Word: marvinism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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's attempts at irony finally pay off, brushing away the tears with the same hand that jerked them...
...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...
...Marvin's performance is the best in a film full of good actors. He may be playing the hardened sergeant for the umpteenth time but his heart is finally in it. With his rumbling voice, he tosses off dialogue that a lesser actor would choke on. The paternal affection he bears his men never conflicts with his silent passion for killing the enemy and getting through the war alive. Hamill and the others are also nearly perfect--Carradine stands out because he has all the best lines--and Fuller leaves us wishing we knew more about his young heroes...