The Big Red One
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| The Big Red One | |
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 The Big Red One DVD cover |
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| Directed by | Samuel Fuller |
| Produced by | Gene Corman |
| Written by | Samuel Fuller |
| Starring | Lee Marvin Mark Hamill Robert Carradine Bobby Di Cicco Kelly Ward Siegfried Rauch Marthe Villalonga |
| Distributed by | United Artists Warner Bros. (DVD) |
| Release date(s) | July 18, 1980 U.S. release |
| Running time | 113 min. USA:158 min. (reconstructed version) |
| Language | English |
| IMDb profile | |
The Big Red One is a 1980 war film written and directed by Samuel Fuller. The movie attempts to portray the horrors of war as it affects the men on the front lines. It was heavily cut on its original release, but a restored version was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, seven years after Fuller's death.
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[edit] Background
Fuller saw a great deal of action in World War II as a member of the US First Infantry Division, which was nicknamed The Big Red One for the red "1" on the Division's shoulder patch.
[edit] Synopsis
The film starts at the end of the First World War with Sergeant Lee fighting a German. As he fights with the man, the camera moves away from the action and towards a life-size wooden crucifix in the background. As we get closer we see that while the soldiers are fighting, Christ is rotting.
When Lee returns victorious to his company's headquarters he is told that the war ended hours ago and that the German was trying to surrender when Lee attacked him. Killing versus murder is a theme that repeats throughout the film.
The film cuts to the Sergeant decades later as he leads a squad of men through North Africa, Sicily, then on to the D-Day landings, where The Big Red One lands on Omaha Beach at the start of the Battle of Normandy. The squad then treks though Europe, ending up at the liberation of Falkenau concentration camp (a subcamp of Flossenbürg) in Czechoslovakia. The story's focus is on the four enlisted men (and Lee) who survive the war from beginning to end with their sergeant, becoming known as "The Sergeant's Four Horsemen."
Midway though the film the Sergeant crosses the same field where he stabbed the German decades before, but now contains a memorial:
- Johnson: Would you look at how fast they put the names of all our guys who got killed?
- The Sergeant: That's a World War One memorial.
- Johnson: But the names are the same.
- The Sergeant: They always are.
[edit] Characters
- Sergeant "Possum" (Lee Marvin) - The Squad leader, he calls his squad "wet noses" and was captured during the battle at Kasserine Pass.
- Pvt. Griff, 1st Squad (Mark Hamill) - He's a skilled marksman who detests shooting at Frenchman in North Africa.
- Pvt. Zab, 1st Squad (Robert Carradine) - He's an author of "The Dark Deadline". He's also the narrator.
- Pvt. Vinci, 1st Squad (Bobby Di Cicco) - He's a Sicilian.
- Pvt. Johnson, 1st Squad (Kelly Ward) - He's a farmer and is knowledgeable in first aid.
- Schroeder (Siegfried Rauch) - He's a Nazi and a counterpart to the Sergeant.
- Pvt. Shep (Joseph Clark) - He dislikes Italians.
- Pvt. Lemchek (Ken Campbell) - he wanted to swap with Vinci at the Bangalore relay
- Pvt. Switolski (Doug Werner) - Thinks not all Germans are Nazis
- Pvt. Kaiser (Perry Lang) - he liked the book written by Zab.
- Pvt. Smitty (Howard Delman) - soldier who trips mine in Sicily.
[edit] Trivia
- Lee Marvin, (who was wounded and almost killed while fighting in the Pacific during WWII), plays "Sergeant" who while his name is unknown does refer to himself once as "Sergeant Possum".
- The battle scenes were generally considered realistic, though some technical details are incorrect, such as the German Panzers actually being Israeli Sherman tanks painted with German insignia, and the low budget and Israeli location is especially evident in the film's portrayal of the Normandy landings.
[edit] Suggested reading
- The Fighting First: The Untold Story of The Big Red One on D-Day by Flint Whitlock - 2004. ISBN 0-8133-4218-X
- The Big Red One (novel version) by Samuel Fuller - 1980; republished in 2004.
