The Big Red One Trailer

The Big Red One is a 1980 war film written and directed by Samuel Fuller. The film portrays the horrors of war as it affects the men on the front lines. It was heavily cut on its original release, but a restored version was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2004, seven years after Fuller's death. The Big Red One is the nickname of the 1st Infantry Division, organized in 1917. The film starts at the end of the First World War with the Sergeant (Lee Marvin) attacking a German soldier. As he stabs the man, the camera moves away from the action and towards a life-size wooden crucifix in the background. As we get closer we see that while the soldiers are fighting, the body on the cross is rotting. When the Sergeant returns victorious to his company's headquarters he is told that the war ended hours ago and that the German was trying to surrender when Lee attacked him. Killing versus murder is a theme that repeats throughout the film. The film cuts to the Sergeant decades later as he leads a squad of men through North Africa, Sicily, then on to the D-Day landings, where The Big Red One lands on Omaha Beach at the start of the Battle of Normandy. The squad then treks though Europe, ending up at the liberation of Falkenau concentration camp (a subcamp of Flossenbürg) in Czechoslovakia. The story's focus is on the four enlisted men (and the Sergeant) who survive the war from beginning to end with their sergeant, becoming known as "The Sergeant's Four Horsemen." Midway though the film the Sergeant crosses the same field where he stabbed the German decades before, but now contains a memorial: Johnson: Would you look at how fast they put the names of all our guys who got killed? The Sergeant: That's a World War One memorial. Johnson: But the names are the same. The Sergeant: They always are. The body of the movie consists of a series of episodes highlighting the insanity and grotesqueness of war. The liberation of the concentration camp brings this to a peak, but also suggests there may be reasons that this madness is necessary. At the end of the film, the sergeant is in the forest, at night, having just buried a young boy he had befriended after liberating a concentration camp. A German soldier approaches, attempting to surrender, and the sergeant stabs him. His young soldiers then arrive and inform him that the war has ended. This time, the sergeant and his young soldiers work frantically to save the life of the wounded German soldier. The last words heard are one of the soldiers saying the German will survive, giving an optimistic tone to the ending.

YouTube | March 24, 2008

Tags:. .heard. .horrors. .heavily. .europe. .arrive