Word: fullers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Fuller's boys manage to turn up everywhere that's anywhere in the war--we're almost surprised that they don't show up on the outskirts of Hiroshima in August, 1945--but a sequence inside a Nazi concentration camp is certainly not a Hollywood war movie cliche. And while Fuller's treatment of the episode is painfully simplistic, it is also simply painful. Hamill discovering a room of ovens filled with human skeletons, Marvin silently baring his heart to a little boy whom he has just liberated--these are moments that we have seen in other films; but Fuller...
...sequence in the concentration camp occurs on a bright, unclouded day, a detail that clashes with a common notion associating Hitler's victims with overcast skies. Fuller's vision is probably truer. He never shies away from color, and enjoys cutting from a crisp shot of blue sky and gold sand to the dull greys and greens of the infantryman's daily existence. Yet the colors never disappear; when there are no more flowers or there is no more blood, Fuller closes in on Lee Marvin's face, a rough-hewn palette of balanched hair, amber skin and watery eyes...