"Talent, sensitivity and character"

Rating: 10/10 (20 August 2010)

The 70s were a strange time for the war movie, especially those dealing with World War Two. We were by now a generation past the conflict itself, and really cinema could use this giant wound in twentieth century history to say whatever it wanted. And since the anti-war movie was now en vogue (despite not being timely in any specific sense) a humane story about a platoon of disillusioned Germans amid the chaos of defeat could work as well as any other.
Cross of Iron was adapted from a German novel, with a screenplay by Julius Epstein of all people. But why not Epstein? After all Casablanca dealt with the war from a similarly oblique angle. You could even draw a line between Casablanca's Rick and Cross of Iron's Steiner, but let's not get carried away. Cross of Iron is a meditative and touching work, with a beautiful optimist streak amid the deluge of despair. And yet it refuses to get bogged down in philosophy, and does not shy away from a realistic amount of action.
The assignment of Peckinpah to the material, while it seems natural in retrospect, was perhaps not the most obvious. Peckinpah was certainly not a great dramatic director. However, his handling of action sequences plays a major role in the impact of this picture. For once, his typically poetic scenes of violence are not exciting – they are too chaotic and disjointed for that – but they are startling nonetheless. Shots are arranged to correlate separate events – David Warner does a nazi salute, a shell explodes outside, a picture of Hitler falls off the wall – evoking the situation in a direct and captivating manner.
Of course Peckinpah's rapid editing schemes mean there is little room for development within the frame, but he nevertheless does take care over the focus and meaning in his images. In fact, the precision of the fleeting shot is often more crucial than that of the lengthy one. Thus Peckinpah quickly establishes mood with an insert of James Coburn backed by wafting mists when he first sets eyes on the Russian boy. A pair of beams is crossed above Keppler's head to highlight his stark expression when he is bullied into betraying Triebig. Throughout, the clarity of Peckinpah's images enables him to rush all that information through in a lightning fast series of cuts.
And in these brief flashes we get to see some stirring acting performances – acting that is at odds with the cutting, being slow and moody. James Coburn was now becoming the archetypal world-weary, reluctant authority figure, and here his tarnished emotional core is at its most perfectly understated. His greatest moment is that ghost of a smile, rolling across his face like an involuntary twitch, that he gives when the Russian boy gives him the harmonica. The next best performances belong to some of the lesser-known German players. Klaus Löwitsch and Arthur Brauss in particular giving us some very real and likable characters.
English-speaking European co-productions like this one tend to be a bit messy, mostly down to the disparate forces working on them (the oddest thing which I haven't yet mentioned is that Cross of Iron's producers were all in the porn industry) as well as the bad mix of low budgets and lofty ideals that tends to be behind these projects. However Cross of Iron is, probably more by accident than design, a very apt and fruitful meeting of creative minds – a lovely, tonal work of beautiful melancholy.