Legendary filmmaker Sam Peckinpah is always destined to be one of cinema’s most misunderstood voices. His predominantly macho body of work dealt with frustrated, pent-up groups of men on missions that traverse the abyss, often losing themselves and sending many others into its deep nothingness along the way. Although milder and more commercial than his other work, the Charlton Heston vehicle Major Dundee set the groundwork for Peckinpah’s body of work with a Civil War story that owes as much to John Ford as it does Moby Dick. Dundee’s obsession with tracking down a murderous Native American chief is very much an Ahab versus whale tale, and even an icon like Heston isn’t immune to the evil inherent to Peckinpah’s protagonists. More iconic works like The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs deal head-on with the brutal chain reaction of violence caused by extreme masculine codes of “honour”, but perhaps his most complex work lies in his late-period World War II epic Cross of Iron, now presented by Studio Canal in a stunning 4K remaster on blu-ray and UHD.
Peckinpah regular James Coburn leads as Corporal Rolf Steiner, a battle-hardened German soldier in charge of a reconnaissance platoon that make up a very motley crew indeed. We pick up their trail on the Eastern Front in 1943, struggling to maintain their position against the gaining Soviet army and holed up in a labyrinth of bunkers under constant bombardment. Despite all that, Steiner and co. are living in a relative idyll, drinking and boozing and keeping the wartime spirits high…until the arrival of Maximilian Schnell’s Captain Stransky and his rampant ambition to attain the eponymous medal of honour makes an already-dire situation ten times worse. Thus ensues a decidedly uncommercial tour from battlefield to convalescence hospital and back again that interrogates the distinct codes the Corporal and Captain can never see eye to eye on.
Studio Canal have decided to open their restoration with a disclaimer, noting that the views held in the film are “outdated attitudes”. This speaks to the many ways Cross of Iron is a challenging watch, first and foremost because of the complicated humanity it gives to its Nazi characters. Steiner is a deep skeptic of the war and an even-bigger active critic of the Nazi party itself, yet his primary motivation is to get back to the action wherever it is to ensure the survival of his brothers in arms. He’s a strange kind of hero, probably one of Peckinpah’s most virtuous screen leads, and to find this level of nuance in what could be a film populated by well-worn stereotypes like camp, cackling SS officers is what makes this a substantial work. Even its villain is given plenty of background to work with; Captain Stransky is positively nasty, determined to lie and cut corners to attain stolen valour from soldiers who end up giving their lives in the chaos to save others, and yet he’s still one of Peckinpah’s most emotionally-vulnerable characters, trapped by his aristocratic rank and holding no feasible skills to help himself or his fellow man under fire. Schnell is authentically pompous and yet also gives a real fear and sadness to Stransky, standing as a perfect foil for Steiner’s world-weary bravery. The two are still somehow eclipsed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder regular Klaus Löwitsch in a particularly heartbreaking role as Unteroffizier Krüger, the beating heart of the platoon and referee when tensions rise. He gives one of cinema’s great thousand yard stares in a harrowing moment deep in the film’s explosive middle set-piece, repeatedly murmuring “I don’t ever want to be alone again” as Peckinpah’s camera pushes in on Löwitsch’s distressingly realistic panic attack. For all of Cross of Iron’s more sensational moments, it’s this one that keeps it the most real.
The evils that men do are shown in excruciating detail as per Peckinpah, but with Cross of Iron, there’s a sense that he and his savage worlds are wanting to atone for their sins after so much death and destruction.
As an action film, it sees Peckinpah deploy his trademark slow-motion photography and explosive blood squibs in substantial quantities, but measured against The Wild Bunch’s revolutionary, chaotic treatment of screen violence, there’s something more frightening at play here. Like the best war films, Peckinpah is not a filmmaker to shy away from the ugliness of war, and his real genius stroke is acknowledging the highs as well as the lows. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now retains its hallucinatory power precisely because it is unafraid to put you in the heightened, feverish mindset of a man pulling the trigger; the seminal Ride of the Valkyries helicopter attack is exciting and propulsive, and whether you like feeling that sensation in that particular context or not, it is undeniable Coppola successfully conveys the blood-drunk ecstasy of a government-sanctioned killer in the heat of the moment. Peckinpah understands this mode too, adding off-kilter flourishes to scenes of abject horror like Steiner coolly tossing an empty machine gun mag towards a massacred pile of corpses in ultra slow-motion and then snapping the illusion with the terrible sight of a private being blasted through the air, hitting a barbed wire barrier and then being buried a split second later by a falling tree. There’s something alluring about the way Peckinpah captures such awful sights, and his emphasis on drawing out people’s final moments in such a stylish way will be one that many will contest to and misunderstand, even in hindsight of the overall picture of his controversial career.
More vitally however, there’s a honesty that goes with the irony of his violence. The fate of a young Soviet prisoner is cruel and tragic, but has a nasty poetry to it that hammers home the futility of combat. There’s even an autocratical sequence near the film’s finale that sees an extended scene of sexual violence reach a grim end for its perpetrator, and anyone who has endured Straw Dogs’ brutal attack on Susan George will no doubt see Peckinpah placing the power back in the hands of the victim this time round. The evils that men do are shown in excruciating detail as per Peckinpah, but with Cross of Iron, there’s a sense that he and his savage worlds are wanting to atone for their sins after so much death and destruction.
As powerful a work as Cross of Iron remains 47 years after its release, it’s a real treat to see the painstaking efforts Studio Canal have gone through to reintroduce it to a new generation. Their 4K restoration is sublime, never neglecting the sweaty, dirty detail of the soldiers’ faces or the unsanitary filth of their day-to-day lives. The rusty mix of crimson reds and muddy browns is perfectly balanced in a remarkable colour grade that immerses the viewer in the misery and the action in equal measure, and it’s entirely possible you’ll need a shower after looking at it too long. There is also a remarkable amount of bonus content across two discs, wrangled together by Peckinpah expert Mike Siegel. Anyone familiar with Arrow Video’s extensive limited edition of Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia (now extremely rare and containing a 10 hour (!) documentary on Peckinpah) will be delighted with this new set for Cross of Iron, and hopefully these two editions will stand as the benchmark for more of Peckinpah’s work to be so lovingly and thoroughly restored.
Cross of Iron is out now on 4K Studio Canal Blu-Ray
