Director Sam Peckinpah switches from westerns such as The Wild Bunch to another kind of savagery - Germans in retreat on the Russian Front during the Second World War - and makes this as graphic an anti-war film as anything since All Quiet on the Western Front. In this adaptation of a book by Willi Heinrich, James Coburn plays the disillusioned sergeant, sickened by slaughter and the double dealings of officers such as Maximilian Schell. There's little room for women in Peckinpah's exercise in macho ideals, though an encounter with female guerrillas shows them exacting revenge with dreadful results. This is bloody action, elegantly choreographed to chilling effect.

It is 1943, and the German army—ravaged and demoralised—is hastily retreating from the Russian front. In the midst of the madness, conflict brews between the aristocratic yet ultimately pusillanimous Captain Stransky and the courageous Corporal Steiner. Stransky is the only man who believes that the Third Reich is still vastly superior to the Russian army. However, within his pompous persona lies a quivering coward who longs for the Iron Cross so that he can return to Berlin a hero. Steiner, on the other hand is cynical, defiantly non-conformist and more concerned with the safety of his own men rather than the horde of military decorations offered to him by his superiors.