- The film begins with an opening sequence that is stark and starkly allegoric. In this sequence, Fuller invokes All Quiet on the Western Front and World War 1. The sergeant, Lee Marvin, sees and hears a German soldier coming out of the fog. Marvin kills the man near a tall crucifix that stands in the middle of no-man’s-land. The scene is bleak and brutal and ironic. We soon learn that the war is actually over and that the German soldier was announcing the end to combat. Fuller allows his camera to close in on the figure of Christ on that tall cross. Christ’s face is haggard and his eyes are hollow. Here is an image of desperation and despair. The Christ on this cross sees nothing; instead, he is a reminder of the cruelty of the human species.
- A band of soldiers who somehow survive the entire war, from 1942 until 1945. They begin in North Africa, go on to Sicily, Italy, Normandy and Omaha Beach, France and Belgium, and finally Czechoslovakia where they liberate one of the death camps. The story is more representative than actual.
- Fuller’s constant theme of survival. Life’s a battleground and war is Fuller’s constant metaphor for life itself.
- The use of children to remind us of innocence. The helmet with woven flowers is a Fuller touch – hokey and sentimental. Then later, we have Lee Marvin befriending a scared child from the death camp, carrying him on his shoulders an hour or so after the child has died, and then burying him. As in The Naked Kiss, children are innocent, children are exploited by adults, children are a sign of human vulnerability and weakness.
- Action and no long speeches.
- The five protagonists are Fuller’s cowboys, American GIs who follow orders, fight because they have to fight (using the bodies of fallen soldiers to hide behind when necessary), struggle to survive, live for the most part without women, and liberate that which needs to be liberated.
- A reminder that humans are nuts. The scene in the mental hospital tops off Fuller’s theme of human insanity. In war, who is sane and who is insane. A great Fuller moment is when one of the patients in this institution takes a machine gun, begins to shoot his fellow patients, and repeats over and over – “I am sane, I am sane.” Well in this world, he is. The sane ones are the ones shooting guns. Once again, Fuller’s irony is not subtle.
- The ending that rounds to its beginning, complete with the German announcing the end of the war, the tall crucifix, and Marvin killing his enemy four hours after the end of combat. But this time the German may live. And so Fuller offers hope, but faint hope.
- Death pervades Fuller’s world. Marvin says to the German soldier at the end, that if he doesn’t live, he’ll beat him to death. This line is reminiscent of Moe’s assertion in Pickup on South Street that if she does not get the money for a good plot and headstone, she thinks it will just kill her.
- Once again, we have little in the way of back story. We know about the Sergeant’s experience in the first war, but that’s all. Who is he? What did he do before and between wars? He seems to live for war. And the four young guys are equally without much in the way of back-story. We have some idea of ethnic background, but not much. Fuller’s characters live in the moment, struggling to survive in a dangerous world.
- The crudity of Fuller’s treatment of “symbol.” Guns in this film are obviously Freudian. The tank turret gun looks phallic. But if we did not get the connection, then Fuller is going to make sure we do. And so he has his soldiers use condoms to keep their rifles dry when they make a beachhead.
The Big Red One is the First
Infantry, formed in 1919. Fuller fought in this unit during World War 2, and
this film is both his memory of battle and his idea of the war. Roger Ebert has
said that the film is neutral when it comes to war, that it is apolitical.
According to Ebert, the film is neither for nor against war; it simply records
the battle experiences of its five protagonists. I’m not so sure. It seems to
me that we have enough material here to mount a case against war. The opening
and closing scenes, for example, suggest the absurdity of war. One minute a
soldier will kill an enemy; the next minute, the same soldier will try to save
that same enemy because the war is over. An enemy is an enemy in war, not in
peace. We also have both the Americans and Germans making a distinction between
murder and killing. Soldier kill, but they do not murder. If soldiers do not
murder, then what does Griff do near the end of the film when he corners a
German soldier in one of the incinerators? He empties his magazine into the
German, and then begins on another one given to him by the sergeant before he
finally stops. Is this action any less demented than the insane person shooting
and yelling “I’m sane, I’m sane”? War may be hell, but it is also insanity. In
a scene restored to the recent longer version, we have a child shot by a sniper
as he is held in the arms of the sergeant. Scenes like this or the scene with
the German officer hiding behind the figure of Christ on the cross must surely
communicate the absurdity of war. Or take the scene on Omaha beach when the
soldiers are trying to oust a German machine gun nest by planting tubular
explosives near the German line. The sergeant sends out at least four (more, I
think) soldiers to move the tubes closer. As one falls, shot by the Germans, the
sergeant sends out another one. Finally Griff makes it. Griff (Mark Hamill) is
the coward of the unit, but he’s the guy who succeeds here. Why? No reason. He
is just the one who makes it. War holds no rhyme or reason; it is absurd. For
Fuller, life is absurd.
The actors in Fuller’s films are,
as often as not, forgettable. This film boasts Lee Marvin who was a well-known
actor, but the others are relatively unknown (Mark Hamill had been in Star Wars and its two early sequels, but
he was hardly a “star”). The actors are, however, young. Fuller wanted, I
think, to stress just how young these guys were. War takes the young more often
than it takes the middle-aged or the old. And the soldiers come and go
anonymously. The soldiers we follow point out that they do not even know the
names of replacements that arrive and then are killed. In Fuller’s world, death
is everywhere. Fuller’s battle scenes are frenetic – lots of noise, dust,
falling bodies, confusion. He anticipates Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan by about 20 years when he shows the shores of
Omaha Beach running red with blood. The shot of the soldier’s arm and
wristwatch nicely counterpoints life and death – the soldier’s life has come to
an end, the watch continues to record ongoing time.
As we might expect with Fuller,
this war film does not have a hero – no John Wayne or Robert Mitchum or Tom
Hanks here to save the day. These are just 50-cents-a-day dog soldiers doing
what they have to do to stay alive. That they manage to stay alive has as much
to do with luck as it does with their training or professionalism. Hawks’s
heroes are professionals; Fuller’s are just average Joes trying to get along.
