The great Lost Movies hide in the shadows, elusive and legendary, haunting the history of cinema. The mother of them all is the original cut of Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed,” the recovery of which is no more plausible than a complete works of Sophocles. There was once a 12-hour version of Jacques Rivette’s “Out 1,” and a 24-hour movie by Andy Warhol. The unmolested saga of “The Magnificent Am bersons” will be dreamt of as long as culture exists. I have even heard it whispered that somewhere on the premises of Eastman Kodak in Rochester there circulates a copy of “Pootie Tang” without the voiceover.

And now a minor miracle: one of these rough beasts has been resurrected. First glimpsed at the Cannes Film Festival, triumphantly received at the 42nd New York Film Festival, the reconstruction of Samuel Fuller’s bowdlerized “Big Red One” opens today at Film Forum.

“My first cut produced a six-hour movie,” wrote Fuller of his “most important achievement.” Wrestling the unwieldy project into the editing room, he managed a four-and-a-half-hour final cut, but the studio “said it was too long to be commercially viable and, over my objections, took over the reediting process.” A one-hour-and-53-minute version was released to acclaim in 1980, but it was always understood to be a compromise. The missing elements hid “somewhere in the vaults at Warner Brothers.”

Working from the original shooting script, Time critic Richard Schickel dug into the archives and recovered nearly 50 minutes of footage. Subplots have been restored, characters fleshed out, major sequences returned, and all manner of small but significant details have been stitched back into the tapestry. “I think we have come as close to humanely possible to realizing his intentions,” Mr. Schickel has said. “And I’ve never done anything in film of which I am more proud.”

He deserves to be: A smashing (if smashed) film in 1980, it’s a bigger, redder thing in 2004 – one helluva picture, as its maker might have said.

Samuel Fuller (1912-97) had long dreamt of dramatizing his experience in the 1st Infantry Division during World War II. “‘The Big Red One'” was the only war film I really wanted to make,” he wrote in his autobiography. Having amassed “a thousand pages of action and dialogue,” he approached Warner Brothers, who expressed interest insofar as they could attach John Wayne. At the urging of his friends, Fuller backed down, suspicious that Wayne’s persona would turn a “dark struggle for survival and sanity” into a “patriotic adventure movie.”

Through the agency of old friend Peter Bogdanovich, a smaller production was set up at Paramount, but the exit of studio chief Frank Yablans left the film once more in limbo. It was ultimately made on the cheap for $4 million, under the auspices of independent Lorimer.

Steve McQueen was offered the leading role of the Sergeant, but Fuller ultimately went with his first choice, Lee Marvin. Fresh off the success of “Star Wars,” Mark Hamill was signed on to lure the youth market, Robert Carradine took the role of Zap (the cigar-chomping Fuller stand-in), and Bobby Di Cicco played the Sicilian private Vinci, a part that was at one time imagined for a 28-year-old Martin Scorsese. Kelly Ward rounded out the pack of “dogfaces.”

Fuller scouted locations and settled on Israel and Ireland as the stand-ins for north Africa, Italy, and central Europe. “The irony of shooting the century’s biggest yarn in the little country of Israel was constantly apparent,” observed Fuller. A climactic sequence set at the Falkenau concentration camp was staged at “an abandoned armory in the heart of Jerusalem.” Israeli extras wore yarmulkes under their Nazi helmets. “The greatest irony of it all,” wrote Fuller, “was that I, a non-practicing Jew, skeptical of all religions, had wound up directing my most cherished picture in the land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.”

Episodic in form, “The Big Red One” follows a rifle squad from Algeria to Sicily to Belgium, climaxing unforgettably with the horrors of a Czechoslovakian death camp. The most unorthodox of war films, it is booby-trapped with irony, black humor, and unexpected sexuality.

The first big action sequence ends with a barbaric detail – the slicing of ears for trophy – that subverts its formulaic excitements. Fuller constantly satisfies genre expectations, then pulls the rug out from under them, a strategy more apparent in this reconstruction. The turning of D-Day’s bloody tide, the moment to expect a cheer of patriotic bravado, instead sounds this withering note: “There are two kinds of men out here, the dead and those who are about to die. So let’s get the hell off this beach and at least die inland.” The famous opening set piece of “Saving Private Ryan” is deeply indebted to Fuller’s muscular staging, but Steven Spielberg’s sentimentalism is refuted by the moral of “The Big Red One” – “surviving is the only glory in war.”

More bracing still, and altogether missing from the original version, are two moments of homoeroticism notable for Fuller’s good-natured ambivalence. When the sergeant, laid up in an enemy hospital, is smooched by a Nazi doctor, he has this to say: “I can understand you being horny, Fritz, but you’ve got bad breath.” Imagine John Wayne sympathizing with such appetites.

The movie is less a story being told than a mosaic of hard, stubborn details. Certain images stand out clear and sharp: a fearful vision of tanks, implacable iron dinosaurs, viewed through the dust-filled mouth of a desert cave; the sheathing of rifles in condoms to protect them from corrosive seawater; a dead man’s watch in an angry tide of blood; a shell-shocked horse, bucking in terror like the deranged emblem of some newsprint “Guernica.” And then there are the lines of unforgettable pulp poetry – “By now we’d come to think of our replacements as dead men with temporary use of their arms and legs.” Fuller’s no-nonsense ear for talk stitches the whole crazy quilt together.

For all its absurdism and tough-minded disgust, “The Big Red One” is a movie to wrap yourself up in, a rich, enveloping, “novelistic” yarn. (Fuller actually novelized the same material prior to filming it.) Throughout, Zap comments on the unfolding events, but it’s Marvin’s great performance as the tender, taciturn sergeant that gives the movie a firm center of gravity. The movie opens with his memory of the last day of the World War I and his “innocent” killing of an enemy hours after the official declaration of peace. Trudging through the new war, he wears an awful resignation on every inch of his sun-worn face.

“We don’t murder,” he tells his dogfaces, “we kill.” “The Big Red One” blurs that necessary fiction at every turn. A quintessentially Fulleresque episode has the team entering a Belgian mental hospital overrun by Nazis. Lunatics slump and drool, an apparently deranged woman dances with a baby doll. She’s their contact in the resistance; on spying the approaching Americans, she plays mad to distract the Germans, slitting their throats with a straight razor. At the climax of the skirmish, a patient grabs a machine gun, spraying a table of Nazis, shattering pottery, blasting apart furniture. “I’m sane!” he bellows – before being silenced by a bullet. No one ever accused Fuller of subtlety.

The blunt hyperbole of “The Big Red One” goes hand-in-hand with its authenticity. “For moviegoers to get the idea of combat,” runs a famous Fullerism, “you’d have to shoot at them every so often from either side of the screen.” The dialogue between realism and pulp theatrics in “The Big Red One” creates a buzzing rhetorical oscillation, a barbed-wire tangle of unpredictable effects. It may fall short of live rounds zipping overhead, but it keeps you on your toes. Fuller knew that realism, when applied to something as vast and traumatic as war, is a lie. The unruly product of a two-fisted imagination, rife with paradox and skepticism, “The Big Red One” disciplines the genre by mucking it up.

“That ‘The Big Red One’ now existed, even in an abridged version, was miraculous,” Fuller wrote in his autobiography. “Future audiences and film historians will judge it for themselves. All I ask is that they be given the opportunity to see the movie I lived, wrote, directed, and edited with my heart and soul – the entire four-and-a-half-hour movie – before they render their final judgment. “The future is now. While “the entire four-and-a-half-hour movie” seems permanently beyond any reconstructing hand, a final judgment is within reach: One of the great war movies just got better.

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