Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Great Dads of the 1970s: Lee Marvin in THE BIG RED ONE

Sometimes a "period piece" tells more about the period in which it was created than the one it depicts. Fuller's grand war saga THE BIG RED ONE is just such a piece, with Fuller's unique mix of sentiment and vulgarity in WW2-era being the ideal commentary on the 1970s mindset, at least how I remember it. You could almost say that Fuller's 40s-nouveau aesthetic came to mesh so perfectly with the 1970s that--at the time when I saw it at the drive-in with my family as a 13 year-old (and it was cut to nearly half Fuller's intended length)--THE BIG RED ONE was almost invisible, even in plain sight. For a WW2 movie, it blended so well into its moment you could barely see it, like an all-in-black ninja skulking between the cars.

If you're a WW2 fan like me then you know that Fuller's films are all pretty accurate, because he was there; a lot of the dialogue is no doubt straight from Fuller's sharp journalist memory, with Marvin leading a rifle squad through North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium and finally Germany. Most of it was filmed in an around the actual locations of the battles, with Fuller's journalist memory no doubt recreating it all better than any squad of Spielberg advisors ever could. Now note I don't mean accurate as in "here's what Patton was doing at the time" but "these were the rumors related to us by the guys farther up the line." and so forth. Fuller was a newspaperman, so almost never lets that crucial distinction distort his tale. Like any good good reporter, Fuller is very specific when it comes to what he witnesses firsthand vs what other soldiers tell him they witnessed, or heard, etc." It's a difference that's not available to those who weren't there. Forced to get all their info secondhand, baby boomer filmmakers like Spielberg use their talent and budget to recreate what they imagine might have happened, based on what they read or are told by old crotchety survivors. Fuller doesn't need to rely on these sources since he IS a crotchety survivor.

A lot of the onscreen action can get confusing, but then again, it probably was confusing at the time? You can see where Godard--a true-blu Fuller fan--got ideas from Fuller for his own narrative-melting 1980s works like CODE NAME: CARMEN, as when bank robbing terrorists and cops shoot it out in a hotel stairwell while old folks read the paper in chairs around them, regarding the bloodshed with casual disinterest, as if it's just kids playing tag or a theatrical group rehearsing. One of my Fuller favorites: Lee Marvin wakes up in a North African hotel-turned hospital, with wounded German and American soldiers shuffled amid civilians and doctors of both nationalities, doctor uniforms and patient whites obscuring who's on who's side - everyone in the beds all in and out of disguises as they try to figure out which side is in control and if they should lay low, fight, dress up like the enemy side, or flee. Later a similar scene plays out as Marvin's rifle squad zips into an occupied insane asylum, moving silently and en masse through a room full of mental patients splayed out on couches and chairs, all of whom either ignore or help the soldiers. The crazier ones probably not sure the sudden near-silent surges of four or five bent-over soldiers at a time, rushing silently from behind couch to under table, and onwards through the chateau, in and out of sight with a wink--are real or imagined.

Conversely, examples of Fuller trying to add commentary to true memories can be spotted a mile off: The squad's sneaky infiltration of a Nazi-held mental asylum actually happened, but an inmate grabbing a dead German's machine gun and shooting everyone in sight, shouting "Look, I'm sane like you!" is a little too on the nose --even if it did happen. The periodic and useless cutaways to Marvin's opposite number in the Wermacht also feels like he's making a forced point.

There is also the 1970s aspect - the jetzt-verboten political incorrectness, regarding "whores" and scenes such as one extraordinarily uncomfortable subtext bit in which Marvin's squad delivers a French peasant baby in the moist confines of an abandoned German tank. They're all gathered around and holding down the woman and spreading out her legs as she screams in pain, a guy mentioning he's getting horny while using condoms on his fingers as gloves and a cheese cloth as a surgical mask. What's evoked is soldier-on-peasant gang rape, right up to Marvin whispering "puuu-say" into her ear to get her to push the baby out. Later Robert Carradine blows this thousand buck check from his first published book on a party to get Belgian whores for the night and make them do "whatever weird stuff we always wanted," which includes freaking out a Belgian hotelier with the ridiculous request of a recently dead fellow infantryman, to have a big-assed woman put her butt cheeks on the (freezing) glass.

The thing is, man, being occupied and half-destroyed by bombs and occupation has probably made half the young women in Belgium into whores of one stripe or another, just to survive and feed their families, so this broad drunken objectification carries a weird depressing aftertaste, especially if you've seen UGETSU. Then again, is being a prostitute that much more tragic and demeaning than being a soldier? (As Dietrich said in MOROCCO: "There's a foreign legion of women... too...")

I don't mean to knock the film, or Fuller. by mentioning all this, quite the contrary, to show how no one likely even noticed or thought twice about these possible readings makes the mix of raunch and reproduction all the sweeter. Back then men didn't have to constantly affirm they were NOT rank misogynists. And if a guy got his nuts blown off, we didn't mollycoddle him and race to sew them back or decide at the last minute not to cut them off  like they do now in movies like TEETH and HARD CANDY; we tossed them nuts to the hungry dogs with a smirk and then forgot about the matter, even if he was our best friend.

Marvin's '70s dad skills include his ability to stand back during downtime and let the boys in his rifle squad do their own bickering, boasting and teasing. He listens, and grins wryly or walks away in feigned disgust, but he rarely interjects or tries to compete. He doesn't need to, and he knows these kids do though --it's how they keep up their courage. You almost never see him interrupt or censor a conversation no matter how offensive, but when he calls a soldier's number to run up and die trying to bring a Bangalore torpedo across a heavily defended beach, that guy better move ass or he'll shoot him himself. The best you can do is just trust and love Lee Marvin. Do what he tells you and rely on him to not get you shot. If you do, well, see you soon.



Marvin only smiles in a close-up/medium shot once, when he finally loses it and starts laughing with joy when they successfully deliver that baby. A man who's been doling out death for years suddenly brings in a little life. "We all felt pretty good about it" Carradine notes in the film's superfluous voiceover. No need for saying it -it's all there in Marvin's hangdog expression as it finally overflow its borders, exploding with a hoarse grinning laugh and a palpable joy as unsentimental in its genuine sentiment as a Hemingway novel, then just as quickly back to business. In the land of no morality and bullets flying overhead, it's a man like Marvin you depend on to deliver the sense of security that a strong, good man has your back, even if he's just acting to keep the children from crying. No wonder the little kids love Marvin and follow him around all throughout RED. In the end, the soldiers getting blown to bits come and go, they're all pretty forgettable despite the callow actor's attempts to win us over, but it's Marvin you depend on for direction in the film, it's Marvin you come to love, even as he sends you to your death with a silent pointing gesture.



 MORE GREAT 70s DADS

1 comment:

  1. This film always reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus. It was one of the first WWII movies I saw that really commented on the horror and pointlessness of war...even a nobel war like WWII. Despite that awful "puu-say" scene, it seems like a more mature approach than more famous films like Saving Private Ryan.

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