Peckinpah's Politically Incorrect World War II Opus

Rating: 9/10 (14 March 2016)

When it came to Sam Peckinpah as a filmmaker, there was never an easy way of doing things, and a penchant for doing nothing the way Hollywood wanted. When he wasn't battling with studio chiefs and producers (which was a great deal of the time), he was frequently battling with critics who liked to nail him for his graphic violence and the complex approach he took to that violence, especially with films like THE WILD BUNCH and STRAW DOGS. It earned him the fairly distorting misnomer "Bloody Sam", which didn't really begin to explain the depth for which he cared about filmic art. And probably no other film of the fourteen he made was quite as infuriating as his 1977 World War II film CROSS OF IRON.
Based on the novel of the same name by Willi Heinrich, the film is set along the Eastern Front of World War II, where in 1943 the battle between Stalin's Soviet forces and Hitler's German forces was becoming the personification of a meat grinder war. James Coburn, a Peckinpah favorite, gives another extremely probing performance as Sergeant Rolf Steiner, the leader of a vastly outmanned and outgunned platoon of German foot soldiers, who learns that his particular squad is about to be taken over by the very autocratic Captain Hauptmann Stransky (Maximillian Schell). For reasons that are quite selfish, namely the desire to get the German equivalent of the Purple Heart or Bronze Star, the Iron Cross, Schell forces Coburn to go into battle against a regiment of the Soviet army that literally cuts their platoon to pieces. As is par for the course in a Peckinpah film, we have two men in conflict with one another, both practically two sides of the same German coin, only one of them (Coburn) cares more for the lives of his men, and Schell just cares about getting that damned Iron Cross, and is so blatant about that ambition that he tells Coburn, "I will show you how a true Prussian fights." Coburn then retorts, quite rightly, "Then I will show you where the Iron crosses grow." It is not too surprising that the battle and action scenes in CROSS OF IRON are distinct from every other filmmaker that has ever lived; we are, after all, talking about Sam Peckinpah here. And he certainly doesn't make things easy; besides the carnage that he shows, he is as precise as ever at showing how the horrors of war affect the men that have to fight it, and how alienated and anesthetized they can be to death and killing on a mass scale we hope never to revisit. Coburn, of course, is brilliant in his role as the humane Steiner whose only concern is for the men he leads and not for the officer corps, especially not the vainglorious Schell (another fine performance). Both actors are supported by a great cast that includes, among others, Senta Berger (who played the love interest in the director's 1965 Civil War western MAJOR DUNDEE), David Warner, and James Mason.
Unfortunately, CROSS OF IRON failed to find much of an audience outside of continental Europe because Peckinpah depicted World War II in such a politically incorrect way: from the point-of-view of German foot soldiers, as opposed to Americans and/or Brits, something that clearly seemed to alienate people just wanting to see a standard-issue war film where good guys and bad guys are clearly distinguishable. But that's John Wayne theatrics of the worst kind; and in real war, the line between good and bad is not only a thin one but it's a line that is also frequently crossed. In any case, Coburn, Schell, Mason, Warner, and their fellow German soldiers are frontline soldiers in the heat of battle, not the Nazi commandants who gassed six million Jews with impunity in the concentration camps. They may be wearing the uniform of a country and a leader with a (to say the least) unjust cause, but that by itself doesn't diminish the reality of the horrors they experience, and in that respect it makes them no different from the Americans, the British, or even the Soviets.
Helped immensely by a crew that includes the great British cinematographer John Coquillon, who had already worked with Peckinpah on STRAW DOGS and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID, CROSS OF IRON is one of those films that ranks with the best films about any war ever made, whether it's about World War I (ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT; PATHS OF GLORY), World War II (SAVING PRIVATE RYAN), or Vietnam (BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY; PLATOON; FULL METAL JACKET). Even with a few flaws in it, this is a movie that needs to be restored to its full original, and extremely disturbing, glory and power, especially for how it adds to Peckinpah's reputation as an ultimate seeker of the truth of Man's contradictions, no matter how disturbing or politically incorrect he is in doing so.