Accurately messy experience with the Eastern Front

Rating: 8/10 (27 December 2018)

While there have been a few movies at this point to deal with the Eastern Front (most recently the German TV series "Our Mothers Our Fathers"), nothing including STALINGRAD and the numerous Finnish war films have captured the horrific nature of the grit and fighting quite like this one. Sam Peckinpah uses editing like a science and makes this film a sort of WILD BUNCH in Eastern Europe. The quick cutting, slow motion, and balletic cross-cutting back and forth creates an exciting fever dream of an experience and certainly breathes a lot of life into the film's more superfluous scenes (such as Steiner's trip to the home front). We don't get exploding heads, murdered civilians, and entrails all over the place so I can't call this an anti-war movie along the lines of COME AND SEE. I would instead call this possibly the most macho WW2 adventure ever made with a strong satirical tone not really made too obvious until the last reel (which is a bit of a fluke I hear as reportedly they had run out of money to make it the way Peckinpah had originally envisioned).
This may be the only film to depict the desperate German holdout in the Taman Peninsula in the summer of 1943. My main complaint is that it isn't given much context (ie. a glorious map session like we got in BATTLE OF NERETVA or A BRIDGE TOO FAR) because the Taman Kessel was a unique phenomena of the war with its only resupply / escape over the Kerch straits to Crimea. On one hand it was the only hope the Germans had of ever attacking the oil fields of the Caucasus again, and on the other hand a very precarious and easily isolated pocket.
Nope, in this movie we are down in the trenches with the men for the most part, fighting for their lives every day and not very conscious or concerned with the greater strategy of the war. They may as well have set this in the Rzhev meatgrinder, which was probably even more horrific but beyond this film's budgetary scope. Most of the Germans (outside of oddly cast James Coburn and two of his senior officers) are played by real German actors speaking accented English. Once you get past the casting of American Coburn and Englishmen Mason and Warner in the key roles, it actually feels much more authentic than, say, ENEMY AT THE GATES. It falls victim to a couple cliches of course, with Zoll the ardent Nazi of Steiner's group being suicidally incompetent and a rapist (who is even introduced as a possible SS man though that wouldn't make any sense for him to be serving in a Wehrmacht unit so early in the war) who of course gets his just desserts. Maximilian Schell's villain is more of a Prussian aristocrat obsessed more with glory than Nazi racist/homophobic policies, even exploiting them to his advantage, which is a nice change of pace.
See with an open mind especially as a fan of Peckinpah's other action films. Pound for pound, it probably boasts the most action of all his films. Don't expect to be too enlightened or educated about the horrors of war or the human condition, though there are a couple good such scenes sprinkled here and there.