15 Great War Movies (Nobody Ever Talks About)
12. Cross of Iron
Bloody and brutal, Cross of Iron was The Wild Bunch director Sam Peckinpah’s uncompromising addition to the war film genre, and boy did the infamously bleak director pull no punches here.
If The Magnificent Seven's gung-ho nationalist metaphor was decimated by The Wild Bunch's Vietnam allegory showing Americans as amoral opportunists killing and dying with no moral code, Cross of Iron was a necessary corrective to The Dirty Dozen's glamorisation of WWII heroism.
Where that flick depicted US soldiers as loveable roughnecks, willing to play dirty but ultimately well-meaning, Peckinpah's grim and unrelenting WWII drama is free from any romantic ideals of heroism or even basic human decency. So a realistic war film, then.