The finest anti-war film ever made?

Rating: 10/10 (8 October 2003)

** Possible minor spoilers **
"The finest anti-war film ever made," according to Orson Welles, who knew a little bit about movies himself, and I for one won't disagree. Cross of Iron has its flaws - the incongruity of some of the casting and accents, several sloppily-directed scenes, occasional bouts of pretentiousness - but nevertheless it is a masterpiece.
Sam Peckinpah was heavily in the grip of terminal alcoholism when he made this film, and it shows. The sure touch and tight control of script, action and editing he showed in The Wild Bunch (easily his best film, one of the ten best films ever in fact; don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise) are not consistent here, but individual sequences, such as the initial attack on the machine gun bunker, are vintage Sam.
What makes this film great is the savagery of its bleak, existential anti-war sentiments. By showing the battle at the Russian front from the perspective of the "enemy", ie Steiner's German platoon, Cross of Iron avoids patriotic cliché and forces us to confront deep-seated prejudices. By the time they are slaughtered at the climax, we do genuinely care about Steiner's men, to the extent that we exult in Steiner's clinical execution of the agent of their murders. The real punch comes right at the very end of the film, during the last part of the end credits: a succession of slides depicting wartime atrocities, including the hanging of children in concentration camps, is projected onto the screen, the sound of the projector mimicking that of a gun being loaded. Overlaid on this is the sound of ebbing manic laughter - Steiner's? - the cruel commentary of a man worn down by constant immersion in man's cruelty to his fellows.
Somebody here criticises this film because the battle scenes are "confusing" and "hard to follow". Well for goodness sake, isn't that what war is like? Confusing, chaotic, frightening, Peckinpah's elliptical battle scenes, with their distorted sound, dull colours and surreal, disorientating photography, plunge us into the centre of hell in a way Spielberg's technically proficient but emotionally vacuous Saving Private Ryan never does. At the end of the film, watch how Peckinpah shoots the doomed platoon members in telephoto close-up, an effect which serves to flatten their images against the screen, dislocating them from their environment.
Not the greatest of Peckinpah, but a great film. And even average Peckinpah is better than the best that modern Hollywood usually offers.