A few things dawned on me while I re-watched Samuel Fuller's late career masterpiece The Big Red One. Since I have already seen this film, I will not write a traditional review. Instead, I just want to go over my revelations.
- During the D-Day Invasion sequence, my friend pointed out that the attack was filmed so that we never really got a good look at the German defenders. "It's like they're fighting a force of nature," he said. And he was right. This stylistic choice on Fuller's part helped make the invasion seem even more panicked, frenzied, and immediate.
- The sequence where Sgt. Possum's squad hides from German tanks while in North Africa was incredibly beautiful in scope. Fuller's camera succeeded in driving home the sheer sense of scale that ordinary soldiers must have felt when confronted with a enemy division of tanks.
- Damnably, the subplot concerning Schroeder, the Nazi officer who follows Sgt. Possum's squad throughout their campaigns, hurts the film and keeps it from receiving a 10/10 score. Schroeder is supposed to be Sgt. Possum's foil, but the film isn't entitled Sgt. Possum, it's entitled The Big Red One. The film is supposed to be the story of the foot-soldiers as framed by Sgt. Possum. If Schroeder's entire unit had been depicted as the foils of the Big Red One, then the subplot may have worked better. But Schroeder's inclusion in the film is painfully unnecessary and one-note: he tries to set traps for Sgt. Possum's squad, fails, and kills somebody under his command for insulting Hitler. The reason why The Big Red One works is due to its episodic nature that emphasizes the everyday experiences of the soldiers. Including Schroeder was like if Coppola had devoted a considerable side-plot to Colonel Kurtz's Cambodian lover throughout Apocalypse Now (1979).
9/10
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