The Big Red One (1980)
Genre: War
Duration: 113 minuten / 162 minuten (reconstructed version)
Alternative title: Samuel Fuller's The Big Red One
Country:
United States
Directed by: Samuel Fuller
Stars: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill and Robert Carradine
IMDb score:
7,1 (22.990)
Releasedate: 22 January 1980
The Big Red One plot
"Only chance could have thrown them together. Now, nothing can pull them apart."
WWII. The four young soldiers Griff, Zab, Vinci and Johnson all wear the 'Big Red One', the badge of the elite unit of the shock troops within the US Army. Together with their sergeant, they are sent to North Africa, Sicily and Normandy. The sergeant is like a father to the young GIs, not to say their guardian angel. The boys all always return unharmed.
Actors and actresses
The Sergeant
Griff
Zab
Vinci
Johnson
Walloon
Schroeder
Rensonnet
General / Captain
Broban
Reviews & comments
Filmkriebel
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- 10202 messages
- 4772 votes
Surviving is the only glory in war
Understated war classic .... that much is certain. I've seen the regular shorter version. Fuller drew on his own war experiences to portray life as a Jan Soldier during WW II. The Big Red One follows a platoon through their various rambles from the desert of North Africa to Omaha Beach to the gruesome finale in Falkenau.
Sometimes the war is presented with great cynicism ("a soldier kills, he doesn't murder"), with Lee Marvin fully involved in this absurd logic. How he without blinking sends his men to their deaths at the landing in Normandy by calling out their numbers one after one I found blood curdling. Those are the kinds of things Fuller wants to show: the dehumanization... and then the little things that bring people to their senses like the birth in the tank .
I thought the last scenes in the concentration camp with Griff going crazy and Marvin and the boy were the best in the whole movie. It may be a low-budget film with poor visuals, but the film makes an impression and the scenes have an impact. Must see!
Translated from Dutch · View original
scorsese
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- 13504 messages
- 11316 votes
Excellent film about a group of soldiers advancing from North Africa to Germany during the Second World War. The film starts off a bit messy and takes a while to get going. But what follows are a number of strongly constructed scenes in which the madness of war is well brought to the fore. The action scenes may be less large-scale than later films, but that doesn't make them any less powerful.
Translated from Dutch · View original
starbright boy (moderator films)
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- 22644 messages
- 5259 votes
Poor Samuel Fuller. This movie was his life's work and he almost got it done several times, but then he got into a fight with a studio again (as in 1962 Warner had wanted to make the movie starring John Wayne in the role of Marvin. In 1980 he got it for each other, with a much lower budget that was intended and outside all the major studios and yet he lost the final cut and finally there was the garbled version until the reconstructed version seven years after his death.
I saw this 2015 but little had stuck. In today's review, I didn't even recognize that much of the movie. It's good to see him in a cycle like that.
Although I liked this movie better than two famous movies that I sometimes had to think about (Saving Private Ryan and Full Metal Jacket) I also found it far from perfect in this form. While the film is very gped in showing many aspects of the war, the film is also rather fragmented and worse: anecdotal. You can hear him through the dialogues in many of Fuller's films. There it gives character, here it sometimes gets in the way of the film. The film is clearly partly autobiographical and one of the soldiers is clearly Fuller (a writer who smokes a lot of cigars and publishes a book during the war, although the soldier is a bit younger than Fuller, the resemblance is not well hidden).
Fortunately, he was still able to make the film. Unfortunately, during his lifetime there was only the mutilated version. I'm sticking with my 3.5* from 2015.
Tomorrow White Dog and then some ducus about Fuller and then other movie adventures.
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