Only chance could have thrown them together. Now, nothing can pull them apart.
A veteran sergeant of World War I leads a squad in World War II, always in the company of the survivor Pvt. Griff, the writer Pvt. Zab, the Sicilian Pvt. Vinci and Pvt. Johnson, in Vichy French Africa, Sicily, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Belgium and France, and ending in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where they face the true horror of war.
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Character
Earnest, epic, grave and bleak.
- earnestironic
- intimateepic
- gravecomic
- warmbleak
- character-ledplot-driven
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“Is this Samuel Fuller's best work?”
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“Is Lee Marvin the best thing in The Big Red One?”
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Reviews on TMDB
Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Tastebuds's numbers.
- Wuchakon TMDB · Oct 20257/10
**_Sam Fuller’s WW2 tour of North Africa, Sicily and France-to-Czechoslovakia_** Shot in the summer of 1978, this was inspired by Fuller’s experiences in the war with Robert Carradine as Private Zab representing him. It’s a lot to cram into less than 2 hours, and this explains the criticisms that the film comes across as a collection of incidents with little character development. Yet Fuller wanted to include the highlights of his 2.5 years in the war and this delivers as far as that goes. Some say it’s a commentary on how war is an ongoing circle of Hell. The problem with this interpretation is that the war does end when the characters wind up at a concentration camp in Sokolov, which is located a dozen miles from the border of eastern Germany in what is today the Czech Republic. I like the way it focuses on the five protagonists (led by Lee Marvin) with everything happening from their limited point of view. Isn’t that precisely the way it is for foot soldiers in combat? A good example is their landing in Normandy where you don’t get a sense of the mammoth operation, but rather just their costly experience in which they interestingly use a Bangalore torpedo to clear the way. Some
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Cast
- Lee MarvinThe Sergeant
- Mark HamillGriff
- Robert CarradineZab
- Bobby Di CiccoVinci
- Kelly WardJohnson
- Stéphane AudranWalloon
- Siegfried RauchSchroeder
- Serge MarquandRensonnet
- Charles MacaulayGeneral / Captain
- Alain DouteyBroban
Crew
- Samuel FullerDirector
- Samuel FullerWriter
- Adam GreenbergDirector of Photography
- Dana KaproffOriginal Music Composer
- Morton TuborEditor
- Gene CormanProducer
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