Sam Peckinpah – Movie Musings

Grim war film, full of blood and horror, but lacking the depth it needs to really make an impact

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: James Coburn (Sergeant Rolf Steiner), Maximilian Schell (Captain Stransky), James Mason (Colonel Brandt), David Warner (Captain Kiesel), Klaus Löwitsch (Krüger), Vadim Glowna (Kern), Roger Fritz (Lt Triebig), Dieter Schidor (Anselm), Burkhard Driest (Maag), Fred Stillkrauth (Reisenauer), Michael Nowka (Dietz), Arthur Brauss (Zoll), Senta Berger (Eva)

If War is Hell, it makes sense that Sam Peckinpah eventually bought it to the screen. Cross of Iron is, perhaps surprisingly, his only war film. But, in a sense, Peckinpah’s grim explorations of the brutal realities of violence made all his films war films. And what better setting for his grim eye than the gore and guts of World War Two’s Eastern Front. If war has any rules they fell silent in this hellish clash where no quarter was given and no decency could be found.

Sgt Steiner (James Coburn) knows this. A grizzled soldier, who despises war, Nazism and officers, he fights through the horrors of the front to protect his men. As the Wehrmacht flees, crushed by the late 1943 advance of the Russian army, the only hope is the vain chance of staying alive. But Steiner’s new commander, Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell) has other ideas: a Prussian elitest, he’s here for an Iron Cross and the fact he’s inept, cowardly and inexperienced isn’t going to stop him. The clash between Steiner and Stransky will leave a trail of futile bodies in its wake.

Cross of Iron may well just be the grimmest war film this side of Come and See. Shot on location in Yugoslavia, Peckinpah films the Eastern Front as a muddy, chaotic mess where no one seems to have the faintest clue why they are there or where they are going. Soldiers huddle in shallow trenches, officers sit in dusty, crumbling bunkers, the sound of machine guns and the explosion of artillery forms a constant backdrop. Battles are smoky, horrific events with bullets flying, ripping through bodies that explode in squippy mess. Bodies are strewn across the battlefield. Even in the progress to the front lines, tanks absent-mindedly roll over bodies left ground into the muddy dirt.

Peckinpah brings his unique eye for violence to bear. Violence frequently takes place in slow motion, bodies twisting and turning in a crazed dance that seems to go on forever as bullets rip through them. The camera never flinches from the blood of war and the films throws us right into the middle of brutal firefights, tracking through smoky, muddied fields full of bodies. The soundtrack is punctuated by distant artillery gun fire. There is no heroism and the sole focus is staying alive. The soldiers have no interest in politics, no passion at all for the war – only one of them, the smartest dressed, is a Nazi. It’s simply something they vainly hope to survive to see the end of. Even the grizzled veteran Steiner hates the killing, hates the violence, hates the waste.

It makes us loath even more Maximilian Schell’s puffed-up braggart Stransky, a man born wearing an officer’s uniform but hopelessly ill-suited for it. Under fire at his first attack, Stransky is hopeless, reduced to bluntly stating the obvious (“My phone is ringing!”) and confusedly rambling about attacking, withdrawing and counter-attacking all in the same breath. Schell was born to play Prussian primma donnas like this, and he gives Stransky a real cunning and survival instinct. Despising Nazism – he sees himself as above the crudeness of the party – he’s a born manipulator, skilfully deducing the sexuality of his aide to blackmail him, but also a rigid stickler for the rules unable to comprehend a world where he isn’t on top.

He’s the antithesis of Steiner, who has everything Stransky wants: respect, glory, guts. Coburn is, to be honest, about ten years too old for the role (his age particularly shows during his brief respite in a base hospital, where he has a convenient sexual fling with Santa Berger’s nurse), but he’s perfect for the hard-as-nails humanitarian, who hides under the surface deep trauma at the horror he’s seen. Steiner is the natural leader Stransky wants to be and has the Iron Cross Stransky wants. Worst of all, Steiner doesn’t give a shit about the medal, when it’s the be-all-and-end-all for Stransky.

Stransky is so out of step, even the veteran front-line officers think he’s despicable. Colonel Brandt (a world-weary James Mason) scoffs “you can have one of mine” when he hears of Stransky’s dreams while his cynical aide Kiesler (a scruffy, shrewdly arch David Warner) takes every opportunity to show his disgust. Stransky is ignored by the soldiers and is rarely filmed away from his bunker, where he reclines on his bunk like an emperor and avoids any trace of conflict.

So, he knows nothing of the horrors of Steiner’s war. We however do. Cross of Iron opens with a successful raid on a Russian encampment. One of the victims, a young soldier his body torn apart by a mortar, is met with barely a reaction by the soldiers (“We’ve seen worse” says Steiner). Another captured Russian boy is later released by Steiner – and promptly machine-gunned in front of him by advancing Russian soldiers. Caught behind the lines, Steiner’s men are picked off one-by-one despite his desperate efforts to keep them alive.

Cross of Iron went millions over budget – largely due to Peckinpah’s chronic alcoholism (he binge drank every day while shooting and spent days at a time unable to work) – and as a result the ending is abrupt and overly symbolic. (Peckinpah and Coburn had about an hour to cobble it together and shoot it before the filming wrapped up). Peckinpah throws in some clumsy fantasy sequences (especially during Steiner’s fever dreams in hospital) and overly heavy-handed reaction shots from Coburn, overlaid with quick cuts to various horrors or shots of lost friends, which over-stresses the horror of war. Much as Cross of Iron skilfully shows the grimness of conflict, it doesn’t balance this with real thematic weight and depth like, say, The Wild Bunch does.

It’s part of Cross of Iron’s flaws. Under the surface, I’m not sure that Cross of Iron has much more to say, other than war is hell. And with Peckinpah’s work here, there is a sort of satanic, indulgent glee in all that mayhem and slaughter, the bodies riddled by bullets. Peckinpah is a sadistic preacher, the sort of sermoniser who is so keen to tick off the evils of the world, that he doesn’t want to miss a thing. The film feels a little too much at times as a grungy, exploitation flick yearning for art.

But it still has a visceral impact that makes it stand out as grizzled war-film, helped by a granite performance by Coburn, with just enough vulnerability beneath the growls. A tough watch and a flawed film, that lacks the real insight and psychological depth it needs, but with some compelling – and shocking – moments.

William Holden and Ernest Borgnine lead The Wild Bunch into one last adventure

Director: Sam Peckinpah

Cast: William Holden (Pike Bishop), Ernest Borgnine (Dutch Engstrom), Robert Ryan (Deke Thornton), Edmond O’Brien (Freddie Sykes), Warren Oates (Lyle Gorch), Ben Johnson (Tector Gorch), Jamie Sánchez (Angel), Emilio Fernandez (General Mapache), Strother Marin (Coffer), LQ Jones (T.C.)

SPOILERS: Discussion of The Wild Bunch is pretty much impossible without discussing its ending – but then it does have a pretty famous ending. Well you’re warned…

It’s easy to look back the Wild West with rose-tinted glasses. To remember it as being when the American spirit was at its best and a romance ruled. To basically take the “Wild” out of the picture. Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch is all about putting that “Wild” front and centre, a stunning exploration of the closing days of the Wild West that replaces sentiment and nostalgia with violence and a group of men who know nostalgia is just the vanity of hardened, brutal killers.

In 1916 Pike Bishop (William Holden) is the leader of a notorious gang of criminals, ruthless killers all, wanted by the law – and the rail company they have been robbing for years – at any price. Pike’s latest bank job winds up being a trap, with a deadly shoot-out taking place in the middle of a town (with the population lethally caught in the crossfire) as the rail company tries to kill Pike’s crew, their efforts led by Pike’s former partner Deke Thornton (Robert Ryan), forced to work against Pike or return to the hellish jail at Yuma. The massacre sees only a few members of the gang survive – Pike, his best friend Dutch (Ernest Borgnine), the Gorch brothers Lyle (Warren Oates) and Tector (Ben Johnson), Mexican gun-slinger Angel (Jamie Sánchez) and old-timer Freddie Sykes (Edmond O’Brien). The gang flees to Mexico, with Deke and his posse dispatched on their heels by the furious railway company. In a Mexico ripped apart by civil war, the gang are hired by would-be warlord General Mapache (Emilio Fernandez) to hijack guns from the American army – but there are other dangers when Angel has friendly contacts with the Mexican revolutionaries.

Peckinpah’s film is a stunning exploration not only of the dying dreams and way of life of old men in the West – Pike, Deke, Dutch and Freddie are all old men while the Gorch brothers are hardly in the first flush of youth – but also the endemic nature of violence. Peckinpah’s film is unfailingly brutal in its depiction of violence, an infection that runs through every level of society. Everyone from the children – the film opens with a gang of children laughingly feeding two scorpions to a mass colony of ants, before setting all the animals on fire (look in vain for the “no animals were harmed in the making of this picture” message) – to the men themselves. The film’s opening shoot-out – a technical marvel and also a masterpiece of slow tension building by Peckinpah – is shocking in its brutality.

Unlike Leone, to whom violence is shocking in its suddenness, Peckinpah slows down the action so that we can see (and feel) the horror of each bullet. The Wild Bunch set some sort of record – in its final shoot-out sequence – for blood squibs used. It’s not a surprise after watching the opening shoot-out between the Bunch and the railway forces. With the Bunch using a passing Temperance march to cover their retreat, bullets are fired indiscriminately, killing passers-by and men from both sides alike. No one, aside from a furious and appalled Deke (the only character who has suffered himself from violence in prison) expresses a moment’s guilt for this massacre.

But then Pike and the bunch are hardened killers to a man. Pike cares nothing for the members of the gang lost – even forgetting until late on that he left a man guarding the bank staff while the gang rode out of town – and when a wounded survivor can’t ride and agrees that Pike should finish it, he doesn’t pause for a second. Any ideas of these men as being rogues or there being any charm to living a life on the margins of the law are rapidly dispelled.

And this violence isn’t just an American thing – it dominates life in Mexico as well, where the drunken, bullying General Mapache is a brutal would-be dictator, whose soldiers frequently terrorise, steal from and murder the villagers around them. In Mexico, the gun is law even more than the US, and these guys have even closer to being criminals in uniform, just as Deke’s posse could just as easily be working with the Bunch as against them.

So what motivates these men? What is brilliant about Peckinpah’s film is acknowledging that these violent killers may feud and fight, but they are still stretching for some sort of meaning in their life. These are world-weary old men with little to live for, who are trying to work out what – if anything – is left in their lives. And that life has to have some sort of code, some sort of grounding basis, even if everything else is up for grabs. Pike says when you “side with a man, you stay with him and if you can’t do that you’re finished”. It’s a flexible rule for these guys – and they frequently shirk it in the film when events are dangerous – but it’s a code they need to believe they would keep.

It’s that code that comes into play late in the film as Angel falls increasingly foul of Mapache’s anger and whims. It takes the gang a while to stand by it, but when they do it’s also partnered by a sad realisation that for these old men what else is there? Their lives have been ruled by the gun and shoot-out after shoot-out. Peckinpah views the West with no nostalgia, but he understands that men need to view their own lives with nostalgia at times, to understand that they may yearn to point at something and say that was what their lives were for.

And what else is there? Everyone in the film knows it’s over. They’re old men, and the world is moving on and leaving them behind. At one point the gang look on at wonder at a car owned by Mapache, and the Gorch brothers flat out can’t believe in the existence of an aeroplane. The modern world is ending the world of these guys, and Pike knows it: “We need to start thinking beyond our guns” he says at one point, but offers no solutions at all about what that might be. The modern world is the real deadly bullet that’s taking out the gang: in the final shoot-out, the key weapon even turns out to be a modern machine gun, spraying death at a level ordinary shooters can’t even begin to match.

That final shoot-out sees all these themes come together brilliantly. It could almost be a rebuttal of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (released the same year) that sees our heroes captured in romantic sepia freeze frame, charging into certain death against the Bolivian army. Here we effectively see the battle, with additional machine guns and thousands of blood squibs as the Bunch take on Mapache’s army in fury at Mapache’s murder of Sanchez. In a furious shoot-out lasting almost ten minutes, it’s a blood bath as the Bunch mow down dozens and dozens of Mapache’s army while themselves being repeatedly shredded by bullets, adrenalin alone keeping them going. Peckinpah even has the final fatal bullet that takes out Pike coming from a child soldier.

But the Bunch are taking this suicidal last stand because it’s their last – their only – chance to have stood for something, to have a code they stuck by. To stand by their partner and if that means going down in a hail of bullets, at least there is some sort of glory to it. And besides – what else have they got? The modern world has drained all purpose from their life, so why not at the end wordlessly agree to leave behind the greed that has dominated their lives and die for something?

Peckinpah’s film is simply brilliant, fabulously made and brilliantly shot and edited. The cast of pros is simply excellent. Holden’s world-weary faded glamour now leaving only a cold ruthlessness and a wish that he had more to show for it is perfectly partnered with Borgnine’s easy-going sidekick who wants to do the right thing but needs to find the reasons. Ryan is excellent as a guilt-ridden Deke, who finally has begun to understand the impact of violence. The rest of the cast also excel. The Wild Bunch may be the least nostalgia infected Western ever made, a grim reminder that the West really was Wild. But it’s also a stunningly well-made and challenging picture.