A veteran sergeant of World War I leads a squad in World War II, always in the company of the survivor Pvt. Griff, the writer Pvt. Zab, the Sicilian Pvt. Vinci and Pvt. Johnson, in Vichy French Africa, Sicily, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Belgium and France, and ending in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where they face the true horror of war.
**_Sam Fuller’s WW2 tour of North Africa, Sicily and France-to-Czechoslovakia_**
Shot in the summer of 1978, this was inspired by Fuller’s experiences in the war with Robert Carradine as Private Zab representing him. It’s a lot to cram into less than 2 hours, and this explains the criticisms that the film comes across as a collection of incidents with little character development. Yet Fuller wanted to include the highlights of his 2.5 years in the war and this delivers as far as that goes. Some say it’s a commentary on how war is an ongoing circle of Hell. The problem with this interpretation is that the war does end when the characters wind up at a concentration camp in Sokolov, which is located a dozen miles from the border of eastern Germany in what is today the Czech Republic.
I like the way it focuses on the five protagonists (led by Lee Marvin) with everything happening from their limited point of view. Isn’t that precisely the way it is for foot soldiers in combat? A good example is their landing in Normandy where you don’t get a sense of the mammoth operation, but rather just their costly experience in which they interestingly use a Bangalore torpedo to clear the way. Some bits are so peculiar that they just had to be pulled from real-life, such as a French woman giving birth inside a Panzer tank or the German-held monastery in Belgium being used as an insane asylum.
To survive with their sanity intact, the guys develop a kind of levity amidst the life-or-death madness of it all. The four privates don’t talk of “back home” because their lives are just starting whilst the hardened veteran (Marvin) focuses on getting himself and as many of these young men through the combat so they can actually have a future. Neither the past nor the future matters in such extreme warfare, all that matters is fulfilling the current mission and, hopefully, surviving with all your appendages.
The second half involves the Normandy landing and fighting through France, Belgium and Germany before making it to the deathcamp. You could say it’s the quickie version of the 11.5 hours “Band of Brothers,” which debuted over two decades later.
Some criticize that the movie feels dated and plays more like a WW2 flick from the 1960s. I suppose that’s because it was initially conceived in the late ’50s. Dated or not, it influenced future war flicks, such as “Platoon,” and was the precursor to the aforementioned “Band of Brothers.”
No, it’s not on the level of those great war films or others, but it gets the job done and is good enough. Think of it as Lee Marvin’s character from “The Dirty Dozen” leading a group of greenhorns through the Mediterranean and Europe.
It runs 1 hour, 53 minutes, but there’s a 2005 director’s cut subtitled “The Reconstruction” that adds about 47 minutes of footage. It was shot in Israel, Ireland and the Sierra Madre Mountains northwest of Los Angeles.
GRADE: B/B-
