The Big Red One (1980)

The Big Red One (1980): written and directed by Samuel Fuller; starring Lee Marvin (The Sergeant), Mark Hamill (Griff), Robert Carradine (Zab), Bobby Di Cicco (Vinci), and Kelly Ward (Johnson): Startling good and refreshingly plotless movie about World War Two and 'the Big Red One' -- the USA First Infantry. The movie basically follows the rubric of Sgt. Rock comic books by having its focal characters -- four callow G.I.'s and career sergeant Lee Marvin -- fight in every major European battle from 1943 Vichy-held North Africa (OK, not technically Europe) to the liberation of a death camp in Czechoslovakia in May 1945. 

The movie succeeds to a great extent because of Marvin's world-weary, sardonic, pragmatic, sorrowful sergeant, whom we open with in a B&W sequence at the conclusion of WWI. Mark Hamill gets second billing because of his Star Wars fame and is fine (and very young), but the main GI is narrator Robert Carradine, an aspiring pulp novelist. The youth and inexperience of the younger actors works in the movie's favour. 

Long-time director Samuel G. Fuller made a movie that remains a favourite of later directors that include Quentin Tarantino. The difference here is that violence is almost never shown -- its aftermath is, sometimes, and sometimes it's only implied. Nonetheless, there's a startling brutality to some sequences that gets the horrors of war across better than flying giblets, especially Fuller's depiction of the effects of explosions on people (hint: people don't fly through the air and then get up; mostly, they just scream and die). In all, I think this a great movie, war or otherwise, and should have secured Lee Marvin some sort of major acting prize. He's terrific, turning in a career-best performance. Highly recommended.

Per IMDB, "In 2004, film critic Richard Schickel restored this film to a new director's cut length of approximately 160 minutes. Using Samuel Fuller's production notes and the full-length, unexpurgated script, Schickel restored the footage that was forced to be cut by the studio upon its original 1980 release (which runs 116 minutes). The restored version's DVD release date is 3 May 2005. This longer, epic-length version is closer to Fuller's original vision for the film."