Samuel Fuller was a pulp writer, journalist, and film creator. In the last category he both directed and wrote screenplays. His films were usually low budget affairs. This was necessary when he felt the need to work outside the Hollywood system and dodge some of the restrictions of the Hays Code (for example, he had an interracial romance between a Japanese-American detective and white blonde in The Crimson Kimono). However, there was one dream project he needed more money for, and that was a war movie based on his own experiences as a 1st Division infantryman in World War II. The movie almost got into production several times, starting in the 50s, but it was not until 1980 that Fuller got the time and funding to finally bring his vision to life.
Fuller
was keen to depict World War II without the typical Hollywood sheen. He avoided
the typical route of having a unifying character or plot arc. Instead he simply
followed a squad of men throughout America’s involvement in Europe,
particularly in the Army’s 1st Division. The 1st
Division’s red insignia is the reason for the film’s title The Big Red One. Negative critics have not been too keen on this
aspect, feeling that the movie rambles from scene to scene. However, this was
intentional. A veteran himself, Fuller knew that war was a grind for the
soldiers, who moved from one battle and incident to the next until the whole
thing was over. Many of the more unusual incidents in the movie actually
occurred, with Fuller himself having been involved in an incident where GIs
helped a French woman deliver a baby inside a tank.
Underscoring Fuller’s attempt at realism was the casting of Lee Marvin as the nameless Sergeant. Like Fuller, Marvin was an actual World War II vet. He had served with the Marines in the Pacific and was involved in many amphibious assaults, getting wounded at the Battle of Saipan. Marvin himself deeply appreciated The Big Red One, bonding with Fuller over shared aspects of their backgrounds. Marvin was in plenty of war films, but often found them ludicrous and far from what he had experienced, so a more authentic film was a big breath of fresh air for him. Marvin could finally avoid macho stereotypes of the heroic American soldier, instead using certain marine officers’ quiet, authoritative demeanor inform his role as the fatherly sergeant of the other lead characters.
Samuel Fuller cameos as a
correspondent with a camera
The
Sergeant himself is a World War I vet who feels a a little haunted over killing a
German soldier after the armistice was signed (he thinks the surrendering Kraut
was playing a typical trick). While this incident helps with bookending the
film, it doesn’t cast too big a shadow, as Fuller chooses not to dwell on
dramatic story arcs. The Sergeant bonds with four men from his squad, with the
various Replacements throughout the war constantly dying off. This is actually
something that occurred with many units. A core group of men who were with the
unit since the beginning would make it to the end of the war while replacements
for casualties constantly got killed off (this is a theme of the excellent Band of Brothers mini-series).
The
four men are the artist and soft-hearted Griff (Mark Hamill), writer Zab
(Robert Carradine), Italian Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco), and Johnson (Kelly Ward,
whose character is the least developed and is kind of just there). For a while
Griff was the only significant live-action movie role for Mark Hamill outside
of Star Wars. He’s a sure shot with a rifle, but quickly finds it hard to kill
another man. Of all the characters he’s the only one to have something like a
dramatic arc, reluctantly participating in battle until finally, with a
disturbing half-grin, finds his killer’s streak when the squad discovers the
horrors of the Falkenau Concentration Camp. Zab is a stand-in for Samuel
Fuller, being an aspiring journalist and novel writer. Zab provides narration
to give context and explain details that the characters wouldn’t just exposit
onscreen.
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| Left to Right: Griff (Mark Hamill), Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco), Johnson (Kelly Ward), Sergeant (Lee Marvin), and Zab (Robert Carradine) |
Unfortunately, just as Fuller seemed to have his big budget, it was reduced, forcing him to make a couple changes to the production. The biggest was where he would shoot his film. Originally he was going to shoot on location in the regions where the 1st Division fought, but he had to settle for shooting most of the movie in Israel. Amusingly, this meant that most of the German extras were Jews. The battle scenes themselves are not very grand, but Fuller is usually able to compensate with tight shots and the nature of the film’s focus on a small group of men rather than the larger forces involved. Because of this, Big Red One manages to be both a low-budget war epic and a high-budget B-picture. However, Fuller’s vision was further constrained when United Artists forced him to edit his movie down to two hours. United Artists also had it edited in a way so as to make it a more conventional war buddies movie. Years after Samuel Fuller’s death, his wife Christa saw to it that a near three-hour Reconstruction Cut saw release. It had been twenty years since I saw the theatrical version, so I’m not entirely sure what was added where, but I get the sense there was more in the way of extended scenes than entirely new ones. Anyways, the Reconstruction Cut better shows what Fuller was going for in depicting the actual flow and experiences of war.
The movie features nearly every campaign of the 1st Infantry Division, so let’s go through them. The first setpiece is a landing in French North Africa (Operation Torch). Under Philippe Petain, Vichy France was an Axis-controlled remainder of conquered France that continued to administer part of France and its overseas colonies. The Americans were unsure whether the French would gladly accept their landings as a reversal of Nazi conquest or would fight out of some sense of honor. A sole French officer manages to start a battle in the movie, but his men kill him and manage to surrender. This leads to a moment where the French and Americans celebrate, oddly enough a ra-ra moment in spite of the fact that they just inflicted kills and wounds on each other.
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| The Squad has many scenes on a transport ship as they are hauled off to the next campaign. (https://filmfanatic.org/?p=118) |
The five characters get into several scraps in North Africa. One which might be entirely fictional is a building to building shootout in what looks like ancient ruins, with French cavalry riding in to help deal with a tank. More historically grounded is the defeat at Kasserine Pass, which I covered a bit in my Patton review. Here we get to see the Americans get routed by an armored German force. Lee Marvin actually reenacted how he got wounded on Saipan, down to the way he fell onto his knees. While on this moment I want to discuss the soldiers screaming in their foxholes as Panzers roll over them. At first I thought they were supposed to be getting crushed, but it didn’t look like it so I thought it was a poorly filmed sequence. Actually they were just screaming out of terror, something which soldiers did because, according to Fuller, they couldn’t be heard over the loud tank noises. Thus they could release their frustration without being regarded as “pussies.”
It’s
on to Sicily, which I also covered in my Patton
review. Here we get to see the perspective of soldiers on the ground, fighting
house to house and interacting with civilians along the way. There’s a fun
sequence where the squad enlists the help of a boy to find a troublesome
artillery piece in exchange for getting a nice casket for a dead family member.
The Omaha beach sequence of course can’t match the big-budget extravaganza of Saving Private Ryan’s opening, but it is
the biggest actions sequence of the film. There’s a drawn-out suspenseful
sequence where the Sergeant has to send men out one by one to construct and set
off a Bangalore explosive and make a breach. The climax has one of the only
appearances of a historical figure, Colonel George Taylor. Wanting to urge his
men to take advantage of the breach, he spouts his famous line, “Two kinds of
people are staying on this beach: The dead and those who are about to die!”
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| Omaha Beach |
For those seeking thrilling action sequences, they might find the treatment of the final battles disappointing. The Battle of Huertgen Forest is one of those battles that gets overlooked in popular history, but was notorious among the actual veterans. Here the Americans and Germans entered into a horrid stalemate in dense woods, the Germans intentionally flooding the dams in the surrounding areas to prevent any Allied breakthrough. In the movie there’s a very small-scale fight which is even tinier in the theatrical cut. For the Battle of the Bulge the characters don’t even do any proper battling, instead getting into incidents behind the front lines.
The
climax is the liberation of the Falkenau Concentration Camp in Czechoslovakia.
Samuel Fuller was among those who entered the camp and got some moviemaking
practice using a camera to document the evidence of atrocities there. That
being said, the camp’s depiction in Big
Red One is actually inaccurate. Among the liberated prisoners is a child
that the Sergeant forms a bond with, and the squad finds crematoriums. However,
the real Falkenau camps had no children and were not quite the death camps that
Jews faced. Rather the emphasis was on slave labor, with a male camp consisting
mostly of Soviet POWs and a female camp for political prisoners alongside a few
other forced women laborers. The incorporation of aspects from the Jew-killing
camps is there to give the characters the justification for fighting all the
way through Europe, but without beating the audience’s heads over it.
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| Sergeant seeks to give a boy a comforting and happy time after his ordeal in a concentration camp. (https://myworldvsthemovies.wordpress.com/2016/06/30/the-big-red-one-review/) |
On a final note there is actually a German counterpart to the Sergeant named Schroder (Siegfried Rauch). Every now and then he shows up to both give a differing German perspective and to show that the soldiers on the other side are not too different from the Americans with some of their concerns and thoughts. Schroder even practically repeats Sergeant's own beliefs about the difference between wartime killing and murder. He's a hapless figure, getting on the bad end of several encounters with the American leads. At the end of the movie his seemingly random inclusion is justified when Zab points out that he has more in common with this German than many of the replacement troops, because they both managed to survive the war from the beginning.
The Big Red One is a pretty
good movie, but I might be committing blasphemy in not finding it one of the
greatest war movies ever made. I love what Fuller and Lee Marvin were going for
and the director did a great job working around his lowered budget, but by its
nature the movie can be a bit rambling. I still recommend a watch. It’s a solid
World War II film that cuts out the melodrama and shows how mentally and
physically taxing being a soldier is. Famously, military officials complained
that the movie had no recruiting potential. Samuel Fuller took this as praise.
Rating:
7/10
Sam Fuller / steel helmet!!!
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