War: Sustained Chaos and Confusion

Rating: 9/10 (15 December 2016)

Resembles an Impressionist or Modernist painting, as, for instance, Guernica. Each sub-theme plays its part, but is not followed through in the overall narrative. The whole is greater than the sum of these parts. Those reviewers who find the film to be a total mess are the usual obtuse and insensitive dunces that made up the studio suits who dumbly did their best to wreck Peckinpah's creations. Moreover, several of those retards seem to think this film is about Nazis: in fact, there is not a solitary Nazi in the entire movie. (Well, there may be one). These men are hapless apolitical soldiers, even the pompous self-promoting and dishonourable Prussian. Also, the Iron Cross is not remotely the equivalent of the American Purple Heart. The Iron Cross was awarded for bravery in battle as well as other military contributions in a battlefield environment. The Purple Heart is awarded for a broken nose, provided a bona fide enemy delivered the punch; or a flesh-wound in the bum, when running away.
The film's story plays out as a series of interlocking and merged, but individual and self-contained, episodes. For instance, the early episode of the ironic tragedy of the little Russian boy, taken prisoner and then shot by his own side, is one of these episodes. His harmonica can be taken as a lucky charm, which saved his life when captured, and which he gives to Steiner, thereby surrendering his good luck to the German Sergeant, who survives to the bitter end.
The battle scenes are intensely striking. The combatants are difficult to tell apart, and that figures, since there's little essential difference between them. They might as well be on either side. The tanks are faceless, anonymous, death-dealing robots, indiscriminately destroying anything in their path, human or inanimate.
Another very effective and affecting episode is Steiner's hallucinatory and romantic spell in the hospital. This recalled the fate of those wounded British soldiers in World War I, who returned to the front when recovered but undaunted, to carry on and die regardless. The nurse is resigned to the soldier's decision. No genuine frontline soldier is concerned in the slightest with the rights and wrongs of the conflict, but, as the film notes, merely with staying alive and supporting his comrades. Captain Stransky, with his questionable un-Germanic name, loses sight of that ethic because of his unnatural desire for the bravery cross; but he maybe sees enough light towards the end to shelve this attitude.
This is, obviously, a remarkably fine film. The only reason I'm docking one star is because it seems wrong to have all the good Germans played by American and British actors, and the dodgy German played by a German. Also, the dirty, long-haired, unshaven David Warner doesn't appear to be German at all.