Spielberg leads the charge as Second World War is re-run

FILMS about the Second World War, a staple of cinema in the Fifties and early Sixties, are making a comeback, with about a dozen projects in production.

The key difference between the Nineties films and earlier versions is that today's are likely to be more realistic in their portrayal of the carnage and chaos.

Steven Spielberg's new film, Saving Private Ryan, is set in France during the D-Day landings. Produced by his company Dreamworks and starring Tom Hanks, it is due to be released in September.

Mr Spielberg said: "Omaha Beach was a slaughter. It was a complete foul- up: from the expeditionary force to the saturation bombing that missed most of their primary targets. Given that, I didn't want to glamorise what actually happened. So, I've been brutally honest."

Gerry Lewis, co-head of Dreamworks International marketing and distribution, added: "Steven wanted to make an in-your-face war movie. It's getting away from the Hollywood gung-ho, John Wayne style of film. This is chaos, horror, mess and confusion."

But Mr Lewis believes the current trend for war films will swell only if the movies released this year are a success.

In Cannes this week, one of the films competing for the Palme D'Or is a Japanese film set on the eve of the Japanese surrender in 1945. Another, the Italian film La Vita e Bella, is set in wartime Italy and later in a concentration camp.

War films in production feature stars such as Nicolas Cage and Michael Douglas. Anna Friel stars in a British romantic comedy, The Land Girls, about girls working on a Dorset farm when a Messerschmitt crashes near by.

Fifties film The Thin Red Line is being remade, and British company Working Title is behind an adaptation of Louis de Berniere's best-seller Captain Corelli's Mandolin, set on occupied Cephalonia.

Simon Relph, producer of The Land Girls, said: "There is a fantastic amount of interest in the era." One of the reasons, he believes, is the buzz created by a Spielberg project, which sends other film makers in search of similar themes.

In addition, the new British Films Catalogue of films being released this year includes Bride Of War, a true story of a Welsh guardsman who escapes from a POW camp and marries a Polish girl; and Breaking The Code, starring Derek Jacobi as Alan Turing, the man who cracked the Nazis' Enigma Code.

Also in Cannes, it was announced that the Churchill family has agreed to a film about Sir Winston Churchill, and allowed a film company to acquire the screen rights to his diaries, speeches and letters from the war years.

The pounds 16m film will be made by Samuelson Productions.