All this and World War II

Gato Barbieri’s Last Tango in Paris (Ballad)

Incest is relative: Proof that even middling Jacques Demy is better than none, Peau d'âne (Donkey Skin, 1970) continues his preoccupation with sad, beautiful women awaiting the arrival of Prince Charming. Only this time the setting is an outright fairytale, complete with talking roses, toad-spitting crones, kingdoms, castles, and Catherine Deneuve, forever smashing and cute as a button with dirt on her face and the titular pelt draped over her head.
    The director’s fifth collaboration with Michel Legrand, it’s the least memorable as far as the music is concerned, lacking the verve of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) or any haunting themes like the ones found in Lola (1961) or Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (1964). All things considered, however, this is a minor quip. Peau d'âne balances a delicate childhood idyll with sharp adult satire, to say nothing of its barefaced Oedipal issues.
    The DVD is overpriced at $34.95—Koch Lorber is taking an unfortunate cue from Criterion—but the print is good and bonus features include a round robin with psychoanalysts underlining the metaphysical ramifications of the picture, notably the ass whose booty shits booty.

Sam Fuller redux: When it was first released in 1980, Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One ran 113-minutes but felt like a slim and anemic effort—sloppy, even—considering the way he was out promoting it. Chomping on his cigar, his frizzy gray hair defying gravity, the old man was passionate, or perhaps just happy he’d been able to make his dream project a reality. But the enthusiasm displayed on talk shows seemed to be for some other, bigger (and better) picture. And the public, still smarting from the wounds of Vietnam, was unresponsive and in no mood for a balls-to-the-walls, John Wayne-style war movie, especially one that Fuller had intended to run for two-and-three-quarter hours.
    Now restored to 158-minutes, it’s easily among Fuller’s best work, a solid b-film approach to the broad canvas of war, conflict and emotion. Lean and economic, Fuller packs his frames tight (wide-angle panoramas are very few and far between), to draw us in with a platoon of young GIs and the World War II battlegrounds of North Africa, France, Belgium and Czechoslovakia. It’s based on the director’s own exploits on the front lines, which he later related with punchy exuberance in A Third Face : My Tale of Writing, Fighting, and Filmmaking, his posthumously-published autobiography. (Fuller died in 1997, at the age of 85.)
    With Lee Marvin heading a cast of largely forgotten newcomers, The Big Red One is less concerned with melodrama and narrative than the experience itself, an overnight maturation process based on the ability to separate killing from murder. While the theme has been explored in the intellectually elevated regions of Apocalypse Now (1979) and Full Metal Jacket (1987), Fuller has no aspirations to create high art, especially out of such carnage. This is storytelling at its most basic level. And if he occasionally succumbs to the convenience of lumbering, broad comedy (the baby delivery scene) or transparent metaphor (a schizophrenic firing a gun at random, screaming “I’m normal! I’m just like you!”), I’d still take this feverish memoir over the lofty Coppola and Kubrick films any day of the week.