Although it in many ways compares favorably with movies like Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day, I cannot recommend The Big Red One nearly as strongly as those two movies. This comparison is somewhat unfair because director Samuel Fuller produced his movie at a fraction of the budget of those two (adjusting for inflation around 5%-10%). But the problems I have with the movie aren’t about how it looks. Yes, he never has more than three tanks and one landing craft, but Fuller works around those masterfully, creating an excellent Omaha Beach battle, considering his budget. The low budget doesn’t effect our enjoyment of the movie; the flaws in the movie seem to come from the script and not from how it was produced. It tries to show so much, we are trapped in significant length and insufficient depth.

You should watch The Big Red One; it is a landmark World War II movie, and it has many fine qualities, but I will not be praising it as highly as others. It isn’t in my top ten, or probably even in my top twenty—maybe it’s in the twenties; I haven’t actually done a top twenty yet. It isn’t a staggering achievement or a flawed masterpiece; it’s good.

I am specifically looking at The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, which is an extended version of the 1980 release completed in 2004, after Fuller’s death. It is forty-seven minutes longer than the original and somewhat better, but not exponentially better—as I recall; I want to compare them side by side but don’t have a copy of the 1980 version. Some of the new footage is noticeably darker, literally—not thematically. You’d think color correction technology existed in 2004, but that’s not my area.

UPDATE: I saw the older version. It’s missing one scene that’s great, two that are maybe important thematically but I don’t care about, one I don’t know what to think about and two I would have certainly taken out myself. So if forty-seven minutes shorter is a selling point for you, watch the older cut.

The movie follows a squad of soldiers from the US First Infantry Division from their landing in Algeria, through the end of the war. It stars four privates: Mark Hamill as Griff, Robert Carradine as Zab, Bobby Di Cicco as Vinci and Kelly Ward as Private Johnson. Most importantly, Lee Marvin (Attack! The Dirty Dozen, Hell in the Pacific) stars as “The Sergeant.”

But it begins during the Great War, where a young “The Sergeant,” who’s not yet a sergeant and certainly doesn’t look young, is on a French battlefield that he will revisit during the next war and is attacked by a horse because—well, he’s attacked by a horse, and he kills a surrendering German after the armistice has been declared. Though the movie, to its detriment, has five bulletproof characters, the focus is on Marvin’s story. This is a good thing because Marvin is the best actor in the ensemble. This is more to praise Marvin than to damn the others because he gives a very strong performance.

He plays what seems to be a typical gruff sergeant, who therefore must really care deeply for the men under his command and is only being gruff for their own good, but he seems to enjoy the façade less. Marvin’s performance suggests depths the script may not have, that the Sergeant regrets the role he plays. He sees terrible things and projects an image of “The Sergeant” to his men that may well be little like a true self he wishes for—one who children flock to (three or four times, children come to him specifically), despite his standoffishness. But the interactions he has with children and his possible doubts do not seem to effect his actions. I don’t know if Marvin’s performance is squandered or all the more valuable because we’re left wondering about him.

The other actors do fine, but other than Hamill are given almost nothing to do. They are just three other guys in the squad. Carradine does well with what he’s given. He’s the closest analogue to Fuller, who served in the Big Red One, and he doesn’t have a particular arc but does some interesting things. One persistent motif is that replacements quickly die while our main characters survive, and the veterans try not to get close to them to protect themselves emotionally. One replacement suggests he might not get killed, and Griff coldly answers, to another human being: “Why not? You something special?” Maybe he says it also a little gleefully, while chomping his cigar. It’s a great read by Carradine.

Carradine also provides the voiceover narration; I hate it, and Fuller may have as well. I may have a bias against voiceovers because they are often lazy or an insult to the audience’s intelligence. Most of it here is superfluous, and I would honestly prefer a version of the movie with no narration, with the possible exception of Griff’s final speech, and I don’t think I’d understand the movie less.

None of this address my ambivalence about the combat sequences.

The battles are  reasonably well done and appear authentic and realistic, except when they don’t. Absurd things happen—but absurd things happen in war, so maybe I should trust Fuller because he was there.

During the battle of Kasserine Pass the significantly outmatched Americans dig holes and hide from the approaching infantry-supported German tanks. They scream as the tanks roll over them. These look like screams of pain, but Fuller claimed in an interview that the screams were expressions of terror that were safe to make because of the noise of the tanks. This is one scene that is reportedly true that I don’t believe, even though I believe Fuller, so I’m trapped the whole movie having to swallow whatever he throws at me because he was there.

So the Algerian/French cavalry can attack, some with black powder single shot rifles, and trade the ears of their slain for cigarettes, and an entire squad watches one person at a time carry Bangalore torpedoes across Omaha Beach without even trying to lay down covering fire—they just watch—and a bunch of German soldiers play dead as a method of ambush, and I have to believe it because Fuller was there, and I often don’t want to.

The Omaha Beach landing Fuller pulls off is excellent. He can’t pull out as far as Spielberg or Zanuck can, but dollar for dollar, it deserves to be looked at with Saving Private Ryan and The Longest Day. It is chaotic and tense. Fuller uses close ups of people firing to make up for not having the ability to show a wide shot in all the battle scenes, but the cuts and camera angles he uses convey carnage and chaos and don’t make you think, “He didn’t have enough money to do this right.” Sure, he uses spare sausages for a wounded man’s intestines, but it’s not that far removed from Saving Private Ryan’s dying men.

During the scene Fuller returns to a shot of a dead soldier’s wristwatch to show the passage of time. We see his watch at least three time as it gets later in the day and the water that washes over the watch becomes more and more red. Roger Ebert writes that Spielberg should be envious of this shot. I generally disagree with Ebert about this movie, except for this. It’s an impressive and economical (both in terms of screen time and cost) shot that conveys a great deal of important narrative information and evokes emotion.

An unfortunate part of the Omaha Beach scene is the reenactment of Col. George Taylor’s Big Speech. My wife laughed out loud when the Colonel stood up under fire and yelled the lines to no one while stirring music played; she was too busy laughing to see him then run down the line of dead and frightened men in a manner that reminded me of Monty Python.

An Extended Clip of Omaha Beach If you skipped to about 2:40, it might be better.

I am ambivalent about this movie. Many critics rank it very highly among war movies for its realistic depiction of soldier’s attitudes and of combat. The combat is fine, but the Sergeant is the only one we may see deeply into. We see bravery and fear and discuss the morality of killing, but the film doesn’t answer the question it hints at all along: How can we kill and retain our humanity? Or maybe it does, and I just don’t like the answer. These characters experience traumas, they see terrible things and become harder and harsher, and the Sergeant wrestles with demons, and the answer seems to be, “they’ll be fine.”

I guess you can say that. The film shows us a glimpse of many of the important themes war movies can address; I’m not sure it actually fully and honestly addresses them. You should watch The Big Red One: The Reconstruction; it is really good, but it is overrated by many World War II movie enthusiasts.

Recommendation

Buy the Steelbook of The Longest Day and treasure it forever.

Buying The Big Red One: The Reconstruction isn’t a bad idea

Undaunted: Normandy combines deck building, area control and combat in a real interesting way.