he finds new ways to polish the central irony of Gary Spinelli’s script: that his anti-hero was both product and casualty of Reaganomics, a delivery boy momentarily handed half the world on a platter. Seal’s conspicuous wealth generation is forever undercut by inserts of later, self-taped depositions, those of someone haunted by the knowledge these might be his only legacy, and that this may be his last chance to offer it. What price a man’s life?

That back-and-forth invests American Made with rather more credible peril than has been on display in the last few Mission: Impossibles. Drug-running proves a risky business even with the Escobars at one’s back, and Liman gives a visceral kick to those scenes which find the increasingly frantic Seal taking off from untested runways, making a single-handed coke drop barely a thousand feet above the ground or making an emergency landing to evade Customs officials, the latter a near-miss that feels dramatically trumped up – big Dolby swooshes, a flash of CGI – yet still succeeds in making the stomach lurch.

The hopping around risks inducing discombobulation or jetlag in the viewer, yet it appears a considered editorial tactic, intended to shake up a generally self-assured leading man. Even with both feet on the ground, Cruise isn’t entirely safe. When Gleeson’s Schafer first confronts Seal with evidence of illegal cigar-smuggling, that familiar grin first freezes, then dies on the actor’s face, as though April Grace’s Magnolia journalist had just walked into the bar. As Seal rolls and lurches through this plot, Cruise sweats and panics in ways Jack Reacher wouldn’t countenance; in jail, the character even loses a tooth, albeit a discreet back molar. (Nobody’s paying to see Tom Cruise turn into Walter Brennan just yet.)

A little of that insecurity feeds back into the film. As War Dogs – last year’s name-director-does-recent-foreign-policy offering – suggested, just because a story in the Times or Post catches our eye, it doesn’t automatically generate characters we want to sit in the dark with for two hours. (Liman concedes as much in spinning Talking Heads’ “Slippery People” just as Seal has evaded three branches of law enforcement simultaneously.) Still, the film has just about enough going on around its anti-hero to sustain the interest and land its punchline, and there are signs Liman (who repeatedly bumped his star off in 2014’s Edge of Tomorrow) is solving the enduring problem of making a Cruise film that’s not wholly about its leading man.

If Jesse Plemons and Lola Kirke’s pairing as a shrugging sheriff and his more vigilant wife looks to have been a lamentable cutting-room casualty, others have the time to make more persuasive and valuable contributions: the emergent Sarah Wright Olsen impresses as Seal’s wife Lucy, calling out her man’s wilder manoeuvres on the homefront, and Caleb Landry Jones is touching as a tragically weak link in the whole criminal enterprise. The draw, however, remains Cruise, figuratively walking out on a wing; whether multiplexers rejoin him there will be seen, but after endless formula runouts, it’s encouraging to see him being properly exercised again.

Grade: B

American Made opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.

1,001 Films: "Loulou" (1980)

After one argument too many, middle-class Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) splits with her jazz musician husband André (Guy Marchand) to take up with farmers' boy, common thief and general lad-about-town Loulou (Gérard Depardieu). Maurice Pialat's 1980 drama Loulou might initially seem the stuff of simplicity - a study in social movement, presented as a series of bust-ups and bunk-ups - but it displays a real feel for cafe and street life, and the eruptions of passion it captures are astonishingly vivid. If its interests are physical rather than intellectual, it's because Pialat evidently takes the side of Loulou's honest brute force over André's passive-aggression. As such, the film turns out to be a genuine rarity: the work of a smart director making a sincere attempt, through Depardieu's oafishly lovable moptop, to understand rather than be snide about the type of non-smart guy some girls want to spend their evenings with.

To some extent, it's Huppert's film: her Nelly is the film's emotional fulcrum, and given the gleaming, Garbo-like iceberg the actress has become these past two decades, it's a nostalgic pleasure to see her back in the days when she was still allowed to smile, laugh and have non-masochistic sex on screen. Yet there's a reason the title isn't Nelly (or Whoa, Nelly!): Depardieu clubs every scene he's in over the head and carries it off over his shoulder, a force of nature apparently acting less than being. Given his physicality, the fit he makes with Pialat's cinema comes as no surprise, but for those of us raised on the jovial gastronome Depardieu - Hollywood's idea of Frenchness - it's still a shock to witness the actor as unvarnished youth. Completing a trio of excellent lead performances, Marchand is wonderfully wormy as the increasingly pathetic saxophonist, refusing even once to ask for the audience's sympathies. A self-absorbed, deeply hypocritical figure who's more of a brute than the brute he accuses Loulou of being, it's somehow fitting that André should finally be left to blow his own horn.

(October 2006)

Loulou is available on DVD through Artificial Eye.

1,001 Films: "The Big Red One" (1980)

A bona fide American film maudit, The Big Red One was snubbed by audiences who'd rather have seen its juvenile lead Mark Hamill fighting intergalactic battles, cut by its producers, and even seized by Manchester's Vice Squad when they misunderstood the threat to public decency suggested by the title. In fact, the big red one in question is the rouged badge of courage sewn to the epaulettes of the First Infantry Division serving America through World Wars I and II - the exact same division that maverick writer-director Sam Fuller himself once served with. Much of what's great about the film is in its stitching - and its suggestion that, in wartime, any outfit was as likely to be torn or ripped apart as remain intact - which is why even a slightly trimmed version might have seemed like an injustice.

It opens with unnamed grunt Lee Marvin knifing a German soldier within hours of the Armistice being signed at the end of WWI, then flashes forward to WW2 and finds Marvin - now promoted to Sergeant - heading a youthful battalion's march north from Africa through Sicily to Omaha Beach and beyond. His fresh-faced men are soldiers of fortune indeed: blessed with a preternaturally lucky streak, they make their way through a series of varyingly fortuitous events, assisting during an attack on a Belgian mental asylum, and after a woman gives birth in a tank. (There's one great linguistic gag here, as the soldiers hesitate to use the French for push - poussez - because it sounds like the American word for what these accidental midwives are looking at.)

The picaresque results are something like Candide as retold by a service veteran. We get the expected sniper hunts and beach landings, sequences which must have influenced Spielberg in the run-up to Saving Private Ryan, but Fuller's personal experience of war, and his journalist's eye, keeps manifesting in the unusual emphasis placed on haunting details like the crucifix planted on a battlefield, the watch on a dead soldier's wrist, or Marvin casually tossing an eviscerated testicle as though it were a dud grenade. A certain morality is evident, but the film seems a quieter and more nuanced statement than the fevered disgust Peckinpah displayed in Cross of Iron: this isn't necessarily war as good or bad, but war as it just might be - a competing mass of narratives, some formative and redemptive, others repetitive and destructive.

A reconstruction of the film, overseen by critic Richard Schickel and running to two hours 40 minutes (as opposed to the theatrically released two-hour cut), was finally released in the UK in April 2005, eight years after the director's passing. This version - which opens with the title card "This film is fictional life inspired by actual death" - makes a strong case for the film being Fuller's most personal and heartfelt endeavour via the reinsertion of several new and telling details. Condoms are unfolded over rifles to keep the water out of them; the battalion is put to sleep by German propaganda broadcasts; Algerians remove American ears as trophies. 

One extraordinary sequence sees Marvin putting an abrupt end to what was presumably his first gay screen kiss ("You've got bad breath, Fritz"), and a love scene, between Hamill and Stéphane Audran at the Belgian asylum, serves a similar purpose to that between Martin Sheen and Aurore Clément in Apocalypse Now Redux: a note of tenderness with which to break up the carnage. An extended coda in Central Europe as the Armistice approaches gets a bit samey, but better connects ending to opening. Generally, this version benefits from greater density of incident, and helps flesh out what was already a pretty fascinating skeleton. A couple of dialogue additions also point up what a balanced piece of frontline storytelling this is: if it has Candide on one shoulder, it almost certainly has Robert Capa on the other.

(March 2003/April 2005)

The Big Red One - The Reconstruction is available on DVD through Warner Home Video.