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Released in 1977 at the end of a particularly complicated and chaotic production, the only war film by the immense Sam Peckinpah is a pure masterpiece, carried at arm’s length by an extraordinary James Coburn.
Russian front, Taman Peninsula, 1943. The German armies are retreating. To the regiment commanded by Colonel Brandt arrives a new Battalion Commander, Stransky, a Prussian aristocrat, who volunteered for the Russian front in order to bring back an Iron Cross, a coveted symbol of bravery. In fact, a Deep antipathy is immediately established between the latter and Sergeant Steiner, a fighter loved by his men and who despises the officers…
In 1998, the press and the public praised, among other qualities, the terrible realism of the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan. Sometimes unbearable scenes, shredded or charred bodies in the middle of which bullets whistled and penetrated the flesh.
However, it was a bit quick to forget that 21 years earlier, Sam Peckinpah was already doing just as well with Iron Cross, the director’s only war film, and one of the greatest war films ever made. A film with paroxysmal violence, which the filmmaker did not like and precisely wanted to disgust the spectators, contrary to the stupid comments of the time which accused him of glorifying it throughout his career.
Peckinpah encountered many difficulties for this film, adapted from the work Men’s skin by the writer Willi Heinreich: script revised several times, filming in Yugoslavia with a cosmopolitan crew which led to communications problems, insufficient financing…
However, he manages to deliver a film of implacable force, violently anti-militarist (“if you knew how much I puke up in this uniform…” cowardly Steiner), stripped of all grandeur and heroism, without forgetting that he adopts the German (soldier) point of view, which was rather rare at the time.
Studiocanal
Magnified by the formidable work of director of photography John Coquillon, and the absolute knowledge of Peckinpah’s editing which increases the strength of his work tenfold, the film also offers the opportunity to see a powerful face to face between an immense James Coburn (who found himself too old for the role at 48!), and Maximilien Schell, who plays Stransky.
A confrontation which finds a final echo in an exchange as brief as it is sublime: “I’ll show you how a Prussian officer knows how to fight!” Stransky said to Steiner. Before the latter gives him a definitive: “…and I’m going to show you…How you earn an Iron Cross.” We can always, however, prefer the original version of this final line: “And ‘I’ll show you… Where the iron crosses grow”or “…And I’m going to show you…Where the Iron Crosses grow”.
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