Cross Of Iron Details

Director Sam Peckinpah switches from westerns such as The Wild Bunch to another kind of savagery — Germans in retreat on the Russian Front during the Second World War — and makes this as graphic an antiwar film as anything since All Quiet on the Western Front. In this adaptation of a book by Willi Heinrich, James Coburn plays the disillusioned sergeant, sickened by slaughter and the double dealings of officers such as Maximilian Schell. There's little room for women in Peckinpah's exercise in macho ideals, though an encounter with female guerrillas shows them exacting revenge with dreadful results. This is bloody action, elegantly choreographed to chilling effect.

Painful to follow, occasionally beautiful to watch, this quite horrid film offers too much opportunity for its director to wallow in unpleasant physical details, and its main plot of bitter rivalry offers no relief.