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...
...nothing to say about the coup, which was immediately deplored by the governments of Venezuela, Ecuador and Colombia, and by Peru's President-elect Fernando Belaúnde Terry. The Bolivian military's action was also strongly denounced by the U.S. State Department, which recalled Ambassador Marvin Weissman for "consultations" and cut off all military and economic aid to the strife-torn country...
...expected to holster his gun, or even fall into hysterics just when he was supposed to be most tightly controlled. Fuller is still doing this in Big Red, but in a much more benign way. In the movie, which traces the lives of four privates and their sergeant (Lee Marvin) from their landing in North Africa in 1942 to the liberation of a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia in 1945, one keeps expecting at least one of them to be killed. But they defy expectation by surviving, implying that in brotherhood there is a strength bordering on the magical...
...manner, the characters are drawn from different backgrounds. But instead of using these conflicts for comic relief or color, Fuller mutes them to emphasize the commonality of their response to shared danger. The only fully developed figure is the wise and weary sergeant, who is so resonantly underplayed by Marvin that one scarcely notices that the young men who group themselves self-protectively around him are not more sharply particularized. But that comes to seem a prime virtue, for character is something that is formed by experience digested, and there is no time for that...
Fuller's film is essentially a series of incidents. Marvin's squad hits an African beach defended by the Vichy French, and instead of facing a firefight, they find themselves making allies of these reluctant warriors. They knock out a hidden German gun in Italy and are awarded an alfresco luncheon by the women of the newly liberated town. They survive a German ambush and soon after help to deliver a French woman's baby in the tank they have captured. There is a weird battle in an insane asylum, and the death of a child...