Among the many fine supporting performances, James Mason plays the war-weary Colonel Brandt. Although Steiner is articulate and philosophical he has no answer when his love interest during an enforced break from battle, nurse Eva (Senta Berger), bitterly accuses him of being afraid of what he would be without the war. He is contemptuous both of Nazism and the aristocratic Prussian arrogance of his new superior officer, Captain Stransky, played with great style by Maximilian Schell. He has low opinions of class and rank distinctions. Steiner fights less for his country than for his comrades. James Coburn turns in one of his finest roles as Rolf Steiner, a highly decorated NCO who leads a German reconnaissance squad. The carnage occurs in the choreographed slow motion which Peckinpah made his signature. Amid the screams of wounded and dying, as dust subsides from a mortar barrage, an artillery piece shorn of its crew by a near hit swings across a pocked battlefield, its traversing wheel spinning under its own momentum. Cross Of Iron explosions don't look merely like pretty fireballs - they blast fragments, rocks and debris, leaving no doubt as to why blood gouts from stumps of limbs and shrapnel-shredded entrails. This 1977 film set rarely matched standards of cinematic mayhem. By the end of the main title the montage subtly introduces the central characters, a German reconnaissance unit patrolling on the 1943 Russian front. Cross Of Iron opens with an intense, chilling montage of nursery rhyme, propaganda, combat newsreel and atrocity. The film reflects on the humanity which may be found on all sides of conflict-including Russian humanity portrayed variously as relentless, innocent, brave, and feminine. Viewers wary of the morality of its German viewpoint and its explicitness might find that it is fundamentally about humanity in general as a victim of war. Its setting on the World War Two Eastern Front, its gruesomeness, and its risk-taking viewpoint on ugly combat from the German side, have tended to count against fair assessment of its considerable artistic achievements. It deserves to be ranked in the same great war movie company as Apocalypse Now, Das Boot, Full Metal Jacket, Paths Of Glory, Saving Private Ryan, Seven Samurai, and Zulu. It is one of director Sam Peckinpah's two finest works - the other being The Wild Bunch. Cross Of Iron is a masterpiece, one of the greatest anti-war, anti-authoritarian movies.
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