THE BIG RED ONE Movie Review

1980 Samuel Fuller

Though Lee Marvin won his Best Actor Academy Award for Cat Ballou, his performance as the Sergeant in Sam Fuller's autobiographical view of World War II may be his best work. It certainly appears to be his most comfortable role, comfortable in the sense that he is not acting but playing himself on screen. As the veteran—both a fictional and a real veteran himself—Marvin is the central figure in a small ensemble that retraces Fuller's wartime experiences.

The story actually begins at the end of World War I, where the Sergeant is part of a nightmarish three-way encounter with a shell-shocked horse and a German. The black-and-white scene takes place on a desolate plain dominated by a huge wooden statue of a hollow-eyed Christ on the Cross. That's where the Sergeant comes up with a design for a “big red one” to represent the First Infantry Division. Flash forward to 1942, off the coast of North Africa. The Sergeant is now in charge of a rifle squad of raw recruits, among them Griff (Mark Hamill), Zab (Robert Carradine), Vinci (Bobby DiCicco), and Johnson (Kelly Ward). That quintet will go from North Africa, through Sicily, to Normandy, and finally to Czechoslovakia.

The film's point of view never rises beyond their ground-level experience, whether they're hiding in a cave from advancing Germans, celebrating a rare victory on a hilltop, or creeping through a bombed out town. Zab, a cigar-chomping fledgling novelist, provides a running commentary on the action via voice-over. His deadpan observations provide one side of Fuller's views. As the men board the landing boat for their first engagement, he says, “There are four things you can hear on the boat: the waves, the engines, an occasional muffled prayer, and the sound of 50 guys heaving their guts out.” Fuller fills the screen with the same kind of carefully chosen details. The men put condoms over their rifle barrels to keep out the salt water during the assault, and in every spare minute in the field, they obsessively clean and care for their weapons.

But Fuller doesn't allow his episodic story to become mired in minutiae. Never one to neglect the more lurid, pulp aspects, he fills the second half of the film with increasingly surreal scenes of sudden violence—most notably in the asylum sequence—and punctuates the action with bleak humor. “Killing insane people is not good for public relations,” the Sergeant says. That comedy evaporates at the conclusion, the liberation of the concentration camp at Falkenau, where the squad faces the final dimension of the war's horror.

Budgetary limitations restrain Fuller's depiction of such crucial scenes as the D-Day invasion, but he works well with what he has and makes the fear that the men experienced seem real enough, even if he can't re-create the invasion as spectacularly as Spielberg does in Saving Private Ryan. That sense of emotional truth is the film's overriding strength. Some of the parallels Fuller draws between American and German soldiers may seem too blatant, but he earns the right to make those points. He also makes them swiftly and moves on. Perhaps no American filmmaker has understood the importance of a quick pace more than Fuller. At times his impatience gets in his way, when a longer moment of reflection might be called for, but that is probably not a fair criticism. According to some reports, as much as 40% of the film's running time was cut before its release.

Even so, The Big Red One is Fuller's personal masterpiece, and one of the best films to come out of World War II.

Cast: Lee Marvin (The Sergeant), Robert Carradine (Zab), Mark Hamill (Griff), Stephane Audran (Walloon), Bobby DiCicco (Vinci), Perry Lang (Kaiser), Kelly Ward (Johnson), Siegfried Rauch (Schroeder), Serge Marquand (Rensonnet), Charles Macaulay (General/Captain), Alain Doutey (Broban), Maurice Marsac (Vichy Colonel), Colin Gilbert (Dog Face P.O.W.), Joseph Clark (Shep), Ken Campbell (Lemchek), Doug Werner (Switolski), Marthe Villalonga (Mme. Marbaise); Written by: Samuel Fuller; Cinematography by: Adam Greenberg; Music by: Dana Kaproff. Producer: Lorimar Productions, Gene Corman. MPAA Rating: PG. Running Time: 113 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV.