During the summer of 1978 Samuel Fuller directed ‘The Big Red One,’ a war epic based on his own combat memories. This film is Fuller’s life work; he has been waiting 33 years to fulfill this dream. “I wanted to do the story of a survivor,” he told Roger Ebert when the movie premiered at Cannes, “because all war stories are told by survivors.” Talking with Fuller, Ebert quoted Truffaut’s dictum that all war movies are pro-war, because no matter what their “message” is, they make the action look exciting. Fuller snorted. “Pro or anti, what the hell difference does it make to the guy who gets his ass shot off?”
Magnum Photos
Fuller centers everything on the sergeant, played by Lee Marvin with the rock-solid authority of a man who had seen action as a Marine in the Pacific, and called his other big war movie, ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ a ‘dummy moneymaker.’ Fuller always wanted Marvin for the role. A studio insisted on John Wayne, but Fuller said he’d rather not make the picture. He was correct. This is Marvin’s picture, and he dominates it not with heroics and speechmaking but with competence, patience, realism, and a certain tender sadness. There’s a scene where a soldier is shot in the groin, and the sergeant finds something in the mud and tosses it away: “That was just one of your balls, Smitty. That’s why they give you two.” —The Big Red One review by Roger Ebert
“The movie is maybe 20 percent my story,” he said. “But the character based on me, played by Bobby Carradine, isn’t nearly as vicious as I really was. The other 80 percent is a composite of dogfaces I knew, fought beside, witnessed, heard about or dreamed up. Lee Marvin was terrific to work with, playing the sergeant. He wanted to make the movie from the moment he heard about it. I love the son of a bitch… even though he was a marine. Some of my best friends were marines. But this isn’t a story about the Marines. It’s a story about the infantry. You can tell the difference because the Marines took islands, whereas we took continents.” —’All war stories are told by survivors’: An interview with Samuel Fuller by Roger Ebert
Read, learn, absorb: Samuel Fuller’s screenplay for ‘The Big Red One.’ (NOTE: For educational purposes only.) Thanks to DucDeRichelieu (Write to Reel). The DVD/Blu-ray of the film is available at Amazon and other online retailers.
Sam Fuller documentary ‘A Fuller Life’ about the life of iconoclastic director Sam Fuller. Directed by his daughter, Samantha Fuller. Featuring James Franco, Wim Wenders, Mark Hamill, Jessica Beals, Monte Hellman, Tim Roth, Joe Dante, Bill Duke, James Toback, Constance Towers, Buck Henry, and more. See more at the official website.
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