Unrelenting and unforgettable

Rating: 9/10 (24 February 2007)

I had read reviews of cross of iron well before my recent viewing of this incredible masterpiece on our local TV station during the small hours. None have given this remarkable film any justice. No war film is so unrelenting in portraying just a small sector of the largest conflict in history. With pitiless carnage from start to finish, one wonders how any who were drafted to fight on the eastern front could survive such inferno after so many written accounts of the brutality and suffering of eastern front warfare are made visual in this film. I can't believe the compassion I could feel for the characters considering the age of the film compared with the bubblegum war films of that era. The mosaic opening scene entwining images of the phoenix rise of Germany, prosperity and incredible evil against a child's nursery rhyme left me cold. No one could have any romantic notions of modern warfare after sitting through this film.
This film satisfied something in me that has brooded for a long time. I have grown physically ill of films that portray German soldiers as useless cattle that were mercilessly butchered by brave American\British supermen. The soldiers of all sides were largely boys not a lot different to each other. All sides in the conflict had their brave and humane Steiners or their callous and evil Stransky's, even those who fought to rid the world of the heinous Nazi's. Cross of Iron's closest contemporary in terms of visual repulsion and subject matter - Saving Private Ryan is simply another Hollywood Dirty Dozen in shiny new clothes. It portrays rank and file Germans and their soldiers as hideous Nazi's and paves the way throughout the film for Spielberg to inflict a glorified orgy of death upon them in the final scene which can only be described as a very personal fantasy for the director that unfortunately we are all now privy to. The image where rays of light bathe an American soldier who has murdered a surrendered prisoner like some kind of suggestive sainthood is disgraceful and who knows how many are influenced by this kind of vicious manipulation of film-making. Cross of Iron shows the wholesale slaughter of all humans in war and the increasingly hopeless situation of all involved is a physical strain upon the viewer. There is no better anti-war film.