The shop received a quartet of titles from the UK, two customer requests and two restocks. The former consists of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s “Our Little Sister” and Chen Kaige’s “Farewell My Concubine,” while the latter is comprised of Lotte Reiniger’s “The Adventures of Prince Achmed” and Sam Peckinpah’s “Cross of Iron.”
“I’m doing a story about the universal soldier more than anything else,” Peckinpah said when discussing “Cross of Iron,” the lone war film in the director’s 14 feature ouvre. The film takes place in the Spring of 1943: the Soviets have held Stalingrad, and the Germans have begun the long, slow retreat west in defeat. Straight away, a distinction is made between the grunts in the field like James Coburn’s Corporal Steiner and “political soldiers” — what we as Americans think of today at the mention of Nazi soldiers — like Maximilian Schell’s Captain Stransky. As James Mason’s Colonel Brandt says, “The German soldier… [is] not fighting for the culture of the West, not for one form of government that he wants, and not for the stinking party. He’s fighting for his life. God bless him.”