The Big Red One was, for thirty years, Samuel Fuller's dream project, based on a nightmare. It reflects his own experience of combat in World War II and that very intimacy made it a difficult project to sell: Hollywood's defiant one would be war correspondent and dog soldier in one. John Wayne was to play the lead in a 1957 version that never was made, but in 1980 Lee Marvin seems the only choice for the grizzled and war-worn Sergeant. Sergeant is one Fuller incarnation; the other is Zab (Robert Carradine), the young cigar-chomping writer who envisions himself the Ernest Hemingway of Brooklyn and thereby distances himself from the horror: it's all grist for the mill. Maybe he'll write a novel; maybe, years later, make a genre film... He's one of Fuller's most ironic characters and he wears his cynicism like he smokes his cigar-trying it on for size. Despair is concentrated in Sergeant, who knows about the irony of killing versus murdering and knows what Zab thinks he's made up, that the only glory in war is surviving. To this end, the film is shot from the infantryman's perspective, a decidedly unglorious one typified by hiding in a hole in the ground while a German tank rolls over. The film follows the First Infantry Division (the Big Red One) on campaigns in North Africa ("sand and rocks"), Sicily ("rocks and sand"), landing at Omaha Beach, pushing the Germans back into Germany, and liberating a Czechoslovak concentration camp. For a film shot almost entirely in Israel, it covers a lot of ground. As released, The Big Red One is but a distillation of Fuller's original, much longer and more cynical version, but the gist is there, in brittle dialogue, and in the ambiguity of Lee Marvin's silences.