a little spotty, some acting flaws, but it's still got the verve and punch of a harrowing anti-war classic

Rating: 8/10 (5 January 2008)

There are reasons I could not recommend Cross of Iron, but they're mostly surrounding little things that strike as being a little more 'ordinary' or just conventional. There's some moralizing from the perspective of the German side, there's a little acting that doesn't quite click (mostly due to accents that are a little forced), and there's only so much character development to keep the story moving. But those facets are tolerable, even sometimes compelling. What does make the movie *highly* recommendable, however, is that as with every film he made, to one degree or another, it's a Sam Peckinpah movie.
What you see from Peckinpah is what you get, and this time it's in the form of a war movie. It fits that he would make a war movie; the iconic scenes of the Wild Bunch where Peckinpah lets loose in his style of slow-mo violence on its western heroes, it's like it's ripped out of an operatic battle scene. So is the case with Cross of Iron that Peckinpah is phenomenally successful in portraying war as chaos, as battles rage and it becomes part of the narrative that we don't know who's fighting who.
It's in the editing, and in the (occassionally overwrought) slow-motion speed, not to mention the various squibs, that make Cross of Iron hit so harshly. On a low-budget, Peckinpah makes the most of his resources, and relies on montage and the inherent idea that war, especially when on he point of view of the side that will lose, is the most horrible concept realized by men in power. And sometimes Peckinpah, also in tune with his usual idiosyncratic method of editing in other scenes as cut-aways, drives the point home on a psychological level. Steiner (James Coburn) is a good soldier, a very professional one, who will lead his platoon despite the fact, as he tells James Mason's Captain, that he hates the uniform, hates officers, hates himself in his own skin. And sometimes he'll flash to a moment, a visual, that makes his journey all the more personal. Coburn brings it out in his personality, a kind of look that's intense, thoughtful, and always on edge. He plays this dangerous but ethical man to his logical conclusion, leading up to the ending where he finally breaks out in a desperate, maniacal laughter at the absurdity he's in.
As said, it's not a great film. It shows that Peckinpah was working with independent financiers that gave him only so much to work with. But it's hard to look away at times from what Peckinpah gives with what he's got. There's one of the most interesting scenes of any war movie here, not in a battle, but in a sort of "filler" scene- Steiner's platoon comes upon a Russian house full of women, some soldiers, after crossing over a protected bridge. There's a sense of peril in this scene, of multiple rapes about to occur. But then there's a morality here that's expressed too, with an unexpected moment with a sex act, and a naked woman bathing in a barrel. The acting here is some of the best in the movie, where all of the looks from the actors, many of them likely non-professionals, tell all there needs to be said about the smaller tragedies, the ones that get overlooked when looking at the big battles and strategies ala Stalingrad. Peckinpah gets so much right with scenes like these, with taut editing and a graphic vibe, as he does in other portions of the picture, that it's forgivable for what he gets wrong. It's a balancing act he, thanks to Coburn, pulls off excitingly.