Samuel Fuller’s account of the infantry war he fought himself is blunt, cheap in places and unsentimental to the bone, with Lee Marvin at its centre doing almost nothing and doing it perfectly. The younger men are types, and the money shows. It still lands.
Samuel Fuller served as a rifleman with the 1st Infantry Division in the Second World War, and he spent the decades afterwards trying to get its story on to a screen. The Big Red One is what he got: a sergeant and four riflemen followed from a beach in North Africa in 1942 to the last days of the war in Europe, in episodes joined by a title card and a map. It is told by a man who was there and did not think it needed dressing up. We think it is one of the best American films about that war, and we also think a newcomer may spend the first twenty minutes wondering what the fuss is about.
The opening sets the tone. In 1918 a soldier bayonets a German who is walking towards him with his hands up, then learns the war has been over for four hours. The soldier is the Sergeant, played by Lee Marvin, and the film never gives him a name. By 1942 he is leading a squad that includes Zab (Robert Carradine), who chews cigars and narrates the film as if dictating the novel he means to write, Griff (Mark Hamill), the best shot among them and the one who cannot pull the trigger on a man he can see, Vinci (Bobby Di Cicco) and Johnson (Kelly Ward). Replacements turn up, die and are forgotten. The four of them agree not to learn any more names. It sounds like a hard line. Fuller plays it as housekeeping.
Marvin does not seem to be acting. He walks slightly stooped, speaks in a flat murmur, and when he does something kind he does it exactly as he does something brutal, without changing his face. The scene we did not expect is the one where the squad delivers a baby inside a tank, and the Sergeant, having pulled rubber over his fingers, talks a frightened woman through it in a language she does not speak. We laughed at the set-up and then the child cried and we were nearer to tears than we were ready to be, because Marvin never once lets the moment know it is moving.
Adam Greenberg shoots the desert in hard white light with almost no shadow, so that men stand out against it like targets, which is the point. On the Normandy beach he keeps the camera down in the surf, at the height of a man lying in it. The famous image there is a dead soldier’s wristwatch, returned to by editor Morton Tubor as the water rises and reddens around it. We were horrified by that watch, more than by any of the bodies, and it costs nothing; there is no wide shot of the landing because Fuller could not afford one and did not need one. Dana Kaproff’s score has the good sense to sit out the fighting.
The flaws are plain. The four young men are types more than people, and Hamill, who is given the only real arc, plays it with care while the writing does most of the work. Vinci and Johnson are barely there. Zab’s voice-over has a habit of telling us what a scene has just shown. Siegfried Rauch’s Schroeder, a German sergeant who keeps reappearing as the Sergeant’s mirror, is the one device that feels written rather than remembered.
Against that, Stéphane Audran turns up as a Walloon woman for a single sequence that is as strange as anything Fuller ever shot, and the second half arrives somewhere we will not describe. The version that reached cinemas in 1980 runs 113 minutes and was cut down against Fuller’s wishes; a longer reconstruction was assembled after his death, and several critics prefer it. We think the short one already says what it means.
Fuller made The Steel Helmet thirty years earlier, and it is the leaner film. This one is the fuller account, and the one he wanted made. Watch it with the sound up and no phone to hand. It is a 15 certificate, and the deaths in it are quick, frequent and given no music at all.
