Samuel Fuller was all but retired from directing feature films in 1980.

His previous film Shark was a Bert Reynolds vehicle that came out in 1969,

but finally an opportunity presented itself.

Today's film is a script Fuller had been trying to get made for over 20 years.

After scouting locations for Warner Brothers in the late 1950s, the studio

decided that the film was more useful as a tax write-off than a viable project

sending it to Development Hell from which only Peter Bogdanovich

and eventually producer Jean Korman could resurrect it.

And the trick was to shoot in Israel and redress Israel to be every country the squad in the film

visit. That way on a typically filarian shoestring budget a war picture of

particularly huge scope could be filmed.

And that's not to imply the script is not a sweeping epic so much as a loose memoir of Fuller's

time in World War II.

Serving in the 16th Infantry Regiment of the Army's first infantry division,

he'd seen action in North Africa, Italy, France, and Belgium, and then liberated a Nazi

concentration camp in Czechoslovakia.

The film focuses on four enlisted men played by Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine,

Bobby Duchico, and Kelly Ward, and their sergeant played by Lee mother-fucking Marvin.

There's not a lot to say about the plot. We all know that it's pretty extraordinary

for anyone to have seen World War II from as many perspectives as these guys did.

So the film kind of takes that for granted and hangs out for a few moments of varying significance in each locale.

Robert Carradine character, our Fuller stand-in, sees some success with his novel writing as the story progresses.

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