The Big Red One

The Big Red One is the film that Samuel Fuller always wanted to make, and was finally able to in the twilight of his career. Fuller spent the majority of his career working with tiny budgets while still managing to turn out some truly great films that were really underappreciated in their time. Fuller started making films in the late 1940s and continued to do so until an 11 year respite (save for one made-for-French-tv movie) that began after 1969’s Shark and ended when he made the Big Red One in 1980. Now for some reason or another, this film has received a significant amount of praise and I can not understand why. The film is simply a mess.

Samuel Fuller based almost all of the scenes off of actual events that happened to him while serving as a soldier in the actual 1^st Infantry Division. And it’s a shame because while they play out really well in his autobiography, they just don’t translate to the screen. Lee Marvin plays The Sergeant who leads a pack of young men who call themselves the Four Horsemen as they battle all over Europe and Africa throughout World Ward II with one scene, the best scene, taking place at the tail end of the first World War. Curiously, Marvin’s character doesn’t seem to age at all over this 20-plus year period. But that’s not really a complaint. The only complaint I have regarding age is that most of the dialogue seems to have been written by someone still in middle school.

Everything feels awkward and forced. The movie keeps telling you how to feel and when to feel it. One scene in particular is so mishandled that I felt embarrassed for the director while watching it. Near the end of the film, the Sergeant and the Four Horsemen wind up liberating a concentration camp. One character, Griff, wonders off alone and stumbles into a room full of ovens. The ovens contain the bones of holocaust victims and one Nazi soldier whose gun misfires. Now throughout the movie we have been told over and over how much Griff hates killing, and there are plenty of scenes where he hesitates to fire his gun. Now in this scene, overcome with horror, Griff, shoots the Nazi. Again. And again. And again. He doesn’t stop. He even reloads his gun at one point and just goes on and on. It just becomes awkward because the film just keeps telling you how “powerful” this scene is supposed to be. But you never actually feel much of anything while watching it. You’re not supposed to tell the audience, you are supposed to show them. And the Big Red One never does that.

Not everything is bad though. There are some really satisfying scenes in the movie. The opening scene is beautiful. It’s just that the film is so uneven. Each time that the films is about to establish a nice rhythm it veers off with some awkward scene that doesn’t even fit. It is really disappointing that Fuller made such a disaster of a film. And even more so that critics ignore its bad quality. Fuller made the Steel Helmet and Pickup on South Street, two of my favorite films, and I think that because he has done such great work in the past, critics have felt that that some how vindicates this movie. It doesn’t. If anyone else had made this movie, nobody would care.