Cross of Iron (1977) - film review

It is 1943 and Germany is losing the war on the Eastern Front.   After a humiliating defeat at Stalingrad, German troops are in retreat, repelled by a determined Soviet fighting machine.   Corporal Steiner is a battle-hardened soldier in the Germany army, contemptuous of officers but fiercely loyal to the men who fight alongside him.  He takes an instant dislike to his new commanding officer, Captain Stransky, a Prussian aristocrat who chose to be posted on the Eastern front to improve his chances of winning the Iron Cross, Germany’s greatest honour for valour.  Steiner sees Stranksy for what he is, a vainglorious coward who uses blackmail and bribery to achieve his ends, and is unimpressed when the captain promotes him to the rank of sergeant in an attempt to buy his support.   When Steiner refuses to recommend his commander for the medal he craves, Stranksy realises that he is a dangerous threat that must be dealt with...

Possibly the most consistently underrated war film ever made, Cross of Iron is cinema’s most explicit depiction of the naked brutality of warfare and its corrosive effect on the souls of the men who find themselves caught up in the carnage of battlefield conflict.  Taking as his inspiration Willi Heinrich’s 1955 novel Das Geduldige Fleisch (The Willing Flesh), director Sam Peckinpah creates a startling piece of cinematic art that captures all of the ugliness and barbarity of modern warfare and makes the most powerful anti-war statement seen in any film since Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).  

Contrasting the nobility of the individual who sticks to his principles against the gutless ignominy of those who cynically serve a debased regime that has lost its moral purpose, Cross of Iron is quintessential Peckinpah and deals with themes that are central to the director’s oeuvre - the corruption of the innocent, the dehumanising effect of violence and the conflict between values and ideals.  By the time he made this film, Peckinpah had already earned some measure of notoriety, his private life proving to be every bit as controversial as his films, which were widely censured for their extreme depictions of physical violence.  No wonder then that Cross of Iron, with its abundance of gory death and mutilation, was not well-received by the mainstream press, who tore into it with no less ferocity than a pack of hounds ripping into a fox after a protracted hunt.  

Few critics could be bothered to look beyond the simulated blood-letting and see that, far from wallowing in mayhem and misery, the film is actually making some intelligent and timely observations on violence, portraying it as a degrading perversion to be resisted rather than something that is in any way good for the human psyche.   Unlike most war films, which present war as a glorious adventure in which death, when it comes, is swift, clean and pain-free, Cross of Iron shows war as it is - a totally barbaric ritual of mindless slaughter where individuals can only survive by blasting away the brains and internal organs of their opponents.  Most of those who fall on the battlefield are not instantly dispatched into oblivion, as most film directors will have us believe, but experience excruciating agony before succumbing to the welcome balm of extinction.  Peckinpah defies the sensibility of his audiences and critics and shows us the reality, the true unexpurgated horror of war.   Unfortunately, this was not what audiences wanted to see and the film’s lukewarm reception dissuaded Peckinpah from ever making another war film.  Had the film been a hit, it could have completely transformed the war movie genre, bringing a far greater realism that would educate society to the true nature of warfare, perhaps making military intervention a less easy option for those whom we elect to govern us, as well as making us much more cognizant of the courage of those who choose to fight on our behalf in those conflicts that are unavoidable.   

Certainly, Cross of Iron is not an easy film to watch.  Peckinpah makes few concessions to good taste and is unflinching in showing us such gruesome images as boy soldiers being ripped apart under intense machine-gun fire whilst others have their guts blown out by bombs and grenades (the visceral impact heightened by Peckinpah’s trademark slow-motion photography).   There are no sympathetic characters to soften the viewing experience, and certainly nothing that may be mistaken for a happy ending.  The main protagonists are a cynical battle-hardened thug (James Coburn, giving possibly his greatest performance) and a sadistic manipulative Nazi opportunist (Maximilian Schell as his most chilling) - two monstrous products of the war who are equally twisted, but only one of whom can be rightly described as evil.  

The conflict between the film’s two main characters serves as a metaphor for a divided Germany, a country corrupted by flawed ideology and driven to destruction by the action of self-serving hypocrites.  The private battle between Steiner and Stransky represents Germany’s struggle for identity in her darkest hour, reminding us that those who suffered most from the scourge of Nazism were the German people themselves.  A far more complex and moral film than it is often credited as being, Cross of Iron offers a sobering vision of war in general, portraying it not (as many films do) as a boy’s own adventure but as a physical and existential nightmare from which no one can hope to emerge unscathed or truly victorious.  War is the ugliest of man’s works, and it doesn’t hurt to be reminded of that fact once in a while.

© Steve Chandler 2010

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