Eight Iron Men

"Eight Iron Men" is a war film filled with familiar faces--both of actors whose faces you'll recognize but not their names as well as a few folks before they hit stardom...as well as one guy who used to be a very big child star back in the day.

The plot is simple. While a group of eight G.I.s are hunkered down in the remnants of an Italian town, one in the group gets pinned down by a German machine gun nest. The rest of the company want to try to rescue him...but they are ordered by the Major not to attempt this, as he doesn't want to lose additional troops.

The most interesting cast member is Lee Marvin--playing pretty much the sort of guy he really was during WWII. He's great...and it's one of his earliest roles. Additional interesting cast members include Bonar Colleano, Dickie Moore and Richard Kiley. Colleano is a familiar face and he was an American living in Britain, so whenever a British film wanted a stereotypical American, they'd cast Colleano. Moore was a HUGE child star and member of Our Gang. And Richard Kiley later went on to great fame playing many roles on TV and Broadway. What these men and the rest of the cast have in common is that they weren't yet stars and were excellent at playing average Joes.

The net effect of this film is an interesting psychological portrait of ordinary men stretched to the limits. You can see the best and the worst of some of the guys...but most just wanna protect their tushes and survive the see the end of the war. Overall, it's a nice little low budget film--excelling with realism and full of grit.

At first may seem like a poorly written and acted movie but you must REMEMBER that this movie was made in 1952 and one must use his/her imagination to fill in the missing special effects that we've been forced to endure.

Many movies of the era used the same format but the movie was about individual soldiers and not the war. I'm sure combat veterans would be better suited to comment on the goodness/badness of the film but suspect they would like it.

Maybe Lee Marvin's first starring role? But the character of Sergeant Joe Mooney was carried out thru his career and it is always a pleasure to watch.

A good movie for its time and remains so in my humble opinion.

Can't recall when I've seen a better war picture. I've seen lots of them with more action, as this is mainly a talking picture, but this one features extraordinarily good acting performances from the entire cast. Especially good was Bonar Colleano, who is the central figure in the story. He is the Wise-Guy-From-The-Bronx, a character movie directors and writers liked to insert into their work, and Colleano makes the most of his star turn.

As with all movies reviewed on the website, the plot has been restated by all contributors, but just let me say it seems mainly like a filmed stage play. But the film is not static and the action moves at a brisk pace, if you can imagine this in a movie with basically one set. We get to learn about each platoon member as characters are fleshed out to a remarkable degree, so that we understand what motivates each one.

Noteworthy, apart from Colleano is Lee Marvin, here honing his tough guy credentials, and Nick Dennis with much more of a part than he normally was used to. I thought Barney Phillips, a good actor himself, was miscast as the Captain. He was just too old for the part - if you have been in the service you would spot it right away. Ol' reliable TCM aired this one the other day, and it is very worth watching.

Producer Stanley Kramer and Director Edward Dmytryk deliberately chose a cast of unknowns who later did move on to varying degrees of success in the film industry, most notably Lee Marvin, for the cast of Eight Iron Men.

It's a tense situation for this squad in some small town on the Italian front in World War II. One of their number is pinned down by a machine gun and it's wearing on the nerves of the other seven. Especially when they get orders to pull back and leave him until replacements come.

The film shows the tension on all of them. Lee Marvin with his war experience in the Pacific Theater is a natural as the concerned sergeant. Other good performances are from Arthur Franz, Richard Kiley, Nick Dennis, and most of all Bonar Colleano whose career was mostly in the United Kingdom. This was one of the few American made films for the New York City expatriate.

Eight Iron Men is based on a flop play on Broadway by Harry Brown which ran only 23 performances in 1945 and featured Sam Levene and a most unknown Burt Lancaster. Obviously someone named Harry Cohn didn't want to pay Lancaster's going rate in 1952 to get him for the screen version.

Even without Burt, Eight Iron Men is a well made war drama and should not be missed.

"Eight Iron Men" is a close-up picture of the American GIs of one squad in the later days of combat in World War II. This squad has been holding a patrol position in a bombed town where German snipers are in hiding. When one three-man patrol is returning to the squad's position, it's fired upon by a machine gun and one of the men slips and is pinned down. The rest of the film has the members of the squad trying to decide to rescue the pinned down GI, or not. With orders coming for them to withdraw behind their lines, there's some nice drama in this.

I think a couple of characters were overly played. Lee Marvin will be the most recognized of the cast as Sgt. Joe Mooney. He shows the turmoil of not wanting to leave a man behind and the risking of more lives to save the one man. To audiences who have never been in such a situation (including veterans like me with no combat time), "Iron Men" does seem very talky. But realizing that this squad has been holed up in this position for more than two weeks, it's not so unreasonable to think that they may talk about things other than their current situation. So, food, the girl back home, family and some fun times were all things that GIs in combat were likely to think and talk about with their fellow GIs.

While some GIs no doubt had a pinup picture of a famous movie personality, how many had fox holes or lodgings in combat where they could put a magazine photo on a wall? The movie-star pinup was one of those throwaway items that Hollywood seemed to toss into so many war movies after World War II.

This is an all-male cast and story, but Columbia managed to sneak some "hot" female type in the pinups and dreams of a couple of the GIs. And, in its usual style (or lack thereof), the movie promos highlighted the sexual allure, which really accounted for a small amount of film time. The cinematography and direction elevated this film.

My favorite line in this film is when Capt. Trelawny says to Sgt. Mooney, "You know, sergeant, before the war I used to be a car salesman. I used to smile all the time. Every time someone came in the door I gave 'em a big smile."