Word: marvinism
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...tries to twist a number of other cliches of the was movie but it starts with a basic formula: a tough, leathery sergeant (Lee Marvin) who survived The First War returns to Europe leading a pack of good but green recruits against Hitler's 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...
...they're known as the Four Horsemen) and they move through every campaign in the Second World War--North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium, and finally a mop-up of the Eastern Front--without a scratch. While the wetnose replacements who join them for each campaign get shot to pieces, Marvin and his gang survive with a magical invincibility...
...they hit the beach and the dying begins anew, the fast talk quickly stops as Marvin begins to send his men, one by one, to blast a hole in the enemy wire. And one by one they die. It is a gruesome portrait of war, more horrible than the intellectualized horror of Apocalypse Now and more realistic than The Deer Hunter's chamber-spinning metaphor for horror. It more closely resembles Stanley Kubrick's evocation of the butchering sen-selessness of trench warfare in his anti-war film, Paths of Glory...
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...
...somehow more accessible than the Vietnam War as portrayed in Apocalypse Now and even more personal than the achingly personal story of The Deer Hunter. There are good guys and bad guys and there is a line, however thin, between killing and murdering. Through the entire war, Marvin and his men stubbornly survive, eerily recalling the words of Coppola's Colonel Kilgore: "Someday, this war's gonna...