Steiner... is a myth. Men like him are our last hope... and in that sense, he is a truly dangerous man.

Cross of Iron

(1977)

Probably my favourite Peckinpah film. Despite the slow-mo action, it leaves you with a profound distaste at any notions of glorification of, and honour in, war. This is leagues ahead of Spielhacker's broken-backed Saving Private Ryan. The marvellously toothsome James Coburn is Corporal/Sergeant Steiner, apparently the only German on the Russian Front holding anything together despite being utterly sickened and nullified by everything around him. It is his sense of duty to the men beneath him in his platoon that keeps him going.

Steiner nurses utter contempt for newly posted Captain Stransky (Maximillian Schell), who is only there to get bag an Iron Cross and thus impress his Prussian aristocrat family. Steiner only slightly less despises sympathetic officers James Mason and David Warner. Most of the rest of the cast is filled out with German actors.

Peckinpah pulls no punches in showing the insanity of war, which makes it by turns repellent and surreally funny. The film also finishes up a 10-odd year run of great roles for Coburn.

Some have speculated that the film ran out of money, hence the rather abrupt ending; the documentary on the Blu ray doesn't address this, although it goes into the financing problems in depth. It's clear the film was shot out of sequence, though, and that Peckinpah made the film he wanted to make. I rather like the ending, unsettling and sudden as it is.

*****

Comments

Oh, you got me right in the pantaloons, partner.

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A herbal enema should fix you up.

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Miss Livingstone, I presume.

Stage Fright (1950) (SPOILERS) This one has traditionally taken a bit of a bruising, for committing a cardinal crime – lying to the audience. More specifically, lying via a flashback, through which it is implicitly assumed the truth is always relayed. As Richard Schickel commented, though, the egregiousness of the action depends largely on whether you see it as a flaw or a brilliant act of daring: an innovation. I don’t think it’s quite that – not in Stage Fright ’s case anyway; the plot is too ordinary – but I do think it’s a picture that rewards revisiting knowing the twist, since there’s much else to enjoy it for besides.

Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you ripped the fronts off houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?

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I don’t like fighting at all. I try not to do too much of it.

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I think you’re some kind of deviated prevert.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) (SPOILERS) Kubrick’s masterpiece satire of mutually-assured destruction. Or is it? Not the masterpiece bit, because that’s a given. Rather, is all it’s really about the threat of nuclear holocaust? While that’s obviously quite sufficient, all the director’s films are suggested to have, in popular alt-readings, something else going on under the hood, be it exposing the ways of Elite paedophilia ( Lolita , Eyes Wide Shut ), MKUltra programming ( A Clockwork Orange, Full Metal Jacket ), transhumanism and the threat of imminent AI overlords ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ), and most of the aforementioned and more besides (the all-purpose smorgasbord that is The Shining ). Even Barry Lyndon has been posited to exist in a post-reset-history world. Could Kubrick be talking about something else as well in Dr. Strangelove ?

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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