The Big Red One (1980)
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There are some movies which are called classics, and which could have been classics, and which just fall short of the mark. The Big Red One is just one of those films, and falls under all three categories.
The cast is a line up of past, present, and future (for 1980) stars, including war movie staple Lee Marvin, upcoming Star Wars star Mark Hamill, and future "Revenge of the Nerds" star Robert Carradine.
The premise is your typical war movie plot, in that it follows a squad in the Army's "Big Red One" through their episodic and twisted adventures (if you want to call it that) in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and later on the beaches of Normandy. We're shown just how weird and surreal the whole war experience can get, from being driven over in tiny foxholes by enemy tanks, to the resistance in a mental asylum, and later assisting with a childbirth inside an enemy tank.
The problem is the whole experience is just very mechanical, as is most of the acting. Carradine's voice-over narration doesn't lend much to the experience either, although it intends to lend some perspective to their situations.
Then there is the parallelism in Marvin's character. The film starts with him during World War I, killing an enemy soldier just hours after the war has ended, but he hasn't gotten the news yet. Seems he's the one responsible for the "Big Red One" moniker as well. Then later he winds up on that same plain, with an ominous lonely cross. And at the end of this war, he repeats his mistake, but this time is given a chance to correct it.... Honestly this little subplot is about the deepest aspect of the film. Without it, The Big Red One would be completely devoid of anything resembling meaning.
But don't get me completely wrong, there are lots of little meaningful moments, which provide a brief interlude of sanity, even if they are ultimately depressing. Such as the boy they rescue from the concentration camp, and the little girl decorating the Sarge's helmet with flowers.
So is it a completely bad movie? No, not really. I just don't think its worthy of a lot of the praise given it. I'd rate it merely average. There are a lot better movies than this, and a whole lot worse ones to be sure. I'll let you ultimately decide.
I should mention that I saw the original cut of "The Big Red One", broadcast on AMC, and that there is a new "reconstructed" edition with 40 minutes of additional footage available. I may rethink my opinion after seeing that, so stay tuned.
Technorati Tags: war movie reviews, the big red one, 1980, lee marvin, mark hamill, robert carradine, world war ii 2, north africa, sicily, italy, france, d-day
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Description
DVD Features: Audio CommentaryDocumentariesPhoto galleryTV SpotTheatrical Trailer
Sam Fuller's The Big Red One was already one of the best films of 1980, despite the fact that the version released to theaters ran barely half as long as the director's cut. Fuller had been America's ballsiest B-movie auteur, an ex-newspaper reporter of the hardnosed breed who made fiercely personal, radically stylized, and politically outspoken films between the early '50s (The Steel Helmet, Pickup on South Street) and the early '60s (Shock Corridor). The Big Red One was his long-dreamt-of account of World War II as experienced by his own squad of the 1st Infantry Division, USA, from the first shot fired (by a dead man, on the coast of North Africa) to the last (in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia). Even in the studio-truncated version, there was no shortage of astonishing moments and sequences: the squad choking on dust in a bat-filled cave in North Africa as German tanks clatter past the entrance; Fuller's cold-blooded distillation of the D-Day slaughter on Omaha Beach, with a wrist watch on a dead arm in the surf marking time as the water slopping over it grows redder; the rifle squad delivering a Frenchwoman's baby in a German tank on a battlefield full of corpses; a commando-like raid on Nazi troops bivouacked in a Belgian insane asylum. A quarter-century later, film critic Richard Schickel and Warner Bros. executive Brian Jamieson succeeded in restoring 15 never-seen sequences and fleshing out 23 others to create The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, a "new" film nearly an hour longer. Above all, BR1: The Reconstruction has a rhythm the 1980 cut lacked. The arc of years, battles, and battlegrounds is so much more satisfying. Greater play is given to Fuller's feeling for children caught up in the sidewash of history and atrocity. And the 2004 cut puts sex back into the movie, not orgiastically but as a fact of life and a rarely forgotten driving force. We can see now that Fuller touched, bluntly and shockingly, on the phenomenon of infiltrators--English-speaking German warriors who donned GI khaki and moved among their enemies waiting for a chance to strike. It's also apparent, as it was not in 1980, that Lee Marvin as the eternal Sergeant leading the young squad is magnificent. This was Marvin's greatest role, rivaled only by his walking dead man in John Boorman's Point Blank. Just beneath the masterly implacability, we glimpse the tenderness, rage, dark humor, experience, and wisdom beyond guilt that have enabled him to survive, to preserve others and to soldier on. His performance, like Fuller's film, is a masterpiece. --Richard T. Jameson
DVD Information
Binding: DVDAspect Ratio: 1.85:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Brand: Warner Brothers
Manufacturer: Warner Home Video
Original Release Date:
Actors:
- Mark Hamill
- Robert Carradine
Features
- "The real glory of war," Samuel Fuller said, "is surviving." A decorated combatant with the famed U.S. First Infantry in WWII, Fuller survived. His 1980 film version of his war experiences did not until now. Working with 70,000 feet of vault materials and Fuller's shooting script, critic/filmmaker Richard Schickel heads a reconstruction that adds over 40 minutes and transforms a truncated but admi
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