Samuel Fuller's skills had been blunted by working in American TV in the 1960s, but the director returned to form on the big screen with this graphic war movie, arguably one of his most accomplished features. In fact, Fuller had regularly tried to make this picture over a period of about 30 years. A crime reporter while still in his teens and an infantryman in the Second World War, Fuller drew on the brutalities that he had witnessed and recorded to produce a powerful and, at times, poetic tale of five soldiers who experience the shocking realities of combat. The squad is lead by Lee Marvin, a perfect choice as the tight-jawed, bullish, growling sergeant, and reminiscent of Fuller himself. This version contains 47 minutes of restored footage cut by the studio on its initial release and is as close to the late director's original vision (Fuller died in 1997) as we can hope to get.

A veteran sergeant of World War I leads a squad in World War II, always in the company of the survivor Pvt. Griff, the writer Pvt. Zab, the Sicilian Pvt. Vinci and Pvt. Johnson, in Vichy French Africa, Sicily, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Belgium and France, and ending in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where they face the true horror of war.