Word: marvinism
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...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...
...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...