Memorial Day weekend always means WWII movie marathons on all your favorite classic movie channels. But I thought I’d get a jump on that by tracking down a favorite of mine from the ’80s and watching it for the first time in forever.

Samuel Fuller was a genre director who fit neatly into the French auteur theory of directors as “authors” of their movies, with not just a style and repeated themes in their films, but a psychological through-line tying them all together.

He specialized in Westerns (“40 Guns”), noirish crime dramas (“The Naked Kiss,” “Underworld, Inc.”) and filmed, for what it’s worth, the very first “Vietnam War” movie — “China Gate” (1957).

But World War II movies were his bread and butter. He was already a screenwriter when he went into the Army. And when he got out, he dove into making gritty, often cynical grunts-eye-view pictures such as “The Steel Helmet,” “Fixed Bayonets” and “Merrill’s Marauders.”

It wasn’t until “The Big Red One (1980)” that we got a clear picture of what Fuller’s combat experience was like. He served with the Army’s First Infantry Division, came ashore in Algeria with the first waves when no one knew if they French they were facing would fight them or join them, survived the Battle of the Kasserine Pass, fought in Sicily and was on the beach on D-Day.

Fuller fought across Europe, and was present (and even filmed) the liberation of the Falkenau Contentration Camp. Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, the man had a helluva war.

All of which lend credence to the film many call his “masterpiece,” “The Big Red One,” named for the division’s shoulder insignia, a saga that skips through all that combat, from shipboard waiting to board the boats all the way through V-E Day.

With a budget that dwarfed most of his genre pictures and coming out in 1980, Fuller finally got his moment in the cinema spotlight with a movie that starred long-in-the-tooth Lee Marvin, “Star Wars” hot Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine of the acting Carradine clan and Bobby Di Cicco, fresh off the epic Spielberg flop “1941.”

It has gripping and believable small-unit combat set-pieces, a cynical “inner circle” of survivors who look on replacements as men they refuse to get to know, seeing as how they’re likely to get killed, and a serious foot-soldier’s eye-view of the war — limited, myopic, concerned first with survival, second with food and-or creature comforts.

The script includes almost magical “fog of war” interludes with a Sicilian boy who will only direct the squad to a German gun emplacement if they help him bury his killed-in-the-combat mother, an assault on a German-held insane asyllum, a baby that simply must be delivered inside of an abandoned German tank and a framing device that sees the WWI vet Sgt. played by Marvin involved in the killing of Germans after the end of hostilities in both “The Great War” and “The Big One,” as veterans referred to WWII.

The dialogue is classic hard-boiled Fuller.

“You’re going to live, even if I have to blow your brains out.”

But 40+ years on, the thing that stands out about the film now is how corny it all is — a combat Pilgrim’s Progress that travels through tropes and cliches that were a lot more familiar to audiences when it came out than maybe they play today.

“The Big Red One” came out after “Patton,” after “A Bridge too Far” and nearly 20 years after “The Longest Day,” its closest WWII combat analog, a movie a lot creakier and cornier than this one thanks to the showy star cameo-cluttered cast.

Fuller’s alter-ego on the screen was Carradine, a few years short of “Revenge of the Nerds.” Private Zab is a cigar-chomping cynic who mouths off at the replacements and voice-over narrates the poor picture to death, first scene to last.

“You know how you smoke out a sniper? You send a guy out in the open and you see if he gets shot. They thought that one up at West Point.”

That’s a detective fiction device that Fuller knew all too well. The character, an already published novelist whose novel sells to Hollywood while he’s serving, is all-knowing and on-the-nose, chomping on a cigar like the WWII comic book version of Nick Fury.

What’s the first rule of cinema? “SHOW us, don’t TELL us.” It’s a visual medium. Zab is forever narrating plot points we’ve already picked up on.

“By now we’d come to look at all replacements as dead men who temporarily had the use of their arms and legs. They came and went so fast and so regularly that sometimes we didn’t even learn their names. Truth is, after a while, we sort of avoided gettin’ to know them.”

But the film gives Marvin — 56 when it came out — one last chance for an actual WWII combat vet (Marines, in the Pacific) to shine in a combat role, and he growls through his patient but unsentimental treatment of the combat-timid Private Griff (Hamill, quite good).

Marvin’s flintiest moments come in this film’s version of the “bangalore torpedoes” on the beach on Omaha Beach on D-Day, basically a more personal reprise of a scene Robert Mitchum starred in back in “The Longest Day.” And his most sentimental scene is in that concentration camp, taking a dying child under his care for a day.

The episodic nature of the movie afforded Fuller the chance to find light moments in the darkness, grim humor in the murder-or-be-murdered world of German submachine guns, castrating mines (graphically illustrated) and close-quarters knife work.

It’s not Fuller’s fault that Spielberg would come along under twenty years later and deliver the last word in WWII infantry combat movies, “Saving Private Ryan.” Or that “Band of Brothers” would almost surprass that. But that’s one reason, no matter what “director’s cut” you see of “The Big Red One,” that it seems so old fashioned.

It’s as formulaic and 1940s fusty as Fuller itself, in structure, storytelling style, unfussy shot-framing and jokes.

That’s not to say that it won’t be one of your better options whenever these “World War II” movie marathons roll around. It’s better than much of what came before it — “The Longest Day,” any John Wayne movie that isn’t “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” “A Bridge Too Far,” but not “Patton.”

And even if it isn’t a masterpiece, it’s certainly Sam Fuller’s biggest and best, a fine big screen curtain call for a reliable genre workhorse from the peak years of Hollywood’s old studio system.

Rating: R for war violence and some language

Cast: Lee Marvin, Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine, Eddie Di Cicco, Stéphane Audran, Kelly Ward, Perry Lang and Siegfried Rauch.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Samuel Fuller. A United Artists release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:53