Word: fuller
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SAMUEL FULLER took the crew of his picture, The Big Red One, to Israel because the Judean Hills today look like the hills of Sicily during World War II. The Israelis cooperated. After all, an American film crew spends a lot of money and hires a lot of extras. Fuller needed extras to play Nazis, foils for his heroes, five musketeers who are members of the U. S. Army's First Infantry Division--the big red one. The Israeli extras unflinchingly donned the Nazi uniforms and marched beside panzers into the desert sun, prepared to die on cue.Fuller...
When he tells this anecdote, Fuller loves to emphasize that the Israelis are survivors. This same heavy-handed irony slips into The Big Red One only in the final scene, when Fuller cannot restrain his narrator (Fuller himself, since the film is largely autobiographical) from underlining the message about survival. Fuller's credo is a realistic twist of the cliche of sportsmanlike competition: it's not whether you win or lose, it's whether you live...
...huns. Mark Hamill is the soft-spoken hero with a streak of cowardice. Bobby DiCicco is the eyetalian who wants to open a bagel shop when he gets home. Kelly Ward is the quiet cartoonist who draws pictures when he's not drawing fire. And Robert Carradine is Sam Fuller, a scruffy, fast-talking writer from Brooklyn who lives on cigar smoke instead of oxygen...
...Fuller's hardline anti-Commie stand lost favor after the McCarthy era. For nearly two decades, he has been noisily chomping his ever-present cigar in frustration, desperate to make the war film he always wanted to make, to prove that he had survived the roller-coaster life in Hollywood as well as the battles in Europe...
...best "Vietnam" film we have. The Americans who fought in Vietnam--more than any other war-quickly realized they were not fighting to win but to stay alive. Battle was no "John Wayne wet-dream," as Michael Herr called it in his Vietnam account, Dispatches. Even Fuller's narrator comments that the army doesn't award medals for protecting civilians but for killing Germans; in Vietnam, a high bodycount signalled victory. It is this attitude to survival that enables The Big Red One to bridge the gap between America's most glorious and most dishonorable wars...