1943. The German army is retreating with heavy fighting on the Eastern Front. Captain Stransky, transferred from France, arrives to replace the dead battalion commander. This elegant Prussian aristocrat has not yet been in a real battle and dreams at any cost to get the German military order – “Iron Cross”.
To achieve his goal, Stransky needs to win the respect of the platoon commander Corporal Steiner, a battle-hardened veteran who enjoys great authority among his comrades in arms. Steiner, a “universal soldier,” despises officers who crave glory but prefer not to go to the front lines….
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No matter how dirty the phenomenon called ‘war’ is, the ability to fight is not a crime for a single person (soldier, officer), because it was not he who invented such an exciting game for rulers who had not yet come to the time when the computer was invented, and with it the games of military strategy. It was for these games that Napoleon, Hitler, Lyndon Johnson and other motley contingent of inadequate comrades, who by virtue of circumstances received at their disposal maximum production, military and human resources, and, by virtue of their dubious goals, directed it to the destruction of everything around them, erasing from their vocabulary the concept of ‘the value of human life’.
However, one should not be deceived about toys, for in their age, if we look at militarists like Bush, this issue of aggression would hardly keep the above-mentioned madmen from the temptation to play with human lives for the sake of some vague ideological, economic and other interests.
Nevertheless, director Sam Pekinpa makes war look exactly like a game….. A dirty game of human lives, where the winner cannot be identified. Or rather, a judging panel called ‘history’ does. But it’s too subjective to answer the question: ‘What’s it for? ‘. This dirty game is built on the contrast between the supposed purity of the real culprits, sitting on their thrones on days of victory and hiding in underground bunkers on days of defeat, and the real filth of war, where forced laborers shed their blood in this alien game. Pekinpa points to this contrast at the beginning of his film ‘The Iron Cross’ by accompanying the newsreel footage of Hitler with the singing of a German children’s choir, as if mockingly equating the Führer to a child like the one who sadistically threw a scorpion into an anthill and shot the main character in the back in his other classic film ‘The Wild Bunch’.
And then, the viewer is thrown into a war zone on the Eastern Front in the summer of the post-Stalingrad period of the war, when the Germans are gradually losing ground on Soviet territory. Already the garrisons are experiencing a state of hopelessness, subconsciously sensing imminent collapse. However, one of the divisions is still fighting back, with an uncompromising officer, Steiner. ‘Steiner is a myth! ‘ says one of the staff military officers about him. Indeed, Steiner is a general’s dream because of his ability to fulfill the most hopeless combat tasks, and a soldier’s dream because he is like a real father to his platoon. For Steiner soldiers are ready to go under bullets, and Steiner is ready to get them out from under these bullets. He is the officer who is not guilty of knowing how to fight, not guilty of the existence of war, fascism, Hitler. He did not choose his homeland and power, but he fights for them because that is his destiny.
True, the questions of homeland and power if and bothered him, but not now, because at the moment he kills enemy soldiers not for the sake of some ideas, pathos coming from the mouth of Hitler and Goebels, not for the sake of the ‘Iron Cross’ and other privileges, but to save himself and his soldiers.
He is no longer afraid to openly declare his hatred for the nation to his superiors, because the greasy staffers with general’s epaulettes will do nothing to Steiner, who simply has no one to replace him, as you can be even the supreme commander in chief, in the conditions of combat operations, it is not the position that determines your true value.
Steiner’s main antagonist, Captain Shtransky, a clean-cut careerist who came from France, where, apparently, it cost nothing to become a hero behind a soldier’s back. Otherwise, how else to explain that this rear rat (as veterans of the Great Patriotic War used to say about such people: ‘He threw a grenade from Tashkent…. ‘) seriously believed that he could negotiate with Corporal Steiner and receive the coveted Iron Cross, the highest military award of the Wehrmacht? Which was his big mistake and in the end Steiner will get to see the true price of Shtransky on the battlefield and laugh at him in satisfaction…
Pekinpa chose a slippery subject in his last author’s film (subsequent commercial works do not count), allowing himself to humanize the image of a Wehrmacht soldier, and even to sympathize with him, for which the film was received in the bayonet. Here, of course, played a role and the shoals with the ‘Russian’ scenes in the tape, whether it is a line with a captive boy or the capture of a Russian village by Steiner’s platoon, although in these episodes Sam has no more shoals than Cronenberg in the warmly received ‘Vice for Export’. However, even these disadvantages do not cover the original director’s view of the soldier’s place in a senseless war, of the relationships in the enemy camp between true scoundrels like Shtransky and ordinary people like Steiner and his platoon, who, like our soldiers, were just fighting for their country, and it’s not their fault that this country was something wild and horrifying in its essence and enticing ideology.
This is what the movie is about… Made by an excellent, but unfortunately forgotten by many directors, despite the shortcomings in the realities of the description of familiar details, it worked perfectly both in form (especially concerning the atmosphere in the ranks of German troops and battle scenes, not as large-scale as in “Saving Private Ryan”, but still inventive in their emotional intensity) and in terms of the story about the antagonism of two different types of officers (perfectly performed by James Coburn and Maximilian Schell) and the chaos surrounding them.
Info Blu-ray
Video
Codec: HEVC / H.265 (79.8 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
HDR: HDR10
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Audio
English: FLAC 2.0
English: DTS 2.0
Subtitles
English SDH, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Dutch, French, German, Russian, Spanish.
