The Big Red One

On its initial release, many Sam Fuller fans hailed The Big Red One, a WWII infantry epic, as some sort of cockamamy poetic epiphany, as well as a decisive late-career comeback for the writer-director of such redolent melodramas as Pickup on South Street and Shock Corridor. But after the overwhelming verisimilitude of Saving Private Ryan, the war scenes look like a backyard reenactment as Marvin's hard-bitten sarge leads a crew of baby-faced soldiers from Africa to Normandy to the concentration-camp liberations, and the film's string of vignettes seems ludicrously corny. C-