Cross Of Iron [1977]

Central to the plot are the two main characters, the well-bred but combat inexperienced Prussian military aristocrat Stransky ( played well by Max Schell ) a fellow with an invincibilty complex still believing in the unassailable superioty of the german soldier. He represents what would have been a high percentage of the officer corp in the Wehrmacht throughout World War 2. He feels he cannot return to Germany without the Iron Cross, which he intends to get by fair means or foul.

Opposite him is the battle hardened anti-authority NCO Corporal Steiner ( played by James Coburn ) who has come to realise long ago that the campaign that decides the outcome of World War 2 for the axis powers is now doomed, and is resigned to final defeat, if not now, then in the future. His only remaining concern throughout the movie is to ensure that both he and all the remaining members of his platoon survive the war. His anger at the stupidity of continuing to fight for a doomed, flawed cause is directed primarily at the officer corp, for which Stransky makes a particularly good outlet, although as the film progresses, Steiner falls out with the one officer ( played by a thoroughly defeated and disinterested James Mason ) who quietly has similar views to him and has granted him unusual freedoms in the past.

In an interesting and probably coincidental reflection of german fortunes on the eastern front, the conflict between Steiner and Stransky closely mirrors the historical political wrangling between the Nazi party, German Army and their war production efforts that in many ways may have cost Germany the war.

The films' central themes of brutality, horror and the low price of human lives are supported by a plot revealing betrayal, cowardice, some humanity, but then revenge, murder and a determination to live in a film which reaches a nasty climax in which a fair majority of the characters in Steiner's platoon meet a grisly end when it seems they might just escape. The film, probably rightly, leaves you with a sense of regret, the bitter taste of defeat, but most importantly the notion that war is a senseless, amoral waste of young mens lives that nothing can justify.

Overall, the films set pieces are staged excellently with Peckinpah's trademark slow motion deaths littered throughout the movie, and with a combined German / English team behind the production, technical accuracy is generally superb throughout ( with one exception - although it is true to say that only a few hundred of the T34-85s had been delivered to the Red Army in late 1943, there is a scene where the Red Army commit an entire company of these new vehicles to overrun Steiner's battalion and force a rout from their entrenched positions, when in fact these were all employed to keep Germany's exhausted Panzer divisions on the back foot right up till the war's end. )

The film gets a 5/5, and is a must-see movie for anyone interested in World War 2 films with real grit.


Excellent Eastern Front war movie   October 9, 2002
Pete Murphy
16 out of 19 found this review helpful

The Russian Front 1943. The German invasion of Russia has ground to a halt amidst a sea of mud and dead bodies. For the soldiers on the front line it's no longer a matter of winning or losing, it's a matter of survival. Enter Captain Stransky, a Prussian aristocrat, determined to find glory at any price. This puts him at odds with his platoon leader Steiner, a seasoned and disillusioned vereran, who only cares about keeping his men alive. But Stransky wants an Iron Cross and he doesn't care how he gets it.

Sam Peckinpah's only foray into the world of the war movie was at the helm of this Anglo-German production and marked a change in direction for the genre. Gone were the days of John Wayne singlehandedly beating the enemy in jingoistic, flag waving, bloodless films that no more represented the wars they claimed to portray than Peckinpah himself represented the Hollywood studio system. With Cross of Iron he painted a picture of the grim reality of war, the downbeat brutality, the bloody reality of men fighting face to face in a battle they can't possibly win. He uses age old themes of honour, betrayal and revenge and proves once and for all that he was the master of slow motion gory violence. In Peckinpah's war you died a long, drawn out, painful death. You died for nothing. In 1977 this must have been shocking for audiences to watch. Not only were they expected to sympathise with their traditional enemy, but the characters they had grown to know through the 2 hour running time were then blown to pieces in front of them in gloriously timestretched twisting agony. There's no single shot and you're dead in Peckinpah's vision of war.
Cross of Iron is a film that sets out it's agenda from the first frame and sticks to it relentlessly. It's filled with brutal imagery such as a rotten German corpse being ground into the mud by a constant procession of trucks driven by his former comrades, but there's also a tenderness as Sgt Steiner, world weary and philosophical, tries to cling to his own humanity whilst surrounded by the absurdity of the carnage of the front line.
Some would say that The Wild Bunch, or maybe Straw Dogs, are Peckinpah's best films, but for me it's always been Cross of Iron. His trademark theme of men at odds with the world they find themselves in was never shown as eloquently as it is here. It's an intelligently written, bloodsoaked tale that deserves to be more widely seen than it is. It's also a cypher for Peckinpah's own career, his 'war' with the Hollywood studios. Peckinpah is Steiner, older and unwilling to follow the rules laid down by his commanders, the studio execs, played by James Mason and David Warner, but because of the success he brings on the battlefield he's left to run things his own way. With the arrival of Stransky, a man who makes Steiner resent him from the outset by laying down a new set of rules - I'm in charge you do what I say - we can see a clear parallel with the latter days of Peckinpah's own career. The studios were trying to shorten his leash, to force him to make films their way, but like the conflict between Steiner and Stransky, Peckinpah wouldn't play ball. He couldn't play ball. He was too old and pigheaded to change even if he wanted to, and his films were all the better for it.


"I'll show you where iron crosses are born!"   May 3, 2003
14 out of 16 found this review helpful

Sam Peckinaph's gruesome WW2 movie is better than any of his previous films, one of his most underrated and one of greatest war movies ever made.James Coburn stars as a decorated Prussian soldier who hates the war but does not know what he would be without it. His somewhat radical behaviour makes him enemies with his higher ranking officers yet his sworn loyalty to his platoon makes him their hero. The film is strongly reminiscent of Erich Maria Remarque's anti war novel "All Quiet On The Western Front" and has a chilling soundtrack featuring German childrens songs. To all those Peckinaph fans I apoligise for this comment, but I have to say I would have preffered if there were not those three action scenes and more of the genius storyline the rest of the movie has. If you are slightly bored with its somewhat slow beginning, just wait untill things really begin to get good (which is around the time the Russian boy gets shot, or perhaps earlier) and then to its truly disturbing ending. Ignore films like Windtalkers or the propaganda Black Hawk Down or even the boring Thin Red Line ("its philisopical". what crock of crap), this, for you young and naive viewers, is a real war movie and even though it may be old it will still pack a punch and will be much more satisfying than any recent war film.


A gruesome masterpiece -- intense, chilling   August 24, 2002
Grant A Thompson
12 out of 15 found this review helpful

Cross Of Iron is a masterpiece, one of the greatest anti-war, anti-authoritarian movies. It is one of director Sam Peckinpah's two finest works -- the other being The Wild Bunch. It deserves to be ranked in the same great war movie company as Apocalypse Now, Das Boot, Full Metal Jacket, Paths Of Glory, Saving Private Ryan and Seven Samurai. Its setting on the World War Two Eastern Front, its gruesomeness, and its risk-taking viewpoint on ugly combat from the German side, have tended to count against fair assessment of its considerable artistic achievements. Viewers wary of the morality of its German viewpoint and its explicitness might find that it is fundamentally about humanity in general as a victim of war. The film reflects on the humanity which may be found on all sides of conflict--including Russian humanity portrayed variously as relentless, innocent, brave, and feminine.

Cross Of Iron opens with an intense, chilling montage of nursery rhyme, propaganda, combat newsreel and atrocity. By the end of the main title the montage subtlely introduces the central characters, a German reconnaissance unit patrolling on the 1943 Russian front.

This 1977 film set rarely matched standards of cinematic mayhem. Cross Of Iron explosions don't look merely like pretty fireballs -- they blast fragments, rocks and debris, leaving no doubt as to why blood gouts from stumps of limbs and shrapnel-shredded entrails... Amid the screams of wounded and dying, as dust subsides from a mortar barrage, an artillery piece shorn of its crew by a near hit swings across a pocked battlefield, its traversing wheel spinning under its own momentum. The carnage occurs in the choreographed slow motion which Peckinpah made his signature.

James Coburn turns in one of his finest roles as Rolf Steiner, a highly decorated NCO who leads a German reconnaissance squad. Steiner fights less for his country than for his comrades. He has low opinions of class and rank distinctions. He is contemptuous both of Nazism and the aristocratic Prussian arrogance of his new superior officer, Captain Stransky, played with great style by Maximilian Schell. But there are hints of a dark side. Steiner is articulate and philosophical but he has no answer when his love interest during an enforced break from battle, nurse Eva (Senta Berger), bitterly accuses him of being afraid of what he would be without the war.

Among the many fine supporting performances, James Mason plays the war-weary Colonel Brandt. He sees the immorality and futility of German war aims, but his sense of honour and duty about the prevailing struggle makes ceasing to fight unthinkable. David Warner plays Brandt's out-of-place and out-of-time adjutant, Captain Kiesel, who represents to his colonel the hope that a more enlightened postwar Germany might arise from the ashes of inevitable defeat.

War movie buffs irritated by the technical inaccuracies common in many examples of the genre will find some satisfaction in attention to authentic details of weaponry. The T 34/85 tanks are real, although the very picky might argue that this is six months premature, and that for the summer of '43 they should be T 34/76. A range of genuine WWII German and Russian small arms appears in close-up. Most importantly, the Warner Home Video Zone 2 release has the high quality video and sound which has been missing from the non-studio Zone 1 releases. This DVD is a must-have for war movie fans.


Startling image, authenticity and brutality of war.   December 4, 2003
12 out of 13 found this review helpful

Right from the start, this film grabs you by the lapels and forces you to watch - the titles appear over stills of Hitler Youth errecting a Swastika flag, German soldiers suffering in the Russian winter, partisans being executed... all to the tune of a children's rhyme, interspersed with a military marching tune. An unrelenting artillary bombardment ensues, amidst the mud of Russia, where the Wehrmacht are being forced back. Steiner (Coburn) is the battle-weary veteran corporal, trying to keep himself and his squad of men alive, and at odds with his superior officers, particularly the newly-arrived Prussian aristocrat, Captain Stransky (Schell). The attention to detail will delight afficianados of the war - real T34 tanks, Germans preferring captured Russian weapons rather than their own - and the impending sense of doom as the story approaches it's bloody climax - well, this IS a Peckinpah film, after all!