It’s one of the 10 war movies you must see in your lifetime: 47 years after its release, it remains a monument to the genre.

Russian front, Taman Peninsula, 1943. German troops are retreating. In the regiment, commanded by Colonel Brandt, comes a new battalion commander, Stransk, a Prussian aristocrat who has volunteered to go to the Russian front to recover the Iron Cross, the coveted symbol of bravery. In fact, deep antipathy develops immediately. Between the latter and Sergeant Steiner, a fighter who loved his men and hated officers…

In 1998, the press and public praised, among other features, the gruesome realism of the D-Day sequence in the film Saving Private Ryan. Sometimes unbearable scenes, crushed or charred bodies, in the middle of which bullets whistled and penetrated the flesh.

However, I was a bit quick to forget that 21 years earlier, Sam Peckinpah was already doing well in Iron Cross, the director’s only war film and one of the best war films ever made. A film with paroxysmal violence, which the filmmaker did not like and precisely wanted to disgust the audience, contradicted the stupid comments of the time, which accused him of glorifying it throughout his career.

Adapted from Peckinpah’s work, this film faced many difficulties male skin By writer Willy Heinrich: script reworked several times, shooting in Yugoslavia with a cosmopolitan crew causing communication problems, insufficient funding…

However, he manages to make a film of unforgiving force, violent anti-militarism (“If you knew how much I worry in this uniform…” Coward Steiner), stripped of all grandeur and heroism, let’s not forget that he takes a German (soldier) point of view, which was quite rare at the time.

With cinematographer John Coquillon’s excellent work and Peckinpah’s absolute mastery of editing enhancing his work tenfold, the film also offers a powerful face-off between the formidable James Coburn (who turns out to be very old for the role at 48!) and Maximilian Scheele, who plays Stransk.

A confrontation that finds its final echo in an exchange both brief and sublime: “I’ll show you how a Prussian officer knows how to fight!” Stransky told Steiner. Before the latter gives him the final: “…and I’m going to show you…how you earn the Iron Cross.” However, we can always prefer the original version of this final line: “And I’ll show you… where iron crosses grow”or “…and I’ll show you…where iron crosses grow.”