Il grande uno rosso

Perhaps I am an exception but this film really did nothing for me.

The premise is simple: the experiences of a US infantry squad led by Lee Marvin fighting in Europe and North Africa during WW II. It was supposed to be about the experiences of the men who fought but I didn't feel the film delivered that: none of the characters were really explored or given much depth, even the great Lee Marvin seemed distant and cold. There isn't too much dialogue, in fact there isn't too much of anything in this film. Its just there but it doesn't really give you much, it just leaves you cold. The plot is occasionally just plain weird and confusing, not the good kind of quirky type of weird but just strange for no apparent reason and with no charm to it.

The action scenes are average, nothing special but enough for their purpose. What annoyed me was that so many different locations were so obviously filmed in the same sandy country (Israel) and it just didn't come off as very convincing. I didn't believe that what I was being shown was really the place it was supposed to be. Its also a quiet film, with very minimal music which in itself isn't bad but just gave the whole thing a somewhat sleepy atmosphere. I wouldn't go so far as to say the film was boring, it wasn't but it just wasn't that attention grabbing either.

Its a film that is there but it did absolutely nothing for me. Others however might enjoy it.

Penetrating, outstanding war drama that depicts, with care and well constructed plot divided in many simultaneous dramas, the lives, hopes, sorrows and, before all, the profound loneliness of a group of young and inexperient soldiers in the WW2 and the friendship and deep respect between them and their old and calused sergeant, a superb performance by Martin.

Maybe the movie is too overlong which reduces its impact but it's extremely rewarding to see this one.

I give this a 7 (seven).

I thought I had seen all the WW2 movies out there but I guess this one was off the radar. There are for sure now better movies to be seen but this is worth the watch.

It is basically a movie that follows one platoon as they go through the war, and how each individual soldier wrestles with various demons so to speak. There is enough action to keep things moving.

Would recommend to anyone who likes, war movies, actions movies or seeing Luke Skywalker as a young soldier.

Some movies are like buried treasure; someone manages to slip them into the theater, practically under every critic's nose, where they either thrive or famish and then vanish into the nearest video catalog. "The Big Red One" is one of those films. For all the hoopla created by "Saving Private Ryan" (another excellent film, which, in my opinion, had a better understanding of it's subject than a lot of it's critics gave it credit for), it owed a great deal to what Sam Fuller did a decade and a half before.

Lee Marvin, an actual WWII veteran himself, holds the film together as the tough but exhausted seargent. When he tells Mark Hamill (yes, Luke Skywalker, folks) that you don't murder animals, you kill them, the look on his face after that seems to say that he wished it could be some other way. It's hard to grab defining moments in this film as stand-out, but the two sequences that stick the most to my mind are the taking of the insane asylum and the horrors of the concentration camp. While other movies have focused on specific campaigns, "The Big Red One" deserves high marks for painting the broad canvass of the Second World War from the perspective of the guys who actually had to do the work.

A lot of people hate The Big Red One. They call it farcical, uneven, clichéd. They find it farcical, I believe, because the film revels in the absurdity of war rather than gloss over it. They would rather watch a film, like Saving Private Ryan, which ignores absurdity in favor of violence. These people find it uneven because the "important scenes" (like the D-Day and North African invasion) take only a minute or two to conclude, while other scenes, less typical of a war movie, spread out before us. They call it clichéd because the movie is unsubtle in its treatment of character development and plot.

I cannot agree with these beliefs. The Big Red One is not only one of the greatest WWII films, it is also one of the greatest war movies.

Sam Fuller's film, which was butchered by the studio, is the picaresque tale of 5 members of the First Infantry, known, because of their shoulder patch, as the Big Red One. The film moves from one story to the next without spending too much time on any particular tale.

The individual vignettes, as they must, vary in quality, but on the whole are excellent. The Big Red One stirs within you a desire to run right out and tell your friends about this amazing scene or that.

There's the soldier who loses his testicle, the birthing scene in the belly of a tank, Lee Marvin, in Middle Eastern garb, traipsing across a beach, soldiers dug into holes over which a Panzer tank division travels, the entire Mad House segment... The list goes on.

Some people dislike the absurdest nature of several of this film's stories, but, for me, those surreal touches make this film great.

Without them (and there are a lot), you would be left with a very normal and very boring film. Using bandoleers as stirrups is genius, as is the woman faking crazy as she whirls through a monastery, slicing German throats.

The performances are solid, for this type of film, but if you are looking for subtlety, go elsewhere. Each character is drawn in broad strokes; you never learn too much about them, but you learn enough to understand who they are and why. Lee Marvin, as usual, is amazing. He is one of the great, gruff actors of our time, bringing a special, intangible quality to every film in which I've seen him. He makes every movie he's in better just by showing up. There are too few actors about whom you can say that.

Like the acting, the direction is masculine, but, for a war movie, that's a compliment. In some ways, Fuller's direction here and in his other films reminds me of Hemmingway's writing - terse and effective. Both men believe in an economy of shots or words, depending on their medium, but, through that economy, they attain a muscular sort of poetry akin to the beauty of a horse's rippling muscles as it races on a plain. Fuller's direction here, though not his best when compared to Underworld USA or Shock Corridor, is still better than most, especially considering that this was his first film in several years.

All in all, I find the Big Red One to be an exemplary war movie, even in its emasculated format (I cannot wait to see the restored, 140 minute print, which should improve upon scenes that feel to brief in this version). It's certainly no Apocalypse Now, but it puts to shame most World War II epics before or since.