Belated Victory

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE BIG RED ONE Directed and Written by Samuel Fuller

Wars are periods of anxious boredom, mitigated by soldierly camaraderie and punctuated by moments of sheer terror, bloody farce and amazing grace which, because they are so intense, have the capacity to shape the lives and spirits of the unformed youths who fight them.

That is the view of Samuel Fuller, 68, who built a cult reputation as the writer-director of a series of crude but vivid action films (The Steel Helmet, Pickup on South Street) in the 1950s and '60s, has not worked in movies for almost a decade and has long wanted to make a film based on his experiences as a World War II infantryman. The Big Red One, which was the nickname of Fuller's old outfit, the 1st Infantry Division, is that film. And it is fine, fully justifying Fuller's faith in himself and his great subject.

Fuller's dream movie has about it a mellowness that contrasts sharply with the brutal force of his earlier films, which often derived their power from the simple act of upending generic conventions--having the hero actually pull the trigger at the moment when normally he might be expected to holster his gun, or even fall into hysterics just when he was supposed to be most tightly controlled. Fuller is still doing this in Big Red, but in a much more benign way. In the movie, which traces the lives of four privates and their sergeant (Lee Marvin) from their landing in North Africa in 1942 to the liberation of a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945, one keeps expecting at least one of them to be killed. But they defy expectation by surviving, implying that in brotherhood there is a strength bordering on the magical.

Again, in the classic movie manner, the characters are drawn from different backgrounds. But instead of using these conflicts for comic relief or color, Fuller mutes them to emphasize the commonality of their response to shared danger. The only fully developed figure is the wise and weary sergeant, who is so resonantly underplayed by Marvin that one scarcely notices that the young men who group themselves self-protectively around him are not more sharply particularized. But that comes to seem a prime virtue, for character is something that is formed by experience digested, and there is no time for that in war.

Fuller's film is essentially a series of incidents. Marvin's squad hits an African beach defended by the Vichy French, and instead of facing a firefight, they find themselves making allies of these reluctant warriors. They knock out a hidden German gun in Italy and are awarded an alfresco luncheon by the women of the newly liberated town. They survive a German ambush and soon after help to deliver a French woman's baby in the tank they have captured. There is a weird battle in an insane asylum, and the death of a child who has survived years in a concentration camp and then dies when Marvin takes him on a picnic.

Some heavy ironic meaning might have been imposed on these juxtapositions of the quotidian and the violent, and the younger Fuller might have done so. But now he merely touches on them and passes on, leaving them to work on his viewers' minds as they imagine the memories must have, over the years, on his own.

Fuller trusts his vigorous and simple style to keep people interested. He should, for his style derives from the classic American manner of making movies: the camera is almost always at eye level, the shots are allowed to play long and calmly, with few moves and few cuts to the closeup. This is clean, direct and gripping film making.

It is apparently true that Fuller wildly overshot, delivering a first cut that was excessively long. He did not supervise the last editing, and there are a few awkwardnesses in the version that is being released. But it is also clear that Fuller delivered the basic goods to the cutting room, the material that only he could reconstruct. What has emerged is a movie that can proudly take its place with The Big Parade, What Price Glory and The Story of G.I. Joe in the great tradition of American war dramas.

--By Richard Schickel

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