On its initial release, everyone bent over backward to hide their ho-hum reaction to Sam Fuller’s 1980 WWII epic. Sadly, forty minutes of new footage in this 'reconstruction' make surprisingly little difference as Fuller’s familiar blunt tabloid cynicism had coarsened into a pose long before this came out. Robert Carradine (playing Fuller) lives up to the film’s ambitions, but the other kids are hack actors, and Lee Marvin isn’t so much war weary as plumb tired. The ratio of one out of three scenes 'working,' sometimes brilliantly, now applying to both versions, long & short. Fuller was always at his best when he was under the thumb of a strong producer (Zanuck is the obvious example) who could tame and order his raging tales into dramatic shape. On his own, Fuller was like that "fascinating" guy who cornered you at a bar and told a hundred stories all ending with the same punch line.
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