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Scripted by Julius Epstein, James Hamilton and Walter Kelley, from the 1956 novel The Willing Flesh, Cross Of Iron, Sam Peckinpah’s only war film, has its world premiere in West Berlin. Set in 1943 on the Crimean Eastern Front, James Coburn stars as a battle-hardened German sergeant who is inexorably drawn into a dangerous moral and ethical dilemma when his newly-arrived commanding officer (Maximillian Schell), an imperious aristocrat with no combat experience, seeks his complicity to help him win the army’s coveted Iron Cross. An arresting, graphically staged, richly atmospheric war picture, illuminated by strong performances from Coburn, Schell and veteran James Mason.
