Eight Iron Men

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 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.

This is a tense little war drama from Columbia. The production values aren't much, but they really don't have to be. Released in 1952 and directed by Edward Dmytryck, it deals more with the personal than the patriotic. It is a WW2 drama that tried to find an audience during the Korean War. That couldn't have been easy.

It deals with the inter-personal relations between eight war weary GI's stuck up on the line in war torn European town. The lead is an ex-pat New Yorker named Bonar Colleano. He isn't well known in the states, but he was a big star in England during the war. Always playing the wise cracking Yank. His co-lead is Lee Marvin. He plays the squad leader and the glue that keeps these dogfaces together. The cast is rounded out by Arthur Franz, Dick(ie) Moore, and Richar Kiley. None of them big names in 1952, but all of them up to the job.

We find this beat up group jammed in a cellar while one of them is pinned down in a foxhole by a German machine gun. The squad is told they will be pulled off the line and they have to decide if or how they are going to rescue their buddy. Each squad member faces his own moment of truth. Some show bravery, some cowardice, some indecision, and one is just trigger happy and about ready to go over the edge.

I like this movie, but it does have a couple of problems. I mentioned the production values. It's a little set bound - almost like a stage play. Most of the action takes place in the cellar, and the exteriors are stock WW2 war torn European street. The dialogue does get a little corny in spots. But the main problem I have with this movie is the basic premise. I can understand an isolated group of guys, faced with the prospect of being pulled out of combat having mixed emotions about putting themselves back in harm's way to rescue a comrade, but that's the dilemma. How could they, in good conscience, leave him behind? Besides, this is an experienced infantry squad loaded with weapons. How could they not figure out a way to successfully assault a single machine gun nest. Despite these criticisms, the movie holds up well. The characters are human - not cartoons.

It's hard to find, but if you're a war movie buff, keep looking.

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.

A mix of "Stalag 17" and television's "Combat" series (which it inspired), "Eight Iron Men" (1952) is my favorite war movie. Made when Director Edward Dmytryk was still paying attention to his acting for the camera direction, "Eight Iron Men" is Harry Brown's adaptation of his play "A Sound of Hunting". Brown would later write one of the more classic episodes of "Combat".

Dmytryk, noted for his action sequences, was smart enough to concentrate on the play's extremely clever repartee between the members of an infantry squad who are marking time in the ruins of a destroyed town in Europe late in WWII. Squad leader Sgt. Mooney (Lee Marvin) has somehow managed to keep his group intact up to this point of the war. His goal of leaving the town with all seven of his men is threatened when the squad's most inept member Private Small (George Cooper) gets himself pinned down in a shell-hole; a few yards away from a well-protected German machine gun nest.

With orders to pull back the squad is torn between disobeying or abandoning their buddy to the Germans. Their decision is further complicated by not knowing if Small is still alive. Once this situation has been fleshed out, Dmytryk builds up the tension as it becomes closer and closer to the time they must leave.

By the end of the film you feel like you know all the six of Mooney's multi-ethnic squad members. There is a comedian (Nick Dennis), a hot-head (Richard Kiley), a pragmatist (Arthur Franz), a cub scout (Dickie Moore), a war-weary dreamer (James Griffith), and a dame obsessed gold brick (Bonar Colleano).

Much like "Das Boot" and "Cross of Iron", the members of the squad have shared so many intense experiences that they have become closer to each other than they ever were to their own family members. This makes their choice even more difficult.

Like the best anti-war films, "Eight Iron Men" is full of hard-bitten cynicism as a group of humans try to maintain their dignity in an insane environment. The face of war is gritty-not glamorous in "Eight Iron Men" and the film is not for those looking for fast edits and flashy action sequences.

Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.