THE BIG RED ONE (1980)

Cast

Plot

A chronicle of the movements of a squad, from the US 1st Infantry Division, through WWII, from a beach-head assault in North Africa to the liberation of a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. The sergeant, played by Marvin, and four young riflemen are the only ones to survive the war, and one (Carradine) is Fuller's surrogate, and this is Fuller telling his own story, synthesising every thought he ever had about the experience of warfare, no heroics, no anti-heroics, no 'drama' to speak of, instead a racy description of incidents from a great war correspondent with a Bressonian concentration on feelings of isolation and dislocation. Visually and philosophically, it's Fuller's equivalent of Kurosawa's Kagemusha, although Fuller's film is more complex, more absurd and more haunted.