Before becoming a real-life battlefield in 1991, Yugoslavia was a popular shooting location for foreign films dealing with the Second World War. This was largely due to the large quantity of American, Soviet, and German tanks and other equipment in the arsenal of the Yugoslav People’s Army, which helped filmmakers reconstruct various battlefields. The most memorable film to benefit from this was Cross of Iron, a 1977 Anglo-West German co-production directed by Sam Peckinpah.
The film is based on The Willing Flesh, a novel by German writer Willi Heinrich partly inspired by his own experiences as a Wehrmacht soldier on the Eastern Front. The protagonist, played by James Coburn, is Corporal Rolf Steiner, a veteran soldier decorated with the Iron Cross. In 1943, when the plot begins, the fortunes of war have turned against Germany and the Wehrmacht, which once penetrated the Caucasus, is forced to defend a shrinking bridgehead on the Taman peninsula against relentless attacks by the Red Army. Steiner commands a small band of soldiers and is now motivated only by the desire to keep himself and his comrades alive, even if this means going against rules, regulations, and his superiors’ orders. Lt. Colonel Brandt (played by James Mason), his regiment’s commander, knows that the war is about to be lost, so he shares Steiner’s sentiment, tolerates his insubordination, and even promotes him to sergeant. It’s quite a different story with Captain Stransky (played by Maximilian Schell), the newly arrived battalion commander, a Prussian aristocrat who volunteered for a transfer from peaceful occupied France to the Eastern Front with the sole desire to follow family tradition and get an Iron Cross. Stransky is, however, incompetent and lacks the courage to get into combat himself, so he expects his subordinates to help him at the expense of their lives, which would inevitably lead to conflict with Steiner.
Peckinpah, in The Wild Bunch, his revisionist western masterpiece, revolutionised the way violence is depicted on the big screen, and this approach seems quite fitting for the most violent event in the history of the world. Again, we can see slow motion, bodies with exploding squibs, blood, and agony, but this time on a much larger scale, with hundreds of victims and more varied ways of killing – from stabbing and being bludgeoned to death to being torn to pieces by artillery shells or bombs dropping from the sky. Those images are quite unpleasant, and even less pleasant because the violence includes women and children. This includes the character of a Soviet boy soldier (played by Serbian actor Slavko Štimac) whom Steiner unsuccessfully tries to keep alive, and the group of Soviet female soldiers whom Steiner and his men, some of them sex-starved, capture in the most disturbing scene of the film. Even in quieter scenes, violence is always in the background, through the sounds of distant artillery which sometimes shake the bunkers and improvised shelters where Steiner and his superiors discuss what they would do.
Yet, despite all that mayhem, there are characters the audience would not only notice but, in some ways, care about. That includes the small band of Steiner’s men, played by relatively unknown German actors, but each displays individuality, and they play their roles in a way that leaves viewers with little doubt that those characters have a strong bond and care about each other. James Coburn, one of the greatest stars of his time and also known for co-operating with Peckinpah on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, plays his character as a combination of a no-nonsense military professional devoid of any patriotic illusions but who remains deeply loyal to his men as well as the last remaining traces of humanity within him. Coburn’s wide acting range is further displayed in the scenes depicting his recovery in a military hospital following a concussion, when the shell-shock manifests itself in his utter confusion, helped by Peckinpah’s skilful direction and editing that makes quick cuts between his past and present, hallucination and reality. Maximilian Schell is very good in the role of Steiner’s adversary, who is pathetic and useless when it comes to combat, but whose upper-class connections and manipulative skills make him dangerous in the Wehrmacht’s version of office politics. This is most evident in the scene during which Stransky blackmails his homosexual aide, Lt. Triebig (played by Roger Fritz), into taking part in his scheme that would ultimately become murderous for Steiner’s men. Although they don’t have much to do compared with Coburn and Schell, the venerable British actors Mason and David Warner (who plays Brandt’s cynical aide Captain Kiesel) are well-used here and given a brief but memorable scene in which they discuss what they would do in Germany after the inevitable defeat.
Cross of Iron, despite presenting a huge variety of talent and benefiting from large amounts of creative energy, is not perfect. Some of the combat scenes are too repetitive and at times confusing. The anti-war message of the film is at times too explicit, especially in the end titles which try to connect images of the Second World War with images of later conflicts in Indochina, the Middle East, and Africa. The film suffered a lot because of Peckinpah’s legendary abuse of alcohol and tendency to go over budget, which in the end left its producer, Wolf C. Hartwig, nearly broke and forced Peckinpah to improvise a quicker and much cheaper ending than the one originally envisioned in the script. Because of that, the ending is unconventional and the main conflict remains unresolved, but Cross of Iron actually benefits from this, because such a finale matches the generally chaotic atmosphere of the film. Despite those flaws and hostility from US critics, Cross of Iron was a commercial success on international markets and is now recognised as one of the classics of the war film genre. This led to a 1979 sequel titled Breakthrough, in which Steiner’s role was taken by an uninspired Richard Burton. We should hope that the historic event that spawned Cross of Iron won’t get a sequel of its own.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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