Word: fullers
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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 film takes this standard structure and cleverly spices it with the right proportions of fancy and grit. It's neither anti-war nor prowar but a simple exposition of what it was like to go Over There and return home in one piece. It's painfully suspenseful and captures the exhilaration of battle nearly as effectively as the Ride of the Valkyries helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now. And despite his lack of subtlety, Fuller has a knack for mixing the hilarious with the sentimental...
EXCEPT FOR ITS ending, there are no weak links in The Big Red One, but three sequences stand out. Fuller's dramatization of the attack at Omaha Beach on D-Day begins as a personal affair. Unlike the 1962 epic The Longest Day, which featured a fleet of landing craft the size of a dozen Spanish Armadas ("Every dot on that screen is one of our boats...we're making history"), The Big Red One focuses of five men, none of whom want to be heroes, all of whom desperately want to live...
Later, an attack by Marvin's men on Nazis holed up in a Belgian insane asylum recalls the charming ballet of war in King of Hearts. Fuller's use of music and symbols is again heavy-handed and the sequence ends with a madman firing a machine gun with berserk glee and shouting, "I am sane, I am sane," but poetic camera movement and a sense of humor, even about death, make the scene more than just another "Who's-really-insane?" routine...