Legendary Director Sam Fuller's Last War Film example essay topic

Legendary director Sam Fuller's last war film is a vivid and richly detailed masterpiece. Fuller creates powerful imagery that will stick in your mind for a long time after seeing the film... "The Big Red One" is a sprawling and morally resonant a film as you are ever likely to see. Following the Big Red One (the 1st Infantry Division of the U.S. Army) from encounters with Rommel's tanks in Africa, via the D-Day invasion, and ending with the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp, this film packs a lot into its narrative, and against all odds, it works. Fuller presents a laundry list of opinions and thematic material in this film, none however, more poignant and important than the theme of the struggles of war. Fuller suggests throughout the course of the film that the true glory that is achieved in war is surviving.

It is the survival aspect that keeps the troops going, their dreams for after the war. It is not how many Nazis they kill, or defending freedom, although these too are important motivators, the true grandeur of finishing the war comes in weathering the adversity of the war and coming out alive. The actual written word, the script for the film, is one of the strongest supporters of the theme that the only true glory of war is surviving. There are very few attempts at sentimentality in this film.

Fuller, due to his time spent in WWII, has a seemingly endless fountain of information and wants to express as much of it as he can. Because the audience follows the "four horsemen" and their sergeant through so many endeavors the audience never really grows attached to the actual missions, just the main characters who go through all of the missions. The audience is happy to just see the men make it out of one mission and go on to the next. Subconsciously, the audience has already adopted the mentality that the true glory of war is surviving.

The movie is moved along more by the events than the feelings, and that is why the audience truly starts to feel for the characters, not because of any "moments" that are shared, but because by the end of film you feel as if you have gone through so much with the characters and you have experienced what they have, the thrill and jubilation of survival. The visual style of the film also supports the predominant theme of the film. In several scenes of the film, the visual images presented to the audience help to create a foundation for the theme of the film. On Omaha Beach, the passage of time is shown through a close-up of a dead soldier's wristwatch, as well as the growing amount of blood in the water. This simple, yet effective piece of imagery convinces the audience that not only have the infantrymen been fighting for a long time, but also that the casualty rate is rapidly climbing. The audience feels remorse for the people while they are fighting, but they get a sense that this war was one where a great number of people lost their lives, and that made surviving the war that much more important and gave the audience a reason to hope that Griff, Za, Vinci, and Johnson as well as "The Sergeant" get out and survive the war.

Another scene is of Lee Marvin carrying the boy on his shoulders toward the end of the film, and while on his shoulders, the boy dies and rather than take his off immediately, the sergeant continues to walk around with the boy on his shoulders. This scene shows how upset and fed up with the war all of the soldiers are. The sergeant almost refuses to let this death happen, he is so upset that this boy dies that the audience realizes that this war has not only affected those people who have died or been injured, it has affected everybody that is involved as well. That makes surviving the war that much more of a greater obstacle to overcome. The most important scene, visually I think in proving this theme however, is the one in which they invade and take over the insane asylum which the Nazi's infiltrated.

During the ensuing battle to retake the asylum, one of the inmates picks up a rifle and begins to shoot randomly, crying out "I am one of you know... I am sane!" This one little scene displays rather dramatically the insanity of war and how transparent the line between sane and insane really is. The completion of the war marks the end of an implied "temporary insanity" that all soldiers seem to experience. Escaping the insanity of war makes survival that much more powerful to the audience as well as to the soldiers. In a long career of film making, this sums up the career of one of the true masters of cinema. The battle that the characters in this film endure mirror those battles that Fuller himself went through to "make it" as a director.

This film is a first-hand account of the horrors and wonders of war. We travel with Fuller and see the small, genuinely interesting moments he experienced in war. This film doesn't snatch us with tricky photography or awesome special effects, it simply unfurls before us on the silver screen and allows us to witness these moments from Fuller's past. This film is truly an awesome piece of work; it is infused with an independent spirit. Through all the troubles, near-death experiences, liberations, and other elements of war, the only consistent driving force of the main characters is survival. Fuller takes the audience as well as the characters on a roller coaster of life and death, leaving the audience with only one consistent theme, that the real, undeniable majesty of war surviving that war.