Mainly straight adventure, with a slight anti-war theme

Rating: 6/10 (13 October 2015)

Version I saw: UK bluray release
Actors: 6/10
Plot/script: 6/10
Photography/visual style: 6/10
Music/score: 7/10
Overall: 6/10
Sam Peckinpah was one of the most respected directors was one of the most respected American directors of his generation. He specialized in westerns such as The Wild Bunch (especially), and more generally went for adventure stories with a shade more subtlety than straight-up boys'-own swashbucklers.
Late on in his career, he took on an interesting task in Cross of Iron: a Second World War film told from the perspective of the German soldiers. In any such film, there are a couple of elephants in the room: Nazism and defeat. While Nazism can be covered, and indeed has been covered in the past, from other perspectives such as the Allied soldiers, or German civilians, this point of view has the unique colouring that we know they are destined to lose. If any happy ending is to happen for the main characters (and it may well not), it will be contrasted with the fate of their fellow soldiers.
In Cross of Iron, this is partly dealt with by isolating Sgt Steiner (James Coburn) and his squad behind enemy lines, and forcing them to make a daring trek through enemy territory. This cuts them off from the main pressures of the background, and allows the writers to bring them in on a controlled basis.
The main conflict, apart from against the Soviet army, is between Steiner and Capt. Stransky (Maximilian Schell), a political commissar of sorts who, while he claims not to be a Nazi party member, enforces their ideology over Steiner's seemingly more noble, practical approach. The main underlying thrust of the film is an anti-war message, that those at the top do not understand the brutality of the front line, and so resort to armed conflict entirely too frivolously.
When it comes down to it, though, the film is mainly a straight adventure, with very limited subtlety. The 'subtext' is even transformed into a supertext when it is spoken directly by Steiner: "I hate officers." It seems that, by his third-to-last film, Peckinpah had perfected his formula, enabling him to produce a strong, exciting adventure film with a bit of depth, without straying far from his comfort zone. However, he had also become somewhat set in his ways. There is a great deal of narrative and thematic potential in the central idea, I think, but Peckinpah had lost some of the flexibility to explore it.