Directed by Samuel Fuller. Starring Lee Marvin and Mark Hamill. Unrated.

Samuel Fuller was American cinema's greatest primitive, a right-wing anarchist who spent most of his life making B movies for poverty-row studios and whose world-view was tempered by the fires of the Depression and the Second World War. A logocentric director if ever there was one, Fuller's unique dialogue was indebted equally to Hemingway-style terseness and pulp-magazine schlock. He was a genuine artist who was far too often misperceived as a hack.

The Big Red One, released in 1980, was the key to his entire life and work. Essentially his own dramatically augmented experiences as a rifleman in the First Infantry Division (known to its members as the Big Red One), the film follows a group of four dogfaces and their much older sergeant (Lee Marvin) as they fight their way from North Africa to Germany, experiencing defeat in the Kasserine Pass and the most bitter sort of victory in a Czechoslovakian Nazi death camp. Virtually every camera angle emphasizes the infantryman's point of view. In battle after battle, the audience, like the men actually doing the wet work, rarely knows what's going on. Combat is a terrifyingly confusing maze of beaches, streets, hills, ruins, and ambush-laden landscapes. Its pro?tagonists are war's survivors, the lucky ones whom death seemingly does not want. Its onlookers are children, civilians, animals, the insane, and the condemned, all the poor devils whose fate it is to be thrust into harm's way.

The restored version of this half-forgotten classic is 45 minutes longer than its predecessor. New scenes have been added and others expanded. What once seemed jumbled and confused now seems almost linear.

Working from material buried in a Kansas City vault, as well as from Fuller's original shooting script, film critic Richard Schickel has done a fabulous job of transmitting the writer-director's original intentions.

These improvements are at their best when showing us the grim dichotomy between killing and murder, between cannon-fodder "replacements" and hard-bitten survivors. It also makes clearer a subplot involving a German officer whose fate is mysteriously intertwined with those of his American antagonists.

The full-length scenes likewise demonstrate how much of Fuller's experience was reflected by his earlier films. The twisted dialogue in Shock Corridor is echoed here in a Belgian madhouse. The cave in the director's Korean War picture Fixed Bayonets is here set in Sicily.

The one downside to this loving reconstruction is the inclusion of too many didactic speeches, statements of intent (usually voiced by German characters) that are far too informative to ring true.

A lesser problem, post-Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, is the relative lack of graphic wounds, with some minor exceptions. On the other hand, the recent Brothers miniseries is obviously indebted to the BRO for its structure, so one probably shouldn't get too shirty about this.

The best thing about this movie, though, is its visual poetry. The chronology of the D-Day landings, for instance, is conveyed entirely by a dead man's wristwatch, its hands barely visible beneath the bloody surf.

There's nothing "pulpy" about that image. It's art, pure and simple.