Marching through World War II under the command of Samuel Fuller and in the company of a charmed infantry unit that survives North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, Belgium, and Czechoslovakia, and somehow missed out on the mop-up operation in the Pacific. (Robert Carradine, chomping on an unending cigar and narrating the action in a hard-boiled vocabulary and a callowly grating voice, is the autobiographical Fuller figure.) Bits of wisdom, cynicism, toughness, and compassion are dispensed in a vignette style perfected in the Forties in William Wellman's Story of G.I. Joe and Battleground. Fuller's chief contribution to the formula is an overdose of salt. For one instance: the birth scene in an armored tank, with the laboring woman's legs strapped up in bandoliers and the doctor slipping his fingers into individual condoms in the absence of rubber gloves. Or for another: the commando raid on a mental asylum doubling as Nazi headquarters, with a female Resistance leader posing as a ceaselessly humming madwoman, waltzing around the room with a rag doll and a concealed razor, and pausing here and there in mid-twirl to slit an occasional Nazi throat, and with one of the authentic lunatics taking a hand in the action by picking up a stray machine gun, spraying bullets at anything that moves, and editorially yelling, "I'm like you! I'm sane!" Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, and Stephane Audran. (1980) — Duncan Shepherd
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