Eight Iron Men

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.

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.

Plainly based on a play, and like the film version a few years later of 'The Long and the Short and the Tall' an obvious studio set reminiscent of the dug-out in 'Journey's End' provides the confined backdrop to the squabblings of the cast; which director Dmytryk's exaggerated compositions simply emphasise the theatricality of. You can understand the change of title from 'A Sound of Hunting' to the more rugged 'Eight Iron Men'; but anybody lured in by the posters flaunting Mary Castle from the ghastly dream sequences really was in for a big disappointment...!

The rain-soaked exteriors in a bombed-out town anticipate the later scenes in 'Saving Private Ryan' (which after the famous opening sequence also became very talky), and the cast, while then short on star power (Kiley & Marvin made it big later, the former on Broadway) is an interesting one to connoisseurs of old movies.

"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.