STACK #195 Jan 2021

EXTRAS FEATURE

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CROSS OF IRON (1977) Directed by Sam Peckinpah platoon, a tight knit group of dog-soldiers fighting for their

fifteen Russian WWII tanks and several vintage aircraft, but due to costs only managed to obtain three tanks and no aircraft. But even without the promised equipment, the stunning footage captured for the battle sequences demonstrated the brilliance of Peckinpah and his skill with the camera. As he was preparing to shoot the climactic sequence in which the Russian troops are advancing on the crumbling German defences, and where Steiner tells the reprehensible Stransky, “I’ll show you where the Iron Crosses grow”, Hartwig ran out of money, forcing him to shut down production. Peckinpah and Coburn decided to inject their own cash into the project and shot the sequence – scheduled for three days – in a little over four hours. TRIVIA: A year later in 1978, Peckinpah was offered the chance of directing a sequel titled Sergeant Steiner but he declined as his original had served to deliver all he had wanted to say about WWII. The sequel was eventually directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, starring Richard Burton and Rod Steiger, but was unable to find an American distributor to release it.

A ctor/director Orson Welles described Sam Peckinpah’s Cross of Iron as the most trenchant anti-war movie since Lewis Milestone’s 1930 classic All Quiet on the Western Front . Peckinpah had previously examined many forms of brutality and warfare in the majority of his films, but had never made a WWII movie before. In late 1975 as he was

survival in the chaotic and lethal environment of the

Russian front. Returning from a hard-fought reconnaissance mission, they find they are under the command of a new adjutant. Captain Stransky (Schell) is an arrogant Prussian aristocrat who had asked to be transferred to the Russian Front to enhance his chance of winning an Iron Cross. But Stransky never leaves his

completing The Killer Elite , he was approached by German producer Wolf C. Hartwig to direct an American-German-Yugoslavian co-production based on Willi Heinrich’s 1956 novel The Willing Flesh . Heinrich had served with the 1st Battalion-228th Jager regiment, which suffered huge casualties fighting on the Russian front – Heinrich himself was wounded five times. His story focuses on a German platoon fighting for their lives in late 1943 as Hitler’s Eastern front, and his thousand-year Reich, teetered on the verge of collapse. Peckinpah immediately saw the opportunity to make an atypical war film instead of the usual American gung-ho production, and eagerly accepted the director’s chair. Within a few months he had assembled an international cast including British actors James Mason and David Warner, Austrian actor Maximilian Schell and his favourite American actor, James Coburn, in the key role of Sergeant Steiner. The supporting roles were given to German and Yugoslavian actors. Before filming began in Yugoslavia, Peckinpah prepared his main cast by screening for them Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous documentary of the Nazi Party's 1934 Nuremberg Conference, Triumph of the Will . Coburn would later state, “After that film we all understood how the German people had fallen under Hitler’s spell and that Riefenstahl’s propaganda film had helped him achieve it.” Cross of Iron relates the story of cynical war-hardened Feldwebel Rolf Steiner and his

bunker and is content to order others to their death. His obsession with winning his own medal induces him to manipulate other officers, which leads to Steiner and his platoon being betrayed as they return from another mission. With a multi-lingual cast and production

Steiner proceeds to show Stransky “where the Iron Crosses grow”

When Cross of Iron was released in Europe, under the title Steiner, it received rave reviews. It became the highest grossing motion picture in Germany and Austria and won a Bambi, one of Germany’s most prestigious performing arts awards. But the reception in the US was the polar opposite. Americans were not interested in a WWII movie that cast Germans in a sympathetic light and the suggestion that the Russians had won the war. Consequently, the movie was dumped into US second run theatres with no publicity and only grossed a dismal half a million dollars. The fact that Cross of Iron has now been reassessed as one of the finest war movies ever made is attributable to Peckinpah’s peerless direction and his mastery as a moviemaker.

Steiner (James Coburn, centre) and his platoon

team, it proved a troublesome shoot. Any war film – with its requirement for large quantities of explosives, uniforms and equipment – is extremely expensive, as Hartwig swiftly discovered. He had promised his director

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12 JANUARY 2021

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