Film School: The Big Red One
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It’s easy to understand why war movies came naturally to me. I was one of a handful of Hollywood people with battlefield experience. I used my firsthand knowledge to create films that, I hope, showed the truth about people at war. It would be hypocritical to deny that, as crazy, violent, and tragic as it is, war lends itself to filmmaking by stirring up the entire palette of our deepest feelings. —Samuel Fuller, A Third Face
Sam Fuller had been preparing to make The Big Red One for most of his life.
In WWII, as part of a division known as “The Big Red One” (thanks to their distinctive insignia), Fuller was involved in heavy fighting on multiple fronts, and won a chest full of medals for his service. Fuller was at the liberation of Falkenau concentration camp, and took footage there that would become a vital historical document.
Though he had worked in multiple genres, it was the war movie that Fuller kept coming back to; films like The Steel Helmet, Fixed Bayonets!, Verboten! (Fuller’s movies lent themselves to titular exclamation points) and Merrill’s Marauders had given him the well-earned reputation as a director unafraid of depicting war honestly, in a way completely devoid of platitudinous, empty patriotism.
The Big Red One had languished in development hell for over 20 years by the time it hit theaters. It was nearly made in the late 1950s as a Warner Bros. production, with John Wayne in the lead role that would ultimately go to Lee Marvin, but Fuller considered Wayne a bad fit for the anti-heroic tale he was trying to tell (he’d also put the kibosh on Wayne starring in 1951’s The Steel Helmet for the same reason). A shot at Paramount was felled by the departure of studio head Frank Yablans. Later attempts were thwarted by a reluctance from any studio to put up the (fairly modest) budget that Fuller was after. Eventually, in large part thanks to the shepherding of Peter Bogdanovich, The Big Red One was released in July 1980.
Fuller’s movie charts the travails of the five-man unit between 1942 and 1945, seeing Privates Griff (Mark Hamill), Vinci (Bobby di Cicco), Zab (Robert Carradine) and Johnson (Kelly Ward), and their unnamed Sergeant (Lee Marvin) fight their way across Europe and North Africa, bonding as they deal with the fear and uncertainty that haunt their every waking minute. The men are joined by various new recruits along the way, but they are usually dead before the five stalwarts have bothered to learn their names.