The Big Red One

Written and Directed by Sam Fuller, based on the book by Sam Fuller.

Summary: The 1st infantry division of the U.S. army participated in all the major battles in Europe from North Africa onwards. This movie follows a Sergeant and four members of a squad as they fight their way through two continents, many countries and countless enemy soldiers.

A bit of History

During WWII, many infantry divisions suffered casualty rates in excess of 100%. A casualty means either a soldier is injured, killed in action or missing. How, you might ask, could a division sustain greater than 100% casualties and still be in existence? By replacing anyone injured with someone new. Also, injured soldiers, newly healed, were returned to the lines to fight again. Several divisions, including the U.S. 1st Infantry, sustained greater than 200% casualties. For four privates and a Sergeant from the same rifle squad to make it all the way through the war without at least one of them dying would be stretching the laws of averages.

It is this stretching of the laws of averages that Sam Fuller uses as the basic plot device in The Big Red One. He shows us a Sergeant and four privates (known as the Four Horsemen in the book) struggling their way through the war, trying desperately to stay alive. He engages our interest in them, and we’re drawn along, wanting them to live, wanting them to make it all the way through.

The Sergeant is known only as The Sergeant, an anonymous embodiment of the fighting man. He opens the film in 1918, an American fighting at the end of the Great War. He doesn’t know the war is over, and finds out in a way that shocks him to the core.

From there, we flash forward to 1942, on a boat headed for North Africa, where we meet the other 4 invincibles in the rifle squad. There’s Griff, a cartoonist (played by Mark Hamill), Zab, a cigar smoking writer (Robert Carradine) from the Bronx, Vinci, a sax player of Italian descent (Bobby Di Cicco) and Johnson, a Southerner with hemmhorroids (Kelly Ward). On the German side, we are only shown Schroeder, a fanatical and expert killing machine.

Lee Marvin doesn’t really look like a very young soldier in the first segment, in 1918, but it is just barely possible to see him as a young man from whom all the humanity has been sucked by the war and by killing. Lee Marvin is a timeless actor in any case, in that he’s looked the same age since the late 50’s. Of the other Four Horsemen, Hamill and Carradine get the most differentiation. Hamill plays an Expert rifleman who can’t kill someone when he can see their eyes. Carradine mostly stands out because he always has a cigar sticking out of his mouth. All have the callowness and invincibility of youth. One of the sad things about the movie is that we don’t get to see the realization that they’re not invincible, except as we watch everyone around them fall away and be left behind.

Sidebar – Sam Fuller

If you look carefully, in Cornelius Ryan’s The Longest Day, you’ll see that Ryan read an unpublished manuscript by “Sammy Fuller”. Fuller took part in D-Day, as part of the First Infantry Division, and he is characterized in the movie by Zab.

The Battles:

The Big Red One is a curious movie, alternating between quiet sections and high tension battle moments. The rifle squad begins in North Africa, assaulting a beach defended half-heartedly by Vichy French. Then they assault Sicily, heavily defended. Their assault on Italy is a casualty in the compression in the transition from book to screen. After spending a good long time in Sicily, finding guns, being heroes, wiggling out snipers, they move on to Omaha Beach.

The Omaha Beach scenes, seen now, must be compared to those in Saving Private Ryan. Saving Private Ryan benefits from 20 years of advances in special effects, making the waters look full of boats, and the explosions bigger, more “realistic”. Saving Private Ryan had a much larger budget (even allowing for inflation), and a much greater portion of that picture was devoted to Omaha Beach, so they had to get it right. The Big Red One looks amateurish by comparison. There is a minor detail that is still striking, though. It is the use of the watch, on a dead man’s arm, showing the passage of time, as the water around it gets bloodier.

Sidebar – Sentimentality, lack of.

There’s very few attempts made by Fuller to go for the easy emotional moment. We don’t start feeling for these guys because of any obvious actor “moments”. There’s no time, with everything that Fuller wanted to cram into the movie, to have more than a few hurried looks between the guys, to show depth of feeling. The movie is moved along more by events than feelings. Similarly, Marvin doesn't need to act (although he does act) as much as he needs to just stand there, while the camera takes in the silent cragginess of his face, which speaks volumes.

Sidebar – Character progression

One problem with The Big Red One is that there’s no physical changes in the characters to show 30 months worth of fighting. Each of the Four Horsemen looks the same in the Hurtgen Forest in Germany in December 1944 as they did on the beach in North Africa in 1942.

Czechoslovakia:

In Czechoslovakia, the movie comes as close as it ever does to displaying a moral centre, and engaging our emotions. In liberating a death camp, Griff finally overcomes his scruples about killing someone whose eyes he can see, in a harrowing, sickening and moving scene. The Sergeant, for much of the movie a stoic, leaves enough of himself vulnerable to hope that he can beat back death, in trying to nurse back to health a camp survivor. It’s a scene I can’t watch without crying hot tears.

When Eisenhower saw these camps, he made every soldier not on the front lines fighting see them, so they could see what they were fighting to prevent.

“The real glory of war is surviving”

Sidebar – tone and violence

This is a violent movie, but not overpoweringly gruesome. You won’t find limbs flying through the air or eviscerated bodies popping out of nowhere as you will in Saving Private Ryan. It’s war. There’s death. But it’s 1980 death, not 1999 death. The race to show ever more explicit and gruesomely dead bodies had not started when this movie was made. In some ways, this is like a 1960’s film in its depiction of death and killing. Having said that, I still urge caution in watching this movie expecting a few yuks. It’s not that kind of war movie, where you can laugh along with the wisecracks comfortably, and then be telegraphed into switching gears into “serious” mode. The wisecracks and the emotional and the action all can catch you by surprise.

Similar movies I think others might enjoy.

Those who like The Big Red One might enjoy The Dirty Dozen, which has the same general “war is hell” tone to it. The Dirty Dozen is supposedly to guys what An Affair to Remember is to women (according to one of Nora Ephron’s characters in Sleepless in Seattle, anyway). Suicide Run, with Michael Caine and Cliff Robertson has always impressed me for its action sequences, and you might enjoy that one too.

Who would enjoy this movie

It’s difficult to “type” the person who would enjoy this movie. If you don’t like war (and who among us can be said to “like” war), you might be drawn in by the anti-glory message of The Big Red One. If you’re into battle strategy scenes, conversely, you probably won’t like this movie, because it spends most of its time with the rifle squad, away from the upper management of the war.

Also recommended

I recommend that you read mangiotto's excellent review of this movie.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older