Package Tour

By C.P.

Cross of Iron is Sam Peckinpah's venture into one of the movies' thriving subindustries: the big-budget, international-cast package tour of World War II. The itinerary is a bit unusual--the Eastern Front in 1943, where the German defenses are crumbling before a Russian onslaught. But within the German bunkers Peckinpah focuses on some old familiar attractions: the maverick sergeant who hates officers and war but is still a helluva soldier (James Coburn), the gutless captain who schemes to ride to glory on the bravery of others (Maximilian Schell), the worldly colonel who copes philosophically with futility up and down the ranks (James Mason). There is also a side excursion to a military hospital with a comely nurse (Senta Berger) whose ministrations include hopping into bed with her patient.

We have been over this ground many times before. Peckinpah, haranguing us from the front of the bus about the horrors of war, lends a grisly authenticity to some of the scenes, but he cannot make it all fresh enough to justify the long, grueling trip. To the battleweary German soldiers, the enemy is not so much Russia as the militaristic strain in their own national character, symbolized by Schell's aristocratic captain who dares not face his family until he has won the Iron Cross. The script labors the point with a barrage of melodrama and moralizing. "What will we do after we lose the war?" James Mason asks his cynical, brainy adjutant (David Warner). Replies the adjutant:"Prepare for the next one."

Peckinpah does better with the action sequences, as befits the director of The Wild Bunch. His battles -- particularly one in which the German lines are overrun -- are convincingly hellish jumbles of shouts, explosions, confusion and panic, which he and his film editors capture with a combination of tense, jagged cutting and horrific, slow-motion dances of death.

To Peckinpah, however, one good slow-motion shot of a soldier getting killed deserves another, and another, and another. By the time Coburn and his men run across a unit of female Russian sentries -- an encounter dripping with prurience, multiple killings and a castration -- Peckinpah is clearly indulging himself. Like Coburn's sergeant, who turns down a chance to be invalided out of service in order to return to the front lines. Peckinpah is undone by his attraction to the carnage he professes to loathe.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.