E-Mail This Article to a Friend Slammin’ Sam Fuller speaks — and Henry Rollins opines BY GERALD PEARY

If only Sam Fuller, who died in 1997, had lived to see the magnificent restoration, with 15 new scenes, of his 1980 World War II masterpiece, The Big Red One, which plays this week, December 3 through 9, at the Brattle Theatre. My happiest moment at Cannes 2004 was to be among hundreds of "cult" Fuller fans cheering the world premiere of the stupendous new version.

What a revelation, the picture that Fuller intended. The last time I’d seen The Big Red One was at its original release, when it was 50 minutes shorter than its current, 188-minute epic length. The narrative then — scissored down, without Fuller’s imprimatur, by philistines at Lorimar Productions — was rambling, incoherent, only intermittently involving. But my dissatisfaction with this bowdlerized film wasn’t going to stop me from an audience with the great man himself. Fuller, then (in 1980) 67, was available for an interview. And so I found myself in LA up in Laurel Canyon, in an old, narrow, unglamorous house. There he held court, puffing on a ubiquitous long cigar, pounding out scripts on a ratty manual typewriter, reminiscing with visitors about his golden days making "A" pictures on "B" budgets. It was the Europeans who discovered him and heralded his gritty, super-cinematic, tough-guy flicks: The Steel Helmet (1950), Pickup on South Street (1953), Forty Guns (1957), Underworld USA (1960), Shock Corridor (1963), The Naked Kiss (1965). But in 1967, he was taken off Shark!, with Burt Reynolds, and for the next decade, he sat home, dreaming movies. Finally, Peter Bogdanovich, a Fuller devotee, helped get backing for a work based on his World War II Army experiences. The Big Red One.

I had been warned: Fuller talks your ear off, and The Big Red One’s existence has much to do with the filmmaker’s motormouth perseverance. In a studio meeting, he recited the plot in such enthusiastic, infinitesimal detail that Lorimar practically agreed to do the film to quiet him. "Can’t anybody shut this guy up?" is a famous quote from an exhausted Lorimar executive. I received one of the shortest audiences with Fuller on record, only three hours of his zany, speedy monologues. That’s because as he talked, he was packing a suitcase for the airport.

We conversed in "The Cave," his home office, a dusty room of scripts, books, memorabilia, and rancid cigar air from his decades of non-stop puffing. Fuller acted out a scenario he was making up on the spot, about Nixon and Watergate. "Gerry," he said, slapping me on the leg, "I can see it!" His eyes twinkled. "Tricky Dick walks into a hotel room!" He improvised the dialogue of several odious Nixon acolytes, including a rasping Kissinger. "What a picture it would make!"

The Worcester native, a lifelong Democrat, segued into a movie idea about Joseph McCarthy. "McCarthy goes into his apartment. This girl asks, ‘How’s it coming?’ He says, ‘If I can put the screws to these bastards, I’m on the cover of Life. These are fucking schmucks!’ " Fuller boiled over with excitement imagining his scenario. "Gerry, I would love to tear the heart out of an audience with the lousiest son-of-a-bitch ever going. Why don’t they make this movie?"

I kept the conversation as much as possible away from The Big Red One, since I was less than crazy about the 1980 release version. But I had to ask Fuller: was the Bobby Carradine character, Private Zab, based on himself? He’s a cigar-chomping young soldier who fights his way through Northern Africa, Italy, Normandy, Czechoslovakia, in order to get a novel out of the experience. In answer, the filmmaker pulled down a 1944 book from his shelf: The Dark Page, penned by a youthful military recruit named Samuel Michael Fuller. And he gave me a paperback of his 1980 movie tie-in novel of The Big Red One, inscribing it, "Gerald, try to survive."

"EVERYBODY HATES A CRITIC, but everyone’s a critic. Why not me?" asks rocker Henry Rollins? No problem: the Independent Film Channel has handed Henry his own 10-part reviewing show, which begins this Saturday, December 4. Am I annoyed? You bet, for here in media America, anyone with an opinion, no matter how brainless and clichéd, is deemed qualified to weigh in on cinema. In the pilot that I suffered through, Rollins raved about Narc as "a roller-coaster journey told with urgency," and his moronic guest, Rob Zombie, chimed in, "I thought it was awesome." Then three porn-star ladies on a bed gave their autobiographical thoughts inspired by Boogie Nights: "My first scene, my cherry popped, etc." Then Rollins came back, suddenly intellectual, recommending Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai: "You gotta watch subtitles. I guarantee you it’s worth it." Thanks, Henry.