The Big Red One is a 1980 American epic war film written and directed by Samuel Fuller, and starring Lee Marvin alongside an ensemble supporting cast, including Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Siegfried Rauch, Bobby Di Cicco, and Kelly Ward.

Based on Fuller's own experiences as a soldier in World War II, it was produced independently on a low budget, and shot on location in Israel as a cost-saving measure.

It was heavily cut on its original release, but a restored version, The Big Red One: The Reconstruction, premièred at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, seven years after Fuller's death.

During the advance across northern France, the American squad crosses the former WWI battlefield on which the sergeant killed the surrendering German, where a memorial now stands to the earlier war.

Schroeder has sprinkled his own living men among the German dead from a recent battle at this location, but the sergeant senses a trap and checks out the bodies in a burned-out tank.

This time, as the squad walks away, Private Griff notices that Schroeder is still alive; the sergeant and his men work frantically to save his life as they return to their encampment.

Private Zab, in voice-over, remarks that he and his fellow American troops have more in common with this Nazi soldier, because they have all been through the war and survived, than they do with all of the replacements they fought alongside, but who are dead.

[2] In the project's early stages, at Jack L. Warner's urging, John Wayne was lined up to play the sergeant, but Fuller felt that he was not right for the role.

[3] The restored version, dubbed "the Reconstruction" and completed in 2004, adds 47 minutes to the film's running time, bringing it much closer to the form Fuller imagined before the studio took it away from him.

[4] Film critic Richard Schickel — who praised the 1980 version in Time when it was released[citation needed] — took the lead on the restoration, which relied on locating footage allegedly stashed in the Warner Bros. vault in Kansas City.