Cross of Iron (1977)

Director: Sam Peckinpah
Writers: Julius Epstein, Walter Kelley and James Hamilton, based on the book by Willi Heinrich
Stars: James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, James Mason, David Warner and Senta Berger

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Cross of Iron is a polarising movie and it’s not hard to see why both sides think the way they do. The people who dislike it see the weak plot and overwhelming amount of explosions. That seems fair. On the other hand, the people who like it tend to love it because it isn’t about plot but immersion and overwhelming is the point.

Initially, it’s a little jarring, because of, well, everything. Sure, we’re in World War II, which isn’t unusual, but it seems so otherwise.

For a start, we’re on the German side, which I should emphasise is not necessarily the Nazi side. There’s only one Nazi in this film and he meets an appropriately awful end: the Russian soldier he raped in a barn bit off his penis and Sgt. Steiner walks in the rest of her platoon to do with him what they will.

For another, we’re on the Russian front, on the Taman Peninsula in 1943, but the Germans are losing. In fact, they’re losing so badly that they’re withdrawing and not quickly enough, the Russians constantly shelling their trenches and chipping away at their numbers.

And the Germans aren’t all who we expect, not only because they don’t share the ideology of their Führer. They’re played by British and American actors, who speak English without a German accent. Oddly, they do sing in German and the one played by a German speaker uses both English and French instead.

Col. Brandt is played by James Mason, who sounds as posh and English as you may expect. His adjutant, Capt. Kiesel, is a laid back David Warner, who’s just as English. Cpl. Steiner—he gets promoted some way into the picture—is James Coburn, who sometimes puts just a little German into his voice but mostly doesn’t care. That leaves Maximilian Schell, as the new fish, Capt. Stransky, and he’s Austrian and fluent in German, so his accent is easily believable.

What little plot there is revolves around an overt clash between Stransky and Steiner. The latter is a highly experienced and very capable rank and file soldier, who’s served on the front for a long time and knows how to survive and keep his platoon as safe as possible under the trying circumstances. The former, however, is a new arrival, an aristocratic Prussian who has no idea how soldiering works but needs to win an Iron Cross to take home to make his family proud. That’s the only reason he asked for the reassignment from occupied France.

This is a two hour plus film, but this conflict boils down to two incidents. The first involves Steiner refusing to lie about who led a counter attack against the Russians that would qualify Stransky for that Iron Cross. He claims that it was him, but it was really Lt. Meyer, who died as he did so. Steiner tells the truth. That leads to the second, later in the movie, in which the Germans are to evacuate but Stransky doesn’t let Steiner’s platoon know, which lands them facing overwhelming odds. And that’s it.

Really, Peckinpah and his writers aren’t too interested in recounting a plot. What they aim to do is to throw us firmly into harm’s way in a particularly dangerous part of the war and let us figure out what it feels like to survive.

Sure, there are huge amounts of explosions, but the key scene there is the one in Brandt’s bunker when we first meet Stransky. He jumps at every single burst outside because it’s all so close. Brandt takes basic precautions when the situation requires it. Kiesel shrugs them off as if they were birdsong. What the film tells us is that this isn’t a Hollywood action scene that’s going to thrill us with choreography. It’s pure chaos and it happens so often that, by the end of the film, we won’t even notice it, like the L outside Elwood’s room in The Blues Brothers. It’s as if we’re Pvt. Kern, only six weeks in but sent to the front already, where everything is new.

Because this is a Sam Peckinpah film, there’s a level of style in the choreography, even with everything I’ve said above. Those who saw The Wild Bunch will recognise the slow motion, the blood and the core theme of basic men trying to survive in a hostile environment.

What stood out to me in these scenes and in others, like Steiner’s recuperation in hospital after a week long coma, was the editing, which was by Michael Ellis and Tony Lawson. It got my attention during the opening credits but it shines all the more during battle, when we see the war in glimpses. It’s done in quick edits, an almost montage approach, that never gave me motion sickness but did keep me wondering if I was going to be alive when the bombs stop.

Part of my brain tells me that Cross of Iron is too long, too sprawling, too unfocused. I’m not listening to it because I’m too immersed in the blood and dirt and base urge to remain alive.

That was a common theme for Peckinpah, a controversial director who pioneered a violent form of Hollywood action film that paved the way for the excesses of the seventies. The Wild Bunch in 1969 is the most overt example, with a more epic take on what had happened at the end of Bonnie and Clyde two years earlier, but it continued in a different way in Straw Dogs too.

He was never the most prolific director and many of his films failed at the time, only to be reassessed critically later to become classics, favourites of many of the greatest names in the business, from Welles to Scorsese.

One reason was his alcoholism, the cause of myriad cost overruns, battles with casts and crews and lost shooting days. On Major Dundee, his abuse of actors prompted Charlton Heston to threaten to run him through with a cavalry sabre. Here, he drank 180 proof Slivovitz daily and binged every two or three weeks to regain his faculties. Overruns meant the budget ran out before the finalé could be shot, prompting Coburn and Schell to improvise a new one.

However, hindsight tells us that he came up with the goods anyway. Ride the High Country is a seriously underseen western while The Ballad of Cable Hogue doesn’t rely on violence and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid found a resurgence in a director’s cut. A wildly different western, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, is one of the most uncompromising American films from its most uncompromising decade.

His non-westerns include thrillers like Straw Dogs, The Getaway and Convoy, which explore a completely different aspect to the genre each. Most later examples, like The Killer Elite or The Osterman Weekend aren’t considered among his best work and he died young, only fifty-nine, a hard life having emphatically taken its toll, a long way from his hundredth birthday today.