Films about the Second World War were not particularly common in the post-Vietnam aftermath of the 1980s, but 'The Big Red One' is one of the few exceptions. War films tend to fall into two categories. The first, such as 'The Longest Day' or 'The Dambusters' concentrates on a single battle or episode in the war's history. The second, such as 'In Which We Serve' or 'Twelve O'Clock High', (or, to take an example from another war, the more recent 'Master and Commander') follows the fortunes of a unit of fighting men over a longer period.
'The Big Red One' is a film of the second type and details the experiences of a platoon of the First Infantry Division of the US Army. (The title refers to the numeral which formed that division's badge). It concentrates on the veteran Sergeant and four of the soldiers fighting under him as they fight their way through the European theatre of war. Although other members of the platoon are killed, these five survive the war unscathed. We first meet them during the North Africa campaign of 1943, and follow them through Sicily, France, Belgium and into Germany. The film, which ends with the liberation of a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945, does not have a coherent plot, but rather consists of a series of short vignettes illustrating each phase of the war.
This is not a traditional big-scale war film. Despite the fact that the featured platoon takes part in a number of major battles, it appears to have been made on a relatively small-scale budget. The battle scenes are too small-scale to be convincing, and are unrealistic in comparison not only with recent films such as 'Saving Private Ryan' but also with others of the same period such as 'Cross of Iron'. While the scenes of, say, the D-Day landings are not too bad, at other times the action sequences have a near-farcical quality. Particularly risible was the scene where our heroes attack a German-held lunatic asylum (a suspiciously Mediterranean-looking building, even though it is supposed to be in the Belgian Ardennes), and Stephane Audran, playing a resistance fighter who has infiltrated the building posing as one of the inmates, waltzes around slitting the throats of the Nazi soldiers. At no time is any serious attempt made to conjure up a realistic atmosphere; we always have the impression that we are watching actors on a set rather than soldiers on a battlefield.
The lack of verisimilitude might not matter if we were presented with characters we can sympathies with, but the soldiers in this film are a fairly unsympathetic lot, with the partial exception of Mark Hamill's Private Griff, a semi-pacifist who is suspected of cowardice by his colleagues. We see Lee Marvin's sergeant explaining to him that soldiers don't murder, they kill. We then see a stereotypically brutal Nazi officer explaining exactly the same thing to his men. If, however, the idea was to make a pacifist point about the moral equivalence of the two sides, this idea is not pursued, particularly at the end, where the final scenes in the concentration camp highlight the evils of Nazism. Incidentally Marvin, who was in his mid-fifties when the film was made and looks older, seems to old to be playing a front-line soldier; shades of John Wayne in 'The Green Berets'.
What saves this film from a lower mark is director Sam Fuller's eye for a striking visual image. Particularly memorable are the shots of the dead soldier's hand and wristwatch sticking up out of the shallows off the Normandy beaches or the battered wooden crucifix which appears both in the main body of the film and in the black-and-white prologue about the sergeant's First World War experiences. (One might, in fact, ask how the crucifix has survived on the battlefield when all around has been destroyed, but this does not lessen the power of the image). These do not, however, compensate for the film's unconvincing action scenes and its inadequate characterisation. 5/10
'The Big Red One' is a film of the second type and details the experiences of a platoon of the First Infantry Division of the US Army. (The title refers to the numeral which formed that division's badge). It concentrates on the veteran Sergeant and four of the soldiers fighting under him as they fight their way through the European theatre of war. Although other members of the platoon are killed, these five survive the war unscathed. We first meet them during the North Africa campaign of 1943, and follow them through Sicily, France, Belgium and into Germany. The film, which ends with the liberation of a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945, does not have a coherent plot, but rather consists of a series of short vignettes illustrating each phase of the war.
This is not a traditional big-scale war film. Despite the fact that the featured platoon takes part in a number of major battles, it appears to have been made on a relatively small-scale budget. The battle scenes are too small-scale to be convincing, and are unrealistic in comparison not only with recent films such as 'Saving Private Ryan' but also with others of the same period such as 'Cross of Iron'. While the scenes of, say, the D-Day landings are not too bad, at other times the action sequences have a near-farcical quality. Particularly risible was the scene where our heroes attack a German-held lunatic asylum (a suspiciously Mediterranean-looking building, even though it is supposed to be in the Belgian Ardennes), and Stephane Audran, playing a resistance fighter who has infiltrated the building posing as one of the inmates, waltzes around slitting the throats of the Nazi soldiers. At no time is any serious attempt made to conjure up a realistic atmosphere; we always have the impression that we are watching actors on a set rather than soldiers on a battlefield.
The lack of verisimilitude might not matter if we were presented with characters we can sympathies with, but the soldiers in this film are a fairly unsympathetic lot, with the partial exception of Mark Hamill's Private Griff, a semi-pacifist who is suspected of cowardice by his colleagues. We see Lee Marvin's sergeant explaining to him that soldiers don't murder, they kill. We then see a stereotypically brutal Nazi officer explaining exactly the same thing to his men. If, however, the idea was to make a pacifist point about the moral equivalence of the two sides, this idea is not pursued, particularly at the end, where the final scenes in the concentration camp highlight the evils of Nazism. Incidentally Marvin, who was in his mid-fifties when the film was made and looks older, seems to old to be playing a front-line soldier; shades of John Wayne in 'The Green Berets'.
What saves this film from a lower mark is director Sam Fuller's eye for a striking visual image. Particularly memorable are the shots of the dead soldier's hand and wristwatch sticking up out of the shallows off the Normandy beaches or the battered wooden crucifix which appears both in the main body of the film and in the black-and-white prologue about the sergeant's First World War experiences. (One might, in fact, ask how the crucifix has survived on the battlefield when all around has been destroyed, but this does not lessen the power of the image). These do not, however, compensate for the film's unconvincing action scenes and its inadequate characterisation. 5/10