Samuel Fuller – The Big Red One (1980)

 Just another war move or a Samuel Fuller movie? The claim is that the 114 minute version released in 1980 is just another war movie with a studio-added musical score and voice-over, whereas the 160 minute film recently “reconstructed” from lost footage is a Samuel Fuller film. Be this as it may, we have the 114-minute version before us. And this gives us enough to see certain of the Fuller trademarks.

1. 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. 

2. 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. 

3. Fuller’s constant theme of survival. Life’s a battleground and war is Fuller’s constant metaphor for life itself. 

4. 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.

5. Action and no long speeches.

6. 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.

7. 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. 

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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. 

11. 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.