Like 'Star Trek's' Scotty, he's a master jury-rigger, capable of working miracles with spit, wire and rubber bands. There's valor here, too, and plenty of action, including U-96's victorious sneak attack against a British convoy, followed by a game of cat-and-mouse with an enemy destroyer, and the ingenuity of the chief engineer (Klaus Wennemann) as he fights to keep the battered boat alive. If any of the boat's boyish new recruits had any delusions of glamour, they are soon as far behind them as the girls and mothers they left ashore. The sub rocks like a granny on steroids, and everything - food, fuel, oil and human waste - mixes together in one stinking broth. The misery mounts when the U-96 takes a hit from an enemy destroyer. Unlike Hollywood's hygienic undersea dramas, 'Das Boot' graphically depicts the nasty intimacy of a long mission. As if that weren't enough, there is an outbreak of crabs and somebody forgot to load the toilet seat covers. The men are obliged to share one head for most of the six week-journey, a period characterized by stormy weather and repeated bouts of seasickness. Sides of beef, salami and ribs all swung from the submarine's infrastructure, and loaves of bread, lemons and other foodstuffs filled not only every spare nook and cranny but also one of the boat's two heads.

Along with 50 men and a mess of torpedoes, each boat was crammed with the food needed for a long mission. Vienna sausages have more privacy in their can than the seamen found in the sweaty confines of U-96, one of the infamous German subs that prowled the North Atlantic in search of British naval targets. The story line's the same and so is the message, but Petersen's sacrificed the urgency of the original in favor of a greater emphasis on the dreary domesticity of life in a German U-boat, a World War II vessel resembling a giant colon. If 'Das Boot' was like being there, the director's 'ideal cut' is like being there longer.

Under the false impression that more is better, Wolfgang Petersen has added another hour of footage to the film for its 15th-anniversary re-release. The original 145-minute version of 'Das Boot' portrayed the drudgery of war with a nail-biting verite that few other combat dramas have approached before or since.

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