Cross of Iron

Cross of Iron (1977) is a war drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring James Coburn, Maximilian Schell, and James Mason. Set on the crumbling Eastern Front in 1943, it strips away every romantic notion of combat.

Corporal Steiner — played by Coburn — commands a battered German platoon that survives on instinct and loyalty, not ideology. Into this picture arrives Captain Stransky, a Prussian aristocrat transferred from France who has never seen real fighting. He wants one thing: the Iron Cross, Germany's top military decoration. To get his recommendation, he needs Steiner's signature on a battle report that rewrites events that never happened. Steiner refuses. What follows is not a war film about heroics — it's about what men do to each other when the cause is already lost.

Adapted from Willi Heinrich's novel The Willing Flesh, the film was a British-German co-production and became one of Peckinpah's defining works, praised for its unflinching portrayal of soldiers fighting for survival rather than victory. Stream Cross of Iron (1977) online on iFILM.