"Cross of Iron is an anti-war film in that it focuses on the average foot soldier, the harshness of his daily existence, and the horrors inflicted on him by war. These men dream about survival, peace, sex and home. Yet Steiner, like many of Peckinpah’s male protagonists, is unwilling or incapable of being open to other ways of existing. He no longer knows where home is or where his children are; he hates the war but is fearful of what he will be without it. Dead to a world of other possibilities, what he chooses is to feel alive in the ecstatic moment of freedom achieved through the confrontation with violence and death."
— Cross of Iron : The last paragraph from an essay on Cross of Iron by Gabrielle Murray, “a lecturer in the Cinema Studies program at La Trobe University.”
