Sam Fuller’s explosive 1980 war epic is loaded with remarkable images of combat and gives us a bug’s eye view of the action. Friend and executive producer Richard Schickel’s labor of love to bring the late director’s uniquely structured World War Two combat marathon to the screen, in a close approximation of Fuller’s original intent, stands with a handful of great war movies. After Fuller’s death in 1997, Schickel made it a mission to dig up the lost footage cut from the original 1980 release. The result has been well worth the effort and worth the wait for the swelling ranks that appreciate Fuller’s work.

A deeply personal project for both Fuller and Schickel, their shared experiences were the inspiration for a movie that would give an authentic vision of the experience of war. Fuller always maintained his amazement that he survived the war unwounded and said the only way a movie audience could really get the feel of combat would be for someone to be behind the screen shooting at the audience. This film comes close.

The themes are simple and profound, wrapped in stunning combat effects (before digital manipulation): we are all heroes; we are all cowards; the most immediate goal is to stay alive. Beginning with a black and white sequence of Lee Marvin as a young soldier at the close of World War One, he sticks a scrap of red cloth onto his uniform and dubs the First Infantry Division "The Big Red One." Picking up the thread twenty-five years later, Sargent Possum (Marvin) leads a squad of soldiers in a sort of everyman’s journey through World War Two in Europe. From the deserts of North Africa to the war’s end in a Czechoslovakian forest, their path cuts a wide swath and winds though Sicily, and the Normandy beaches. Through several of the toughest battles in the European theatre, Fuller reveals a pure and unsentimental respect for the ordinary dogface soldiers of war.

The title card at the opening tells us that "This is fictional life based on factual death." Marvin and four members of his squad represent the fictional composite characters; Griff (Hamill), Zab (Carridine), Vinci (DiCicco), and Johnson (Ward), alternately scared, anxious, cocky, fearless, and always human.

An extremely effective element in the person of a German officer (Seigfried Rauch), Possum’s alter ego, was almost completely cut from the original release, and the restored sequence of the D-Day landing at Normandy ranks with that in Saving Private Ryan. In all, 40 minutes and at least eight omitted sequences round out Fuller’s original script.

Fuller himself has a walk across part as a newsreel photographer. He recounted later the first time he ever used a movie camera – at the end of the war when his own platoon came upon a camp in Czechoslovakia. They broke down the doors to find the half-starved concentration camp victims inside. His commander asked him to take some pictures with a movie camera he had received from his mother.