"The Big Red One"

When a director known for tight, 90-minute genre pictures takes on a topic this large -- the progress of the American infantry through Europe from 1942 to 1945 -- not to mention one that he had carried in his head for 35 years, it's perhaps inevitable that the result will be a bit sprawling. There are sections here where the rhythms feel lumpy, where some of the characters aren't properly introduced. Not even all of the five main actors register.

Mark Hamill, as Griff, the kid who seized up in combat, gets a great scene towards the end, and as Zab, the character who is the stand-in for Fuller, Robert Carradine chews on the director's beloved cigars and shows the wily, squirrelly quality that distinguishes him from his acting brothers, Keith and David. Bobby Di Cicco and Kelly Ward's characters, though, are barely fleshed out. And the newly added scenes featuring a German officer whose trek through Europe parallels the American characters' combat route don't work at all; the actor who plays him is the cold, blond, blue-eyed Aryan familiar from too many bad war movies.

But it's niggling to dwell on the flaws of a movie with such cumulative impact. Foremost and proudly a tabloid filmmaker, Fuller spent his career looking for stories and moments to "grab them by the balls" as he says again and again in "A Third Face." His movies are prosaic, hysterical, crude, brutal. Key lines of dialogue pop out of the characters' mouths sounding like a cross between a topic sentence and a screaming headline on an Extra! edition being hawked by a newsboy.

But if Fuller didn't achieve perfection, neither did he fall into mythmaking (the way that John Ford did). Working on tight schedules and budgets, Fuller wasn't directing for the ages, which may be why his movies still retain their impolite punch. If you go into "The Big Red One" looking for perfection, you're not going to find it. If you like your art subtle, you won't like Sam Fuller -- but if you like your art subtle you've got no business watching Sam Fuller movies.

I mean no condescension to call Fuller a great primitive. At his best he was in touch with the primal power of movies. Landing in Normandy during the D-Day invasion, the young Fuller had seen a soldier's severed arm in the surf with a still-ticking wristwatch attached. In the D-Day sequence of "The Big Red One," the watch on a dead man's arm is used to convey the hour-by-hour passing of the Allies attempting to advance onto Omaha Beach. Each time Fuller cuts back to that watch, we see that another hour has passed, and we note that the water washing over it has become redder. That's the sort of terse and sometimes surprisingly eloquent movie shorthand that Sam Fuller mastered.

There may still be a temptation to classify "The Big Red One" as a "good" version of one of those old-fashioned Hollywood war movies that featured tough, lantern-jawed officers leading a melting pot of inexperienced soldiers to victory and, it was always implicit, to manhood. But as Fuller told Tim Robbins in a documentary that Robbins made about him, he didn't believe in the concept of either heroes or cowards. The point of view in "The Big Red One" will be familiar to anyone who has read World War II combat memoirs, but it's still a unique one for American movies.

The film gets the combination of superstition, callousness, black humor, grousing, fierce loyalty to your comrades, disdain for replacements and sentimentality that is the infantryman's mindset. At times the film is both hilarious and appalling, as when Marvin's sergeant, tossing away the bloody testicle of a soldier who has stepped on a trip wire, tells the soldier not to worry, "that's why they gave you two."

And Fuller, who had a passionate loathing for bigots and bullies, trounces the old movie cliché about how different ethnicities came together to fight a common enemy. A soldier starts asking Bobby Di Cicco's Vinci how a "wop" like him got into the Army and wonders why he isn't singing "O Sole Mio." Vinci obliges with a lovely version of the sentimental Italian favorite, just after sticking his rifle in the soldier's mouth.

The old line goes that there are no atheists in foxholes. In "The Big Red One," Fuller is saying that, in the midst of combat, there are no fascists or democrats either. Fuller understands that, under fire, no soldier is thinking of grand objectives. Instead of extended combat scenes, Fuller gives us the decisive moments that portray battle as a fight to survive and nothing more. In the midst of the D-Day sequence there is a passage concerning the building of a "Bangalore torpedo," a long tubular device that must be assembled on the battlefield, which means that we watch as one soldier after another scurries from a ditch and is shot to death attempting to put the damn thing together. It's the sort of absurdist horror that Joseph Heller might have invented.

Next Page: "For moviegoers to get the idea of real combat, you'd have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen"

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