"The Big Red One"

The movie is strung together out of a thousand remembered anecdotes like these. There's a bookended structure to "The Big Red One" that only reveals itself at the very end. The episodic nature of the movie mirrors the experiences of the characters as they find themselves in one place after another -- North Africa, Sicily, Normandy on D-Day, Belgium, Germany -- barely having the time to get their bearings or save their skins before they're on to the next spot. Between these locales, Fuller keeps returning to an image of the soldiers crammed with others into a transport ship, as if they were daily commuters on their way to work in hell.

As always in Fuller's movies there are sequences where the sentimental is inextricable from the tough-minded. In just about the best scene, the Americans assist a woman in labor, delivering her baby in a German tank cleared of corpses, immediately after they've successfully eluded a German ambush. The scene mixes the sentimental with good, lively low comedy, and contains one genuinely surreal detail: hanging belts of ammunition used as stirrups, the bullets pointed at the pregnant woman's belly.

This one-thing-after-another approach suits the nature of what's essentially a personal reminiscence. We expect war movies to be epics. In "The Big Red One" Fuller treats a huge subject as modestly as if he were making a much smaller picture. Throughout, Fuller keeps a tight focus on the sergeant and the four remaining members of his platoon. We know as much of the war's progress as they do.

The cinematographer Adam Greenberg follows Fuller's lead: Even in the midst of sequences that must have seemed opportunities for virtuoso work, Greenberg keeps the camera on the characters. The few panoramas are striking, particularly a blasted battlefield where the only thing standing is an enormous wooden crucified Christ; on close-up we note insects are crawling out of the Savior's eyes. Even the locale was modest: With the exception of Ireland standing in for Belgium, it's Israel doubling for Western Europe throughout the movie.

At times, as when an officer rises on Omaha Beach and announces, "There are two kinds of men on this beach. The dead. And those who are about to die. So let's get the hell off this beach and at least die inland!" you may feel Fuller's old Hollywood roots (though the incident is recounted in his autobiography). If "The Big Red One" is difficult to get a fix on, it may be that the surface seems conventional but the sensibility is harder than what most Hollywood war movies allowed. Those films depicted glory in combat. Fuller belongs to a generation of American men who, while they know what they did was necessary, saw no glory in it.

It's not just the compromised Hollywood war films that feel less honest than "The Big Red One," it's many of the prestige American war pictures that have appeared since the late '80s, the ones hailed for their new maturity and realism. When the late writer Veronica Geng said in 1988 that Oliver Stone's "Platoon" wasn't "as good as a Sam Fuller war movie," she was committing a heresy against the prevailing critical orthodoxy. With the exception of Brian De Palma's "Casualties of War" (which never found an audience), none of the big prestige war movies that have appeared since the late '70s -- the mucked-up "Apocalypse Now"; "Platoon" and Stone's even more appalling "Born on the Fourth of July"; "Full Metal Jacket"; and "Saving Private Ryan," a film that pushes war-movie gore to its limit while returning the subject to '40s homefront platitudes -- can match the humanity, the craft, or the deft mixing of moods and emotions in "The Big Red One."

It may seem strange to speak of the decorousness of a tabloid filmmaker, but the key to the power of "The Big Red One" can be found in these sentences from Fuller's autobiography: "See, there's no way you can portray war realistically, not in a movie nor in a book. If you really want to make readers understand a battle, a few pages of your book would be booby-trapped. 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."

That's the voice of someone who understands the limitations of art. Compare it to the attitude revealed by the Omaha Beach sequence that opens "Saving Private Ryan." Spielberg's decision to fill the screen with dangling limbs and spilling entrails seems now like an arrogant faith in the power of movies to supplant, or at least equal, life.

The unexpected discretion Fuller shows here makes itself felt in the climactic sequence where Marvin and his men liberate a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The sequence consists of perfectly selected details: the wide, fearful eyes of inmates huddled in the dark; the low-angled shot of one of the soldiers, proceeding cautiously with the rifle but unaware of the meaning of the crematory smoke stack hovering over him; the few bones we see when the soldiers discover the oven; and the boy Marvin's sergeant nurses staring at him as if he cannot grasp what it means to be treated kindly by a human being.

The sequence does justice to Teodor Adorno's admonition that there could be no poems after Auschwitz. This is not poetry. Fuller's images are spare, descriptive prose. And yet out of all the strung together sequences, out of Fuller's meat-and-potatoes aesthetic, there emerges a valedictory grace that has more power, more unity than the grand "statements" of younger and more acclaimed directors.

Fuller was never a poetic director, but in "The Big Red One" he finds what in himself was closest to lyricism. Fuller's movie is like flowers thrown on a battlefield in remembrance, and it makes the overblown war movies that have followed seem like cheap and tatty Veteran's Day poppies.

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