Lee Marvin in The Big Red One.

Before Band of Brothers, there was The Big Red One. Samuel Fuller wrote and directed this World War II movie based loosely on his own experiences and stories he heard about the war. The movie contains some truly memorable scenes but taken as a whole the movie is too episodic. It could play very well like the HBO miniseries Band of Brothers in that every 20 minutes or so the action switches location and centers on a different character.

Like Band of Brothers, The Big Red One covers several years of the war in Europe following a platoon of men as they battle in different countries like Algiers, Italy, France, Belgium and Germany. Band of Brothers owes much to Samuel Fuller. Both end at the discovery of a Jewish death camp.

The Big Red One centers on a Sergeant and 4 key members of his platoon. Private Zab is a writer who narrates the movie with such lines as, "We were more horny than hungry." And "You know how you smoke out a sniper? You send a guy out in the open and you see if he gets shot. They thought that one up at West Point." Private Griff is the company sharpshooter who can only kill men from a distance. He loses his nerve when he is close to them. One of the last scenes in the movie is him over coming that fear when he finds a Nazi hiding inside an oven used to cremate Jews. Vinci and Johnson, the other two Privates, have even less characterization than them. Johnson is a farm boy. Vinci is Italian.

The Big Red One does succeed in the many memorable moments that occur, sometimes for no apparent reason. At one point Sarge is in a German hospital and a gay Nazi doctor starts kissing him passionately. Marvin grabs him by the throat and says, "I can understand you being horny Fritz but you've got bad breath." Another scene that stuck with me from the first time I saw this movie, when I was in high school, is the one where Johnson and the Sergeant are delivering the French woman's baby. "How do you say push in French?" A nervous Johnson asks the Sergeant who tells him, "Poussez." Johnson anxiously then mispronounces the word and tells the woman, "Pussy, pussy, pussy." My best friend spend the next day at school saying "poussez" every chance he got. For cringe inducing, there is the part where a new guy in the platoon trips a mine and is worried that his penis is blown off. Sarge picks something bloody off the ground and shows it to the guy who asks, "Is that my cock?" Sarge responds, "No, it's your ball." He then throws it aside.

The Big Red One would have worked great as a mini-series, but as a movie there is very little story arc. It follows a group of men as they experience war. There is plenty of fighting and the pace is well done. However, the characters are never developed and very little changes for these guys by the end of the movie. There is a bookend plot that has Sarge kill a German at the beginning of the movie and at the end, but it is not enough to solidify a movie whose plot is just fight, talk, fight, talk.

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