The Big Red One was for thirty years Fuller's dream project, based on a nightmare-his own experience of combat in the Second World War. By 1980 Lee Marvin seems the only choice for the grizzled and war-worn Sergeant. Another Fuller incarnation 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. 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 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, as it follows the First Infantry Division (the Big Red One) on campaigns in North Africa, Sicily, at Omaha Beach. The gist of Fuller's much longer and more cynical original concept is here in brittle dialogue, and in the ambiguity of Lee Marvin's silences.