In celebrating Homer as the paradigm of writers who tell the whole truth, Aldous Huxley singled out the episode in which Odysseus and his men, having watched six of their companions devoured by Scylla, weep and then prepare a masterly meal before succumbing to a gentle sleep. Other poets, Huxley argued, would have ended the canto with tears. I find myself thinking of Huxley (and of Homer) when watching Sam Fuller’s masterpiece, “The Big Red One.” A baby-face recruit named Kaiser, whom we have come to enjoy, is abruptly killed in battle, his last words: “Did I kill the guy that killed me?” The film cuts to a raucously funny dinner, where Kaiser’s division plans an orgy to stage the fallen virgin’s sexual fantasy.

This is the Fuller touch – an almost unbearably tense or tragic moment capped by an aphoristically comic one-liner or a scene of utterly contrary dimensions – and it is felt throughout “The Big Red One.” His odyssey tracks the progress of an old sergeant, played by Lee Marvin in the most resonant performance of his career, and four young recruits, from the Algerian coast in 1942 to the liberation of a Czech concentration camp three years later. One recruit, Griff, is brave enough when lobbing grenades, but cannot shoot a man face to face. After experiencing numbing horror at the Czech camp, however, he encounters a Nazi who is out of ammunition and in a moment of transfixed madness kills him, firing bullet after bullet into the corpse. The sergeant cautiously approaches Griff, pats him on the back, and drawls, with a casual let’s-move-on camaraderie, “I think you got him.”

Tellingly, the orgy talk was cut from the film when Warner released a butchered but powerful two-hour cut in 1980. Fuller, a decorated veteran who died in 1997 at 85, had spent most of his career writing and directing idiosyncratic B-budget films in which sex, violence, survival, miscegenation, and madness are habitual themes. He hoped his original vision might be patched together, but after more than two decades, that dream seemed no more likely than restorations of “Greed” and “The Magnificent Ambersons.” Yet a couple of years ago, cans of missing footage were found warehoused in the Midwest, and Richard Schickel, the critic and documentary filmmaker (his “The Men Who Made the Movies” segment on Fuller is included on the DVD),war hired to supervise the recreation. Working with Fuller’s shooting script and a certain amount of guesswork, Mr. Schickel reinstated nearly 50 minutes of new material, producing a deeper, faster, more coherent, and more truthful work – a candidate for the best film ever made about World War II, which is saying a lot.

More movies have been made about World War II than any other subject. If the tally includes films about prewar Nazism, home fronts, service comedies, musicals, and postwar resettlement, the total is in the area of 2,000 – the kind of number we associate with whole genres (war films, Westerns), not a specific subset. It’s not hard to see why, beyond the historical magnitude of a conflict that remade the world. Successful genres promote audience identification and dichotomies between good and evil. The reality of a citizen army is now remote, but the appeal – at least in the realm of fantasy – of battles in which any of us might have been thrust is not. The war film allows us to weigh ourselves in the balance, and World War II remains near enough to supersede the alienating effects of antiquated uniforms, jargon, and armaments.

Morally, World War II is the safest of military harbors. In assessing the Northern temper after the Civil War, Robert Penn Warren said it assumed a monopoly on the Treasury of Virtue, a not undeserved stance, he conceded, but one that blinded the victors to their own ethical failings. Every national cinema can feel virtuous about World War II – even those of Germany and Japan, for overcoming and surviving temporary bouts of insanity. Anti-war films concentrate on the insanity of battle, but truth tellers are obliged to recognize that sometimes the only cure for insanity is more insanity. Not even Homer could have invented a better kicker than the liberation of the camps, which justified the agonies of war after the fact, at least for the survivors.

Fuller sees battle as a socially condoned madness in which killing (or murder: his soldiers debate the semantics) is approved, but he is no less mindful of the stakes. In a film that has almost as much eating and drinking as battleground engagements, he does not condone the madness. He laughs uproariously at it and turns his attention to the immediate problem: survival. “The Big Red One” is unapologetically schematic, beginning and ending with parallel events; it depends on the premise that his recruits (they call themselves the Four Horsemen) and their sergeant are invincible, while dogface replacements fall all around them. Fuller’s vision is epical: The scheme is fantastic, the details realistic.

The same may be said for Jiang Wen’s “Devils on the Doorstep” (2000), which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in a longer version, later cut by Mr. Jiang, a writer and director who also plays the lead role. Questions have been raised by the cuts, because Mr. Jiang’s career was put on hold by disgruntled Chinese officials, but the 139-minute version feels complete and right, and we can only take his word, stated on the DVD, that the cuts were aesthetic and not political. The picture opens with a black screen and the order, “Attention!” From the first shot of Japanese soldiers waddling through the village to an absurdly upbeat march, Mr. Jiang commands attention and holds it.

In a small, northern area of the Great Wall, called Rack-Armor Terrace, a peasant named Ma Dasan is interrupted during lovemaking by a rifle-wielding intruder who identifies himself as “Me” and leaves two Japanese prisoners wrapped in sacks, instructing Dasan to protect and, “in his spare time,” interrogate them until he retrieves them in five days. What follows is an improbably funny nightmare, part Kafka (six months pass as the community hides, feeds, and cleans up after its prisoners, never learning why or for whom), part Abbott and Costello (“Who is ‘Me?'” “How do I know who you are?”). One captive is a translator who keeps himself and his suicidal commander alive through mistranslation. When the soldier wants to curse out the Chinese, the translator teaches him to say “Happy New Year.” That’s nice, says Dasan, but why does he sound so angry? When the soldier later discovers he has been tricked, he says, “Educated people are so evil.”

As played by Mr. Jiang, with his jug-ears, bedroom eyes, and permanent state of fearful perplexity, Dasan is naturally comic, yet also resourceful and determined to hold onto his sense of decency. “We can’t kill and we won’t,” his pregnant girlfriend insists, and he concurs, though he does search out a swordsman who doesn’t live up to his name, One-Strike Liu. Then the captives convince the Chinese to trade them back to their army in exchange for grain, and the tone of the film changes from comedy to outright horror. The full brutality of the Japanese occupiers emerges at a banquet that we know will end in disaster, though the warning signs don’t mitigate the shock.

Just as Fuller’s sergeant mistakenly kills a German after the armistice has been signed, the Japanese launch their massacre after Japan has surrendered. The difference is this: The Japanese commander knows. After the devastation, the Chinese army, supported by gum-chewing U.S. troops, replaces Japan’s army. Dasan, shaken to the core, realizes that revenge and death are preferable to acceptance. He goes on an ax-wielding rampage against the imprisoned slaughterers, and is publicly executed, welcoming death as the film turns from black-and-white to color and his decapitated head winks at the viewer with satisfaction. Insanity has its privileges.

The powers in China resented Mr. Jiang’s depiction of the coldly supercilious, young Chinese leader who spouts empty rhetoric, ordering the death of Dasan for killing “Japanese devils”: He asks, “Are they not human, too?” Presumably, the Chinese do share Dasan’s outrage at a barbarous occupation. (In an interview included with the DVD, Mr. Jiang points out that he cast Japanese friends in key roles and had to convince them that their countrymen really did perpetrate atrocities.) Even so, China has been relatively taciturn about the eight-year occupation. They, too, were searching for power through the barrel of a gun, while the West’s Treasury of Virtue covered a multitude of imperialist sins.

After the Battle of Britain, the English – or at least Vera Lynn – knew that the old music hall favorite, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” or the more recent “We’ll Meet Again,” would replace “Rule Britannia” as their theme song. As early as 1942, the British film industry could see the future. An amiable guide (Mervyn Johns) welcomes us to a churchyard in scenic Bramley End, where the defeated Nazi invaders were buried: “They wanted England, the Jerries did,and this is the only bit they got.”

This is the opening of a remarkable film with the ungainly title, “Went the Day Well?” – the earliest of five, mostly made at Ealing Studios and collected in “British War Films.” (A complete absence of supplementary material represents a tremendous opportunity missed, but the feature Americans will most long for is the option of English subtitles; these films make no allowances for local accents and period slang.) Briskly piloted by Alberto Cavalcanti from a Graham Greene story, “Went the Day Well?” presumes to look back at the war as a quaint interruption in village life, while pointing a finger at traitors among the neighbors – most nefariously, Leslie Banks, whose war scarred face never looked more ominous. After a series of suspenseful episodes, including the shooting of a young boy, that portend a Nazi victory, the residents rouse themselves in one of the most violent episodes in any English film before Hammer unleashed its monsters – one elderly woman buttons a German with an ax. That bit of church ground was not bought cheaply.

Within a couple of years of the war, the British film industry went full throttle in honoring its heroes on land and sea and in the air and in POW camps. In 1952, Charles Frend directed Eric Ambler’s efficient script of the Nicholas Monsarrat best seller, “The Cruel Sea,” a landmark film not least for establishing actor Jack Hawkins as the British lion for the next decade. An excellent villain, Hawkins later gave a memorable performance as the bitter ex-army officer organizing a heist in “The League of Gentlemen,” but here he personifies the paternal side of the stiff upper lip, the commander everyone would like to serve – a man, who, having killed sailors expecting to be rescued from the sea, because a German U-boat lurks beneath them, openly cries, doubting himself and the whole bloody war.

John Wayne must have blanched; Homer would have understood.

This was the same year as “High Noon,” a Western criticized by Howard Hawks because the marshal asks civilians to help him out of a jam – something he said couldn’t happen. Yet the template for “High Noon” was the citizen army that Hawks himself had sentimentalized in “Sergeant York.” “The Cruel Sea” draws its moral edge from the sacrifices of amateurs. Filmed with documentary precision (including a helpful explanation of sonar), “The Cruel Sea” was a film made for those who had served, a justification and historical finale. The battles at sea are excellent, but the drama accrues with personal issues, now considered war film cliches: the good commander versus the self-important martinet (in this case, Stanley Baker, who is dispatched faster than you can say duodenal ulcer), uncertainty at home, the madness of impersonal killing. Upon destroying a German sub and bringing survivors aboard, Hawkins says, “This is quite a moment. We’ve never seen the enemy before.”

“The Dam Busters,” the nickname for Squadron 647, is never used in the film of that name. The mission it details was of little military value and is largely forgotten, but the story is so good that Michael Anderson’s pedestrian direction cannot derail its interest. Told in four sections, the picture shows how Barnes Wallis (Michael Redgrave) worked up the apparently preposterous idea of dropping 5,000-pound cylindrical bombs that would skim over lakes like flat stones (but only if dropped from a height of exactly 60 feet at 240 miles per hour) until reaching German dams; how Wing Commander Guy Gibson (Richard Todd) trained the squadron in secrecy and led the attack; how the last hours were spent; and how the attack did and did not succeed on May 16, 1943 – at the cost of 19 planes and 56 British fliers.

When shown in American theaters, the 1954 film was cut by 20 minutes and Gibson’s black dog was renamed Trigger (to rhyme with the actual name); the DVD restores it to its original form, building at a leisurely tempo to the fiercely fought mission. The special effects are dated but effective, and though it honors the fliers, the film refuses to patronize them or the audience with inserts of doomed pilots or overstated claims of what they did. It ends not on a note of victory, but with boneweary exhaustion, a job of work done, as Gibson walks off to write letters to the families of the dead and missing.

The remaining two films, both made in 1955, are less imposing. Guy Hamilton’s “The Colditz Story,” a hugely influential film in its day, remains one of the better POW films, playing down the comical German officer of “Stalag 17” and sustaining tension as escape attempts mount and various prisoner armies come to an accord. Although the film wisely keeps to Colditz Castle, emphasizing the claustrophobia and ignorance of the outside world, the summer camp quality that pervades most POW films undermines our interest in the characters – a failing that John Mills and Eric Portman do nothing to reverse, though it is fun to see Lionel Jeffries, briefly, in a straight dramatic role.

“The Ship That Died of Shame” (1955), based on a Monsarrat story, directed by the undervalued Basil Dearden (assisted by producer Michael Relph) and photographed superbly by Gordon Dines, deploys much talent on a kind of EC-comics mystical anecdote about a ship that rebels against its postwar takeover by smugglers. Richard Attenborough is a terrific villain, never more rat-faced than as a Brighton Rock sharpie whom the ship ultimately tosses overboard. The ship didn’t mind killing Nazis, but transporting a German child molester (right out of “M”) is more than it can abide.

There is a serious theme here: the difficulty that demobilized servicemen had in finding work in a country salving its wounds with black-market balms. The early battle scenes and a romance involving George Baker and Virginia McKenna are convincing, as is the knowing split established between those living in the past (getting together to sing “We’ll Meet Again”) and would-be entrepreneurs, encouraged like Prohibition bootleggers to engage in the harmless crime of giving people what they want. The smugglers, who come in two classes, murderous and good-hearted, disturb the filmmakers because they waste whatever is left in the Treasury of Virtue. If the filmmakers had allowed the characters and not the ship to mete out justice, it wouldn’t have been the whole truth, but it would have been plausible.