![]() As writer and director of this and other such provocative classics as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs, Sam Peckinpah has served as an inspiration for everyone from Tarantino to Kathryn Bigelow. ![]() Finally, Steiner and his men were no longer fighting for Fhrer or Fatherland, but for their naked, desperate livesAcclaimed throughout Europe, The Cross of Iron has been. All the murderous hazards of war blocked their marchhunger, exhaustion, terror, treachery, death. Heralded as the most anti-war war film ever made, Cross of Iron is a bloody and thought-provoking depiction of the horrors of war. Their path to survival led straight through the entire enemy army. Knowing that defeat is inevitable their only goal is survival…. Then Stransky purposefully fails to relay an order to the squad to fall back from their position, leaving them surrounded by Russian troops and suffering heavy bombardment. When Steiner refuses to be complicit, a battle of wills between the two men from very different backgrounds ensures. The opening section of the novel, where Steiner and his platoon are trapped behind enemy lines and sneak back, encountering an all-female Russian unit on the way, is probably the strongest of the novel and could even have been a a stand-alone novella. When Stransky falsely claims credit for bravely leading the squad into a bloody battle against the Russians, he names gutsy Sergeant Rolf Steiner (James Coburn) as his witness. ![]() An arrogant aristocratic Prussian Officer named Stransky (Maximilian Schell) is assigned as the new commander of a German platoon, his only ambition is to win the Iron Cross, in order to maintain his family honour. ![]()
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