The Big Red One (1980)

"The Big Red One" is a nickname given to the 1st Infantry Squadron's on World War 2. The film is brilliantly scripted, and feels very realistic in it's depictions of World War 2 battles. There's a reason why the film is realistic. It's based on actual experiences that the Writer/Director, Sam Fuller, went through during his time in the war.

The movie follows several soldiers in The 1st Infantry. Lee Marvin brilliantly plays The Sergeant. Four soldiers under his command, played by Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Kelly Ward and Bobby Di Cicco, have been named The Four Hoursemen, and they become well known among other soldiers. Despite being in a position and squad, where most troops come in and die before others even know their names, these four manage to live through the most dangerous situations and missions. Most of the time without even getting a scratch on them.

There's no big overall story in "The Big Red One". It's made up of many different combat scenes that The Sergeant and his men fight in. The D-Day footage is almost as realistic and frightening as those shot in "Saving Private Ryan", and this was made 18 years earlier. There are some very dramatic and intense scenes in this film, but it avoids making the viewer feel too depressed or saddened, thanks to a lot of light humour throughout the script.

Although "The Big Red One" is not well known, it easily ranks up there with Saving Private Ryan, Apocalypse Now, and Tora Tora Tora as one of the greatest war films of all time. I can't recommend this movie enough to anyone reading this. "The Big Red One" does not disappoint. It gets a perfect 10 from me.

Fmovies: The Big Red One isn't so much a war movie as it is a message, sometimes obscure, of what war is really like. There is much symbolism in this movie, for example the human arm, with a wristwatch on it, washing in the bloody surf of Omaha Beach. If you want realistic detail of combat, watch Saving Private Ryan. If you want to the voice of experience, blurry from the passage of time, The Big Red One is a movie to see.

Keep in mind that this movie reflects the life experiences of some survivors of WWII. That Lee Marvin was cast as the grizzled sergeant is part of the symbolism: Marvin was a combat Marine who participated in the invasion of Saipan; he is cast as a survivor of WWI who is retracing part of the path he took during that conflict. I found some of the scenes from the movie barely believable, for example, the French insane asylum, but you must keep in mind that there is a message from the survivors of that war in each and every scene. How you take the message, apparently, is up to you.

BR1 has been my top WWII movie for 25 yrs, incl. Private Ryan. Spielberg wishes he could have created something this real, this moving. No smoke and mirrors, just the gritty reality.

The Reconstruction is a different movie. About 3 minutes of original film to 15 of new. It's so obvious, if you know the first movie, that Hollywood forced Sam FUller to trim away most of the grit and pain. BR1 is tough and real, but squeaky-50s-clean compared to the Reconstruction. All the real impact was trimmed away. That must have hurt.

There was a point, about 2 hours in, I thought, "I can't take much more of this." And it hit me that Fuller intended that. Pushed us to that limit, so we would experience a tiny bit of the exhaustion, the overload, the need to just get away from it for a while. Private Ryan never even got close. I can't think of any WWII movie that got close. And I've watched them all.

Band of Brothers is the only work I would put in the same frame as the Reconstructed BR1. If you haven't seen either, buckle up. It's going to be a bumpy night.

The Big Red One fmovies. When I first saw THE BIG RED ONE in the early 80s I was fairly impressed especially with the twist at the end tying in with the start though I wouldn`t have gone so far to have called it a classic . However I was about 15 when I saw it and many teenagers of my generation still enjoyed feature films about the second world war . Alas a lot has happened in the film world not to mention my life so when I saw it again at the weekend I was very much underwhelmed by the movie

First of all I found it rather disjointed and episodic . In many ways THE BIG RED ONE laid the foundations for BAND OF BROTHERS but whereas that acclaimed mini series dedicates the first episode to jump school training followed by nine one hour episodes from June 1944 to the Summer of 1945 , this movie has a running time of less than two hours featuring a timeframe that lasts from Spring 1942 to May 1945 which seems a bad idea with hindsight: Cut to Algeria 1942 , cut to Sicily 1943 , cut to Normandy 1944 etc . Also THE BIG RED ONE lacks a budget big enough to make the film convincing ( Well it was made by Lorimar the company who brought us DALLAS ). No matter where the action takes place the landscape resembles sunny California especially the beaches of Western france which looks suspicously like the same place BAY WATCH is filmed , every expense has been saved where location filming is concerned . I`m also surprised I didn`t notice something from my first viewing and that`s the German tiger tank not being a tiger tank at all but it being an American Sherman , and strange that you never see two tanks side by side . No doubt the production team couldn`t afford to hire more than one tank . And looking back on this film 20 years later after seeing APOCALYPSE NOW , A BRIDGE TOO FAR , CROSS OF IRON , SAVING PRIVATE RYAN , THE THIN RED LINE and BLACK HAWK DOWN I can`t say the battle scenes in THE BIG RED ONE are all that impressive to me in 2003.

THE BIG RED ONE does have a few good points . First of all it does make mention of the British contribution to the war which is something you don`t see in American films in recent times . There`s an interesting subplot ( Though it`s painfully underwritten ) about Mark Hamill`s character being a coward . There`s also a great line about it " Being okay to kill sane people but not insanes ones ? " . But the best part of the movie is a moving segment featuring Lee Marvin`s tough Sarge befriending a child who`s just been liberated from a Nazi death camp , though once again this is skated over far too quickly in a film that`s got too many negatives and not enough positives . As I said I waited 20 years between seeing it for the first and second time and could happily wait for another 20 years before seeing it a third time

A lot of people hate The Big Red One. They call it farcical, uneven, clichéd. They find it farcical, I believe, because the film revels in the absurdity of war rather than gloss over it. They would rather watch a film, like Saving Private Ryan, which ignores absurdity in favor of violence. These people find it uneven because the "important scenes" (like the D-Day and North African invasion) take only a minute or two to conclude, while other scenes, less typical of a war movie, spread out before us. They call it clichéd because the movie is unsubtle in its treatment of character development and plot.

I cannot agree with these beliefs. The Big Red One is not only one of the greatest WWII films, it is also one of the greatest war movies.

Sam Fuller's film, which was butchered by the studio, is the picaresque tale of 5 members of the First Infantry, known, because of their shoulder patch, as the Big Red One. The film moves from one story to the next without spending too much time on any particular tale.

The individual vignettes, as they must, vary in quality, but on the whole are excellent. The Big Red One stirs within you a desire to run right out and tell your friends about this amazing scene or that.

There's the soldier who loses his testicle, the birthing scene in the belly of a tank, Lee Marvin, in Middle Eastern garb, traipsing across a beach, soldiers dug into holes over which a Panzer tank division travels, the entire Mad House segment... The list goes on.

Some people dislike the absurdest nature of several of this film's stories, but, for me, those surreal touches make this film great.

Without them (and there are a lot), you would be left with a very normal and very boring film. Using bandoleers as stirrups is genius, as is the woman faking crazy as she whirls through a monastery, slicing German throats.

The performances are solid, for this type of film, but if you are looking for subtlety, go elsewhere. Each character is drawn in broad strokes; you never learn too much about them, but you learn enough to understand who they are and why. Lee Marvin, as usual, is amazing. He is one of the great, gruff actors of our time, bringing a special, intangible quality to every film in which I've seen him. He makes every movie he's in better just by showing up. There are too few actors about whom you can say that.

Like the acting, the direction is masculine, but, for a war movie, that's a compliment. In some ways, Fuller's direction here and in his other films reminds me of Hemmingway's writing - terse and effective. Both men believe in an economy of shots or words, depending on their medium, but, through that economy, they attain a muscular sort of poetry akin to the beauty of a horse's rippling muscles as it races on a plain. Fuller's direction here, though not his best when compared to Underworld USA or Shock Corridor, is still better than most, especially considering that this was his first film in several years.

All in all, I find the Big Red One to be an exemplary war movie, even in its emasculated format (I cannot wait to see the restored, 140 minute print, which should improve upon scenes that feel to brief in this version). It's certainly no Apocalypse Now, but it puts to shame most World War II epics before or since.

In the past several months, I've clicked by on television and seen that The Big Red One was on, and I would check it out for a few minutes or so, here and there as it were. I knew though, once it became official that the New York film festival was premiering it, that the reconstructed version of Samuel Fuller's epic was going to be seen as no longer being truncated. When it was over, I felt as though, like with his other films I've seen (Pickup on South Street and Shock Corridor to a degree), that I'd seen something special- a work of art that's told with such straight-forward precision it elevates the B genre. There is something about war that is, like life usually, a contradiction. There are scenes and instances in Fuller's film where confusion occurs, and tragedy comes about as if it's springing out of nature.

But what Fuller captures as well is the camaraderie, so to speak, of the platoon- the humor, the understanding of one another that strengthens when other soldiers come and go without much notice. And the strengths and humanity of the sergeant (here portrayed in a performance that could possibly be better or at least on part with what was in The Dirty Dozen) comes through clearest of all. The Big Red One, at its extended length, is one of Fuller's triumphs as a storyteller; infusing his own experiences in the first battalion (the cigar that re-appears with one character signify who he made as his kind of alter-ego) as well as others he fought with, stories he heard, etc. While it is a film that lends itself partly to the ideals of the "old-fashioned" WW2 films, it's very modern in its personal take on the situations, battle sequences/outcomes, and the dynamics of the characters. To put it another way, what Oliver Stone was to Vietnam, Samuel Fuller was to WW2, to an extent.

Though his version of, for instance, the invasion of Omaha beach, doesn't have the grainy, documentary feel of Saving Private Ryan, the realism and suspense and chaos it all there. Fuller's experience as a journalist - his sense of detail and pacing in the scenes - is what gives that sequence involving Marvin and his men, among others, such truth. Along with the Israeli cinematographer Adam Greenburg, who would go on to lens the first two Terminator films, The Big Red One brings forth numerously unforgettable images. The climax, in and of itself, in which the quote I mentioned is put to the test for Mark Hammil's Pvt. Griff, is extraordinary. The shots, the faces, and usage of light, and the acting by him and the others, brought to me some of the strangest emotional reaction (not as in crying, but empathizing) I ever felt in a war film. In that respect the film, in scenes like that, and in the little moments with the "four horsemen" and their episodes, are on the level (if not superior) to the emotional connectedness that Spielberg or Stone achieved.

The script is a feat as a story of the stead-fast progression of the soldiers from North Africa to Germany. However without the cast it might have faltered. Marvin pulls off a rounded character by the end and is successful in his own right, but the four privates are the show. Most of the time if not all through, Ward and Di Cicco (not very well known actors to me before viewing this film) are very dependable for some comic and sensible interludes. Carradine's Zab (Fuller's re-incarnation) is in a performance of insight, amusement, and is a crucial piece to the film. It is Hammil then that comes away as most