Twenty-five years after Sam Fuller's searingly compassionate war film first made it to the big screen, it's back as an almost director's cut.

Lee Marvin plays the world weary veteran of the Great War - known simply as The Sergeant - who is back in action leading a troop of gauche grunts in WWII.

As their tour of duty takes them from the Tunisian desert, to the beaches of Sicily and on to the final thrust towards Berlin, a quartet of riflemen emerge as determined survivors.

Nicknamed The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, they come to regard their replacement colleagues as "dead men who temporarily had the use of the arms and legs."

Fuller - who himself served as a US soldier - was forced by his bankrupt backers to trim forty minutes off what they saw as just another action movie.

They didn't like the sprawling, practically narrative-less style that Fuller had employed to convey the sheer chaos punctuated by acute boredom that characterised war.

Now, more than a couple of decades on, film historian Richard Schickel has restored forty of the missing sixty minutes to a film truer to its maker's original vision.

The main characters remain minimally characterised including Robert Carradine as a cigar-chewing Hemingway of the Bronx and Star Wars' Mark Hamill as a cartoonist unable to shoot people when he can "see their eyes."

On the other side, the German perspective is seen through a diehard Nazi who unwittingly exhanges fire with Marvin's unit from Africa to Czechoslovakia.

Its influence is seen most strongly in Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, particularly the beach landings where sheer bloody carnage is balanced with cinematic lyricism.

But where Spielberg utilised a plotline describing the search for a missing soldier, this uses no such device and is happy to limit itself to evoking the sheer tedium of war.

There's a few duff notes - the acting is variable and we could have done without the crass gay seduction scene in a Tunisian hospital.

But, by and large, it’s a marvellous realisation of Fuller's concept and a welcome chance to see one of the great forgotten war films.

Tim Evans