At the end of World War I, an American soldier killed a German soldier with a knife on the Western Front, but later found out the war ended four hours ago. 24 years later, the soldier is now Sergent of the American infantry unit "The Big Red One" during World War II. They depart to north Africa, where Vichy French soldiers of a military outpost lay their weapons down and surrender without a fight. They also fight Rommel's forces in the desert. The Sergent then leads his unit to the invasion of Sicily, and the Normandy landings. His soldiers include the nervous Griff, writer Zab who wants to write a novel about the war, Italian American Vinci, and others. With years, they go on to battle Nazi soldiers across Central Europe. They even storm a mental asylum, killing Nazi sodliers inside. When they capture a German-run concentration camp, the Sergeant releases a boy inside, but he dies, anyway. The Sergeant burries the boy in the forest. A German soldier surrenders because the war is over, but Sergeant stabs him with a knife, yet the soldier is saved by American soldiers who give him medicine.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, "The Big Red One" is Samuel Fuller's "war Amarcord", a recollection of his events during World War II, and thus the entire film is episodic, chaotic, raw and sometimes even surreal, since real life war really is like that, without a neat conclusion at the end. Fuller directed only four films after this one. Anti-patriotism and anti-pathos define "The Big Red One", and just like all of Fuller's films, it has a bitter, grim, 'hard-boiled' and sober visions of life. Certain sequences stand out due to their sheer bizarreness. In one, several soldiers sit at the stairs of an old city in Sicily, one of them, Smithy, stands up to get some water in the bucket. The minute he disappears behind the horizon, a giant explosion is seen behind it. The remaining soldiers run to see what happened: Smithy is wounded, but still alive, since he stepped into a tripwire. The Sergeant tells him the tripwire only castrated him, picks up some meat on the floor and throws it away: "Just one of your balls, Smithy, you can live without it. That's why they gave you two". Griff laments that he cannot murder people, but the Sergeant tells him: "We don't murder. We kill".
The five main characters, led by the brute Sergeant (Lee Marvin), are the only constant in this collection of war vignettes, a sort of archetypes for wars throughout history, though they are underdeveloped as characters. At an abandoned destroyed tank, a location where the Sergeant fought in World War I, the movie points out how the war has a cyclic nature, never to finish, but just to pause for a time. It also features a grotesque moment where a Nazi soldier throws a grenade at them, hiding behind a giant crucifix, but the American soldiers still return fire and shoot at the cross. The sequence of a shootout between Nazis and American soldiers inside a mental asylum, where three patients just continue to calmly eat their lunch on the table while bullets fly around them, seems almost Felliniesque. Some flaws bother: it is unforgivable that German soldiers speak in English instead of German language in Africa; the Normandy landing feels almost like a walk in the park when compared to the ferocity of Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" (though Fuller only had a 4 million $ budget, which alleviates it); and some bits seem to be missing, since the producers cut the film by a half into this edition we have today. Mark Hamill appears as Griff, in his rare notable role outside the "Star Wars" universe.
Grade:+++
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