12 FEBRUARY 1977, Page 26

Cinema

Fake cross

Clancy Sigal

Cross of Iron (ABC, Shaftesbury Avenue) Next Stop, Greenwich Village (Rialto) Anyone who ever served in the armed forces as an other-ranks will feel twinges of fellow feeling for Sergeant Steiner in Cross of Iron (X certificate), Sam Peckinpah's latest advertisement for killing as a crucible of male honour. As a battle-hardened Wehrmacht veteran in the German retreat from Stalingrad in 1943, Steiner has to contend with two enemies: the inexorably advancing Russian army in front, his own glorythirsting German officers at the rear. A particular menace is Captain Stransky, an aristocratic Prussian determined to win himself an Iron Cross at whatever cost.

In the micro-war between Captain Stransky and Sergeant Steiner CI hate this uniform and everything it stands for'), Sam Peckinpah's sympathies are wholly on the side of the common, dirty soldier who is often put at risk more to win generals their medals than nations their battles.

The real obscenity of the war, Peck inpa,h implies, is not the killing but the state of mind of the killer. In his eyes Sergeant Steiner is admirable because he kills not from hate—against Stransky's orders he frees a teenage Russian captive—but from a deep sense of compassion and responsibility for his platoon. The emotional core of Cross of Iron is the sergeant's close, even loving, relationship with his unit of grizzled survivors who, inspired by his loyalty to them, fight so skilfully that they are always sent out on the most dangerous missions. Like Steiner, they don't give a damn for Iron Crosses or Nazi ideals, they fight to survive and out of an almost mystical sense of kameradschaft.

Even in hospital the multi-wounded Steiner refuses a furlough home in order to rush back to the collapsing front. 'Do you love war so much ?' his beautiful nurse asks him. 'Or are you afraid of what you would be without it ?' Perhaps more to the point, a young adjutant explains to the regimental CO, Colonel Brandt, that though maverick Steiner would be a discipline problem at the rear, 'here men like him are our last hope.'

The adjutant is an 'internal exile' opposed to the war ; Colonel Brandt is played by James Mason doing his I'm-a-decent-German-soldier-whohatesthatupstartHitler bit again. Indeed, in Peckinpah's Wehrmacht there is hardly a German who genuinely believes in what he's fighting for. Yet, walking dead men in a cause they know is both evil and doomed, they kill on.

It's not in Sam Peckinpah's nature to inquire into the moral or political merits of that cause. (That the Russians, also trying to survive, were defending their homeland is not once considered.) The Nazis fought well because of people like Sgt Steiner. As far as I know, no film has dealt adequately with why some Germans sui rendered and others, equally disillusioned, stayed to die. Peckinpah raises the question only to turn his back on the possibility of any rational, human answer.

He is obsessed by a different question: what makes a man? And the answer he comes up with is the same one as in Straw Dogs:a man is made heroic only by fighting. And the man who, like Sgt Steiner, understands his violent nature is a saint.

In other words, the good soldier is a priest of war who, Zen-like, sees clearly that satori, the splendid 'it,' is comradeshipthrough-killing. Everything else is crap.

This is familiar stuff for readers of Hemingway and Mailer—and students of Peck inpah. From The Wild Bunch on, he has been preoccupied with violence as a male rite-of-passage: What messes up Cross of Iron is that he doesn't use violence to illustrate or punctuate his fable, he's hooked on the mechanics of it. Like a slightly demented child he mows people down again and again and rips them apart with explosives in slow motion. After a while it's hard to care about Steiner or anyone else because our ears are ringing with dramatically unnecessary explosions and our eyes are awash with studio blood.

The picture's great success is James Coburn's Sgt Steiner. With his slightly gawky, toughly mischievous come-on, Coburn was a good choice to play a man Who kills almost out of an existential sense of humour. I believed in his affection for the platoon and his wary, contemptuous obedience to superiors. There is an especially good exchange when Colonel Brandt demands that Steiner testify against Captain Stransky who, to win the coveted medal, has lied about his part in a battle. Though Steiner loathes Stransky, he will not rat on him because, for good or ill, the officer is now part of the sacred platoon—one of us.

The end of Cross of Iron is as mindless as any I have seen. To get rid of witnesses to his cowardice in action, Captain Stransky induces a subordinate to open fire on Steiner's platoon as it stumbles back from a behind-the-lines mission. The unit is wiped out, and Steiner almost killed. As the Russians close in, Steiner confronts Stransky. But instead of (justifiably) shooting him he tosses the officer a machine-gun. `You're in my platoon now,' he says triumphantly. 'I'm going to show you where the Iron Crosses grow.' Stransky grins, 'And I will show you how a Prussian can fight.' Blazing away together, they advance into the crossfire of the Russian advance.

I can't say this ending betrays the picture's meaning; it is its meaning. When all is said and done, 'a man's destiny is to rule and fight' (in the words of Captain Stransky). By playing out the death game to its violent end, Steiner and Stransky achieve a kind of

transcendence, a semi-mystical communion. And by imputing an almost religious nature to Steiner's clear-eyed, empty-headed determination to keep fighting, Peckinpah asks us to see in him a battered symbol of an humanity, almost Christ-like in his suffering. To make sure we get the point, the director universalises it by inserting, as a postscript, some newsreel footage of wars in Vietnam, Lebanon etc. The device says nothing except about Sam Peckinpah s pretensions. Peckinpah's skill is to make his 1943 seen' as horrifyingly immediate as yesterday. In Next Stop, Greenwich Village (X certificate) Paul Mazursky's 1953 already seems a long, long time ago—when virginity was still Important and you could leave your apartment door unlocked in Manhattan without getting mugged. It's a fond, funny look back at writer-director Mazursky's own escaPe to the liberating cruelties of semi-communal life in New York's bohemia.

It was the coldest year of the Cold War' the, Rosenbergs were about to be fried. In Sing Sing's electric chair, and sensitive young souls huddled together for comfort in cold water flats and despairing lov,e affairs. Greenwich Village, New york. s left bank, was (and is) for quasi-artistic, parent-oppressed kids what Ellis Island had been for their immigrant families: a haven of hope. Like Sgt Steiner, the movie's her°' Larry Lapinsky, fights on two fronts: to become an actor, like his idol Marlon Brand° (ex-actor Mazursky sprinkles his script with references to `Gadge Kazan. Lee Strasburg, the Actors Studio etc), and to put breathing distance between himself and his suffocating Jewish-monster mama CShe invented the Oedipal complex'), grand.1,Y overdone by Shelley Winters. His girt" friend, marvellously etched by Ellen Greene' is sexy and cynical; unwilling to settle for Larry, she doesn't really want to sieeP around, but in those ancient days a `liheritted' girl ('Nobody owns me') almost had 03 be promiscuous to find out who she was. , The other semi-lost souls in LarrY s incestuous clique set themselves against the philistine Eisenhower era in poignantIY individual ways: Bernstein is a black gaY before it's fashionable, Anita neuroticallY gets off on Bernstein and other stray cat52.. the would-be playwright Robert lives on, women and an ice-cold ego. In a cast ol impressive newcomers, Christopher Walken as Robert is stunningly apt. Mazursky, who did the surgically furl" Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice about late'sixties swinging couples, has a talent for actors rather than script. Performances are uneven ; in deep waters, such as the after math of Anita's suicide, Mazursky leads his players into pawky melodrama. But Elle, happy element of risk in the picture-"cer“ for Shelley Winters, leading man Leril Baker and the other Villagers are virtual unknowns—translates itself into real charn Next Stop, Greenwich Village is that rat; Hollywood beast, a personal filnn about collective experience. See it.