Rating: 
Summary: A "SGT Rock" comic book comes to life...
Review: This movie follows a squad from the 1st Infantry division grizzled, WW1 vet sergeant, portrayed by Lee Marvin,through all the major European battles of WW2. The basic theme is that organisations such as the 1st Inf. Div. consisted of a handful of combat veterans and thousands and thousands of faceless replacements. Although this is a great idea for a movie, it fails on about all counts. The movie is a series of loosely conected vignettes, each one more cartoonish and unbelievable than the last. My favorite is when "the squad" discovers a bunch of dead Germans and a tank out in the middle of nowhere. They poke around, but only when 'ole sarge sticks his head inside the tank and discovers that the "dead" germans inside the tank have the wrong colored piping on their shoulder straps is the ruse discovered, then all the evil nazis who were playing posum are dispatched quickly and effortlesly. (How long were these guys playing dead, waiting for someone to happen along?)Finally, after our heroes depart the cowardly nazi NCO slinks away from his perch, a huge, lifesize crucifix. Makes you wonder how Germany ever invaded anything bigger than the Hofbrau Haus! Another great scene is Omaha Beach, here the squad nervously awaits its turn to charge forward with a Bangalore Torpedo, in the background, out in the water, representing the greatest invasion fleet ever assembled is one (1!) ship, that looks like a stranded tramp steamer actually. The movie was filmed entirely in Israel, which is fine for portraying N.Africa and Sicily, but France and Germany (where the 1st spent most of its time) it isn't. So the movie doesn't even have the right "look". If you always wondered what SGT Rock comics would look like in real life, check this out, if you want a realistic portrayal of infantry action in WW2, avoid this like the plague.
Rating: 
Summary: Mediocre Adaptation of a War Novel
Review: This movie is an adaptation of Samuel Fuller's autobiographical novel of the same title. The movie achieves some but not all of the book's impact. The brutal rape of a young Arabian girl by an American G.I.was deleted from the movie. Also, unlike the book, the concentration camp victim the sergeant carries on his back in the closing scenes is a boy as apposed to a young woman that the aging nomcom has a macabre romantic attraction to. Nevertheless, the movie retains many of the book's important themes dispite its somewhat unbelievable combat scenes. The most powerful example is Mark Hamill's confession: "I can't murder anybody" which drew the succinct reply from Lee Marvin: "We don't 'murder,' we 'kill!'" The movie was filmed entirerly in Israel thus giving the sometimes too sunny appearance to even the storm cloaked Normandy Beach landings. The characters are not as believable as those found in the classic BATTLEGROUND (Van Johnson). The ongoing comparison between the American and German sergeants is also less well done in the film than the book. It helps if the viewer has some knowledge of the historical background to fill in the noticable gaps left by the director. Though not as symbolic as the movie APOCALYPSE NOW the movie tries to adapt a war novel with some semblance of success.
Rating:
Summary: The Long Red Schlong
Review: This movie is HORRIBLE! It ... the "Big One"!
I can't believe that a WWII veteran, Sam Fuller, directed this travesty!
Lee Marvin is too old to portray a believable American GI.
Carradine is a big nerd.
Most of the extras look as though they were lured away from someone's Bar-Mitzvah so Fuller could film this piece-of-... in Israel.
Geez, I never knew that Eucalyptus trees grow in the German Forest? Duh!!
See Sam Peckinpah's "Cross of Iron" (1977) starring James Coburn for an excellent WWII B-movie. Coburn tears Marvin to shreds.
Fuller, you should be ashamed of yourself!
Rating: 
Summary: Lee Marvin is a gem, but this is a lightweight TV movie.
Review: Two or three times during this movie Lee Marvin makes subtle faces and body movements which are superb. You have to hang a star on him.
The rest of this movie is best described as "five or six scripts rejected as unworkable from the old TV show 'Combat', loosely threaded together, with little or no underlying theme or plot to the movie.
Every war movie cliche is present, the bravado lines are obviously and painfully conjured up by Hollywood writers, and from this point it gets worse.
The movie doesn't, at any point, make any military sense. A GI decides to hide by running out of the hills and into the open, (?) where he digs a hole(??) with enought time to dig a four or five foot deep hole (??) but gets squished by getting run over by a tank (Uh... the pounds/sq inch under a tank tread is pretty low actually, the hole would not collapse).
Sicily: hiding in a cave and ambushing Germans one by one. Without any context to this event in the big picture of Sicilian ops, this scene was just plain painfully unrealistic to watch. I found myself offended that anybody would believe an audience would believe this scene. Why couldn't they film a REALISTIC scene to make whatever point they were trying to make?
D-Day: Since you never see more than sixteen people at any one time there is absolutely no sense of the sweeping scale of the invasion. There is almost no sense of terror, little sense of carnage, little sense of loss when American soldiers were getting killed. This is where the total lack of military tactics really starts shutting down the movie. Why did they send one man at a time out with the bangor (sp?) mines? Was it to add suspense at the cost of total unrealism? It seems so.
And what was up with the snipers? For the soldier to get shot by a sniper, swing around and kill the sniper... that's total Hollywood.
And the ridiculous scene with the German ambush attempt. The word 'stupid' is defined as "lacking normal intelligence", and I'm afraid that it is the best word to describe that entire scene, culminating at the baby's birth.
The insane assylum just really went over the top.
Finally, the concentration camp. If I'm a German soldier, ya, I'm going to hide in an oven. Right. What a fight, machine gun nests between the barracks at a concentration camp. Think about that, nobody in their right mind would take something as valuable as a machine gun and put it at such an insignificant point as between two barracks. This is laughable.
The end of the movie is just really really stupid. Lee Marvin kills his SECOND German after a truce is declared. You'd think that maybe some sort of successful tie-in can be made with WWI, and that hopefully this tough shell of Lee Marvin's would peel away, but it's still just Hollywood hogwash: "LIVE OR I'LL BLOW YOUR HEAD OFF".
This movie is not that good at all. To compare it to Private Ryan is preposterous. Private Ryan sums up to be an allegory on life, and of selfless giving. Big Red One sums up that some guys shot their guns a couple times, and Hollywood really dies without capable military technical advisors.
Reruns of Combat are better than BigRedOne.
Rating:
Summary: The absolute worse war movie I have ever seen.
Review: Words cannot do justice to how bad of a portrayal of war this movie is. Even comparing it to other war movies made around the time of this one and before it is bad. The action is horrible and unrealistic the acting is a let down and most importantly a sixty year old Lee Marvin as the leader. Bad...Bad...Bad...Get Patton, all quiet on the western front, The longest day, A bridge to far. Hell any war movie but this one..
Rating:
Summary: The absolute worse war movie I have ever seen.
Review: Words cannot do justice to how bad of a portrayal of war this movie is. Even comparing it to other war movies made around the time of this one and before it is bad. The action is horrible and unrealistic the acting is a let down and most importantly a sixty year old Lee Marvin as the leader. Bad...Bad...Bad... Get Patton, all quiet on the western front, The longest day, A bridge to far. Hell any war movie but this one..
Rating: 
Summary: THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE
Review: Written and directed by Samuel Fuller, THE BIG RED ONE is the dream of a lifetime. It's also the testament of this director who deserves to be rediscovered one of these days. Since his three last movies, shot in France, may be forgotten, let's enjoy this unusual war movie. During almost 2 hours, we follow Lee Marvin and his four GI's through the battlefields of World War II. And, believe me, it's a hell of a ride. Be prepared for the shocking images Samuel Fuller had the habit to offer to his audience : a woman delivering a baby in a tank, a wooden statue of a blind Christ eaten by insects, etc... Every scene is a little pearl of emotion and energy. War movie, surrealistic essay or religious allegory, THE BIG RED ONE is waiting for you. Don't forget it! A movie which is not seen is a dead movie. Audio and video perfect for me considering the fact it's a 1980 movie. A DVD for your library.
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