Touches You

Sorry, this movie sucks

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Though Lee Marvin and Sam Fuller did not live to see the 2004 reconstituted version of THE BIG RED ONE, I think both would be enormously proud of the restoration of one of their finest films. Though not a "director's cut," the DVD, with an exceptional commentary by critic Richard Schiekel, and running nearly three hours, gives us the gritty, infantryman's view of World War II that Fuller wanted us to see. The longer version has a stronger narrative flow as the movie follows a unit of young American GI's and their much older Sergeant (a veteran of WWI) through a series of battles with Germans, starting with North Africa and ending with the liberation of a concentration camp in Germany at the war's end. There is one marvelously staged and striking scene after another, as these young men go from one theater of battle to another, starting out as fresh and nervous recruits and ending up as battle hardened vets, sticking together and surviving one deadly encounter with the Nazis after another, outlasting most of the replacements who come to fill the ranks; and all the time led by Marvin's tough Sergeant, in a role that fit him as perfectly as his uniform. The young men are played by Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine (as a character based on Fuller himself), Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward; all of whom should have gone on to be much bigger stars. Seigfried Rauch is Schroeder, a German counterpart to Marvin's Sergeant, who comes in and out of the story multiple times before the fateful final scene. One of the replacements is played by Perry Lang, whose face is familiar to anyone who watched a lot of teen comedies back in the day.What struck me most about this film is its lack of typical Hollywood war movie theatrics and heroics, as when Marvin's Sergeant is reunited with the young men in his squad after being briefly captured during the battle at the Kasserine Pass, where most of his untested squad threw down their rifles and fled the Germans. You expect Marvin to tear them a new one when he finds them relaxing on a North African beach, which would have happened if John Wayne (who had once been considered for the part in the 50's) had played the character. Instead, Fuller stages the reunion in a long shot, we don't hear a word, but the emotion of the moment is clear. Hamill's sensitive Griff, has a problem with pulling the trigger when face to face with the enemy, yet in every other way, he is a competent, brave and effective soldier (especially in the D-Day sequence), yet Griff is never confronted by his fellow infantrymen, never called "yellow" and forced to prove his courage to the satisfaction of others. There is a point to this subplot and Fuller resolves it in the finale. We get the full sense of the combat soldier's view of this world, where the ground was constantly shifting under their feet: they are charging into a German held building and taking fire in the afternoon, and then one of them is having sex with female partisan that evening; being shot at from snipers on the way to eliminating an 88 gun, and once the deadly mission is completed, sitting down to dinner with grateful Italians. There is the constant presence of children, over and over, Fuller returns them and shows in vivid ways the impact of war upon them; this is another thing rooted in Fuller's own wartime experience. This has to be the first film to note that American soldiers died from heat attacks on the front lines. The film had a limited budget, but Fuller did amazing things with it, they only had a couple of tanks to use, but you would never know it except from Schiekel's commentary; the D-Day scene may pale in comparison with the one in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, or THE LONGEST DAY, but it works within this movie. There is the expected blood and gore, but nothing like what Sam Peckinpah would have done if he'd been the director; I think Fuller would have considered that exploitative and disrespectful.Why did THE BIG RED ONE fail at the box office? By the summer of 1980, the era of the big World War II epic of the late 50's and 60's had passed and there seemed to be nothing more to say about a conflict fading into history; APOCALYPSE NOW was playing in theaters and audiences wanted to see movies about Vietnam; they wanted to see Mark Hamill fight Darth Vader with a light saber, not shoot Germans with an M-1 rifle. The only person anyone wanted to see fighting Nazis in the 80's was Indiana Jones. Another good movie had fallen victim to bad timing. After the failure of THE BIG RED ONE and the shelving of his controversial film, WHITE DOG, the following year, Sam Fuller turned his back on Hollywood for good, working in Europe for many years; truly our loss. Yet, it stands now as one of the great American war films, and a definitive statement on the men who defeated Hitler's war machine. THE BIG RED ONE is moving, but brutally unsentimental, horrific and funny at the same time, a film that gets better with repeat viewings. Wherever they are, I am sure Lee Marvin and Sam Fuller would be well pleased with how it turned out.

"I can't murder anybody." "We don't murder; we kill." 'The Big Red One' (1980), was made particularly in order to show people what the 1st Infantry Division entering WWII were truly like and how ordinary men fought, bled, and died for our great nation throughout the many hellish war zones and situations some narrowly survived for a few fatal years. The director, Samuel Fuller (Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor), known for his low-budget genre movies with controversial themes, here wanted to capture the true essence of what these ordinary men had to do to survive extraordinary circumstances: the German artillery, D-Day on Omaha Beach in Normandy, a massive counterattack resulting in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge and other famous historical battles. Dodging gunfire and clinging to survival amidst dangerous war zones therein this gritty, gripping war flick, 'Big Red' is a loosely constructed epic account for reconstructing his Fuller's own days in Europe and North Africa between the years 1942 and 1945, displaying both raw power and a rough edge, all the while maintaining a cool and personal perspective that echoes his war-torn trials as they bleed from various moments throughout the picture as we sit there and witness it. So, did Fuller's version of what he personally experienced during the war truly capture the essence of it? Let's take a look.In October 1918, the patch as it is known, a red "1" on a solid olive green background, was officially approved for wear by members of the Division. Worn with pride, the patch symbolizes the legacy and tradition that binds all generations of those who have worn the Big Red One. On August 1, 1942, the first Division was recognized and redesignated as the 1st Infantry Division. The 1st Infantry Division entered combat in World War II as part of "Operation Torch", the invasion of North Africa, the first American campaign against the Axis powers that marched and combated through Algiers, Tunisia, Sicily, France, Belgium and then pushed into the German border. The Division continued its push into Germany, crossing the Rhine River. On December 16, twenty-four enemy divisions, ten of which were armored, launched a massive counterattack in the Ardennes sector, resulting in what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. The Big Red One held the critical shoulder of the "Bulge" at Bullingen, destroying hundreds of German tanks in the process. On Easter Sunday, April 1, 1945, the Division marched one-hundred fifty miles to the east of Siegen. On April 8, the Division crossed the Weser River into Czechoslovakia. The war was over May 8, 1945. Tragically at the end of WWII, there were over twenty-thousand casualties and over one hundred thousand prisoners of war had been taken. Forty-three thousand plus men had served in the ranks, winning a total of twenty-thousand plus medals and awards, including sixteen Congressional Medals of Honor. Nonetheless, the actors on the screen reflected just a glimpse of how the real soldiers back in the day fought for our great nation to the fullest extent. One of the main characters, Pvt. Griff (Mark Hamill), causes to violate his pacifist views because even amidst the chaos and utter destruction around him, he does not believe in and refuses to "murder". He values life to the fullest extent. He lives in believing and even states that the true glory of war is actually surviving it. Griff's position in the infantry is a marksman, and a skilled one at that. Nonetheless, the horrors of his war years have finally caught up with him. He is finally stripped of his pacifist views in one scene as he fires every one of his last bullets into a lone German hiding in one of the ovens in a concentration camp used to exterminate the Jews. His face contorting into agony and despair as he does so, it is revealed to him and to the audience that WWII had finally wreaked a psychological toll on Griff, regardless of his heroism and bravery for his country. The horrors of war have finally gripped him into a reality where his pacifist views have come to a grinding halt in his mentality, knowing that his aspects will never again be the same from here on out.I do believe there is a difference between killing and murder. Even though The Sergeant (Lee Marvin) explained the difference in the beginning of the film, I had to agree with what he said. However, my thoughts on the certain matter is that killing is what you have to do in war or in dangerous life-threatening situations where you have to shoot the enemy in order to defend and protect something big or meaningful, their case being the United States and the people of America. Murder has no rational thought, such as randomly stabbing someone with a knife for example. Some people murder only to save themselves or if they are convicted criminals, not for something heroic like fighting for their homeland or for victory. The plot was all about surviving WWII, along with the many horrors that encompassed it as well. This was a wonderful picture altogether, with a glorious display of historical battles given as torn pages from a found war journal for us to relive, recount and remember.

There must be lots of men who fought bravely during war but who aren't good at making war movies. Samuel Fuller is just one of them.This movie is a bore-fest.Acting: Lee Marvin is working within himself (it's no Emperor of the North) but the others must have just been handy and cheap.Story: There isn't really one. It is a series of scenarios, each from a different European theater of WWII in which American army forces took part. It's sort of like a greatest hits of actions - and clichés.It is fairly humourless, says nothing unique, and is best viewed by someone who wants to see a WWII movies and has seen the others.

"In cinema's presumption, in its pretension to being the real - which is the craziest of undertakings - no culture has ever had toward its signs such a naive, paranoid and terrorist vision." - BaudrillardThere are only five or six types of war films, the most common being "the Platoon movie". Traditional this sub-genre contains three basic elements: hero, group, and objective. The group is made up of a mixture of ethnic types, most commonly including an Italian, a Jew, a cynical complainer from Brooklyn, a sharpshooter from the mountains, a Midwesterner (nicknamed by his state, "Iowa" or "Dakota" for example), and a character who must be initiated in some way (a newcomer without battle experience) and/or who will provide a commentary or "explanation" on the action as it occurs (a newspaperman, a letter writer, an author, a professor). As the group moves forward, action unfolds in a series of contrasting episodes that alternate in uneven patterns: night and day, safety and danger, action and relaxation, dialogue and non-dialogue, comedy and tragedy, good weather and bad weather, combat and non-combat, and so on. Military iconography is used and explained, conflicts break out within the group (in which the objective, leadership and war itself is questioned), rituals from home are discussed and remembered and new combat rituals are enacted. As the group advances, they encounter the enemy and certain members die. A final climactic battle, often a last stand referred to as an "Alamo", takes place at a bridge or in a town, and reveals the film's overall purpose. The hero or narrator, who has usually had the objective forced on him, then has to make a series of difficult (and unpopular) decisions. He sometimes survives (although most of his men don't), and he sometimes dies. These films were common in the 40s and 50s, and rarely deviated from this formula. The genre remained silent for a number of years, thanks mostly to the Vietnam war, before two films reactivated it briefly in the 80s and 90s: Sam Fuller's "Big Red One" and Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan".Fuller's film, which eschews realism at times for a more metaphysical outlook, and which revokes corny moralising in favour for stoic silence, has been criticised by some for being "fake". Filmed on a minuscule budget (1/25th the budget of "Private Ryan") and without the benefits of modern technology, viewers dismiss it as a "dated movie". But with repeated viewings (and an extended cut released recently) the film reveals a maturity, an immediacy, a sort of no-nonsense authenticity, that most "platoon" films lack. Indeed, of all WW2 platoon movies, from "Bataan" to "Guadalcanal Diary" to "Objective Burma" to "Saving Private Ryan", the trio of "The Big Red One", "Beach Red" and "The Thin Red Line" are arguably the best, not because of their "realism", but because of their metaphysical trimmings. But when people complain that old war films are "not realistic", what do they really mean? When "Bataan" was released (the first film to pull together all the elements that came to define the genre) it was praised for its "gritty realism". Shot entirely on studio sets, viewers and critics were blown away by its extreme violence, its authenticity and the bloody "Alamo" finale in which everyone dies. A violent beheading (which largely occurs off-screen) was deemed particularly shocking, despite the fact that no blood is shown. As time passed and censorship restrictions were loosened, genres of violence (horror, war, gangsters, and westerns) all increased in bloodiness. Sam Peckinpahs "Cross of Iron" and "Platoon" were praised in their day for their gore and realism, but today both seem hopelessly stupid. Likewise "Private Ryan" and "Black Hawk Down", two films praised for "taking it to the next level", today look indistinguishable from next generation hyperreal computer game shooters. In reality it is only technology that progresses, cinema's "understanding of war" regressing into the infantile comfort of movie narratives over 90 years old.And yet with each wave of technological innovations, the latest war films pretend to bring us "closer to the truth of war". When "Private Ryan" was released advertisements proudly proclaimed "Now You Know!", the implication being that after witnessing the film, we now know what combat is like. Hyperrealism has somehow become conflated with truth, when in fact the two are often in complete opposition.The shaky, desaturated looks of "Ryan", "Schindler", "Black Hawk" and "Hurt Locker" are designed to simulate reality, when in fact they mimic archived, documentary or news footage. The intention is thus not to bring us closer to reality, but closer to a mediated hyperreality, an image of an image of an image, regressing further into what Baudrillard calls the simulacra, further and further from any ground zero reality.Coupled with this, these films offer a curious lack of any real insight into the psychology of the soldiers or the nature or politics of warfare. Beyond spectacle, we get offers of heroism and redemption, but little else. It's as though an obsession with rendering the aesthetics of war "real", has pushed past realism into video game simulation and rendered all context and truth void. All that matters is the look and sound of the thing. Surfaces are all you need to know.This, of course, is Baudrillard's description of the 21st century American desert-city. Surface is no longer about the realisation of a thing's essence, about history and truth, but assumes almost the exact opposite meaning. An overemphasis of depth-less surfaces leads to object-hood, rather than art.8/10 - Whilst most war films ("Ryan", "Schindler" etc) exploit the context of war to tell a story of rescue, survival and redemption, the restoration of family and the recuperation of a nation and its history, Fuller has less propagandistic aims. Like his earlier war films, this is pulp journalism, prose before image, his blunt poetry capturing the tone of a Jones or Hemingway.