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The Brecht quote at the very end heralds the continuum of blood sagas, thus Vietnam by way of the Nazi retreat. "What will we do when we lose the war?" "Prepare for the next one." German forces on "the bad side of old Mother Russia" ca. 1943, a bit of sanctioned carnage to complement Sam Peckinpah's view of everyday combat. The war within the war (cf. Aldrich's Attack), the sergeant (James Coburn) who loathes the battlefield yet excels in it versus the Prussian aristocrat (Maximilian Schell) angling for medals while sending men to slaughter. The opening signs off a patrol ambush with slow-mo on a freshly emptied machine-gun cartridge, the cherub taken as prisoner might be Tarkovsky's Ivan, freed with a bit of poetry and promptly mowed down by his own side. Mud, barbed-wire and endless explosions, amid all this the tragicomic push-pull between weary commander (James Mason) and caustic captain (David Warner). "Do you know the ruling classes?" The helter-skelter spectacle of shootings and shellings slows down briefly to register a bayonet sinking into a corporal's stomach, the snapping of the mind in the midst of gunfire à la Fuller (The Steel Helmet) leads to the hospital interlude, with an anticipation of The Big Red One. (Senta Berger in and out of a nurse's uniform embodies the brief repose, a dissolve to a mangled soldier beneath a tank announces the return to the front.) "A man's existence" and its opposite, bridged by Fassbinder actors and a platoon of wrathful Russian women. "Take off one uniform, there's always another one underneath." War is hell but it's a cosmic bad joke, too, Coburn's last cackle is surely Peckinpah's in the face of an impossible assignment. With Klaus Löwitsch, Vadim Glowna, Dieter Schidor, Burkhard Driest, Roger Fritz, Arthur Brauss, Fred Stillkrauth, Michael Nowka, and Véronique Vendell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |