Merrill's Marauders

Fuller's superb patrol movie - taut, bleak and damning - was a self-confessed 'rehearsal' for his long-gestating The Big Red One, following a World War II American platoon in Burma on a suicidal trek, suffering from what the unit doctor diagnoses as AOE - 'accumulation of everything' - and burdened by madness, exhaustion, and the demonstrable irrationality of their wasted energies. Fuller draws potent ironies from his casting of young cowboy 'heroes' (including Bronco and Tenderfoot), and mobilises his camera in violent sympathy with the men's physical and psychological effort.