Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Skyler Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

MartinHafer "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.

bkoganbing 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.

max von meyerling An example of that now nearly extinct oxymoron- the quiet war movie. These were inevitably adaptations of plays. The theatre, in the olden days before television, 24/7 news cycles etc., once prided itself on being able to respond to current events and the significance of contemporary history. The WPA Theatre Project produced the Living Newspaper during the New Deal. After every war there were plays dealing with that war but unrecognizable from war movies because of the confined spaces of a theatre. The post WW1 period was particularly rich in war plays. This was the height of theatre and I guess the masterpiece of this genre was R. C. Sheriff's Journey's End.American Lawrence Stallings (What Price Glory?) and others also wrote plays in the genre. Playwrights responded to ww2 in much the same way. Again the restrictions usually dictated a one set play, with maybe some change of scene in act two and perhaps a small adjunct set to play out some subsidiary action. These were later translated into films. EIGHT IRON MEN was adapted from a play and reduces the agonies of fighting a war to something like real time and a single human life. The classical unities of time and space are nearly totally observed. Remarkable for a war film. A eight man squad led by Lee Marvin Sgt. Mooney) is quartered in the basement of a ruined house. A three man patrol comes back minus one man who is trapped in a bomb crater being swept by a fearsomely placed machine gun.The squad is due to be pulled back after 17 days on the line but are under orders not to go and rescue the pinned man. Captain Trelawny (Barney Phillips), aware of the heavy casualties of his unit, doesn't want three men killed trying to save one ("I came up here with a company and I'll be lucky to leave with a platoon"). The tension builds as it becomes closer to the time to move out and leave one of their buddies behind. That's it. Basically one set with brief forays into another set depicting a rubble strewn street being periodically swept by machine gun fire. There was some attempt at opening out by literally visualizing the sub-erotic sex fantasies of the men particularly Bonar Colleano (Collucci) ("Tonight I'll be whistling at every dame in the country. You can't keep a healthy guy like me stuck away like this for too long - I go crazy - I get hair on the palms of my hands - the beast rises in me.") but almost all of the tension is provided in the dialogue between the men.' The conclusions reached reflect the hard bitten cynicism of men at war, of being used by fate, and of the connecting sinews which build between men at their extreme.EIGHT IRON MEN is no masterpiece but it is very effective drama, just don't expect any of the usual visceral thrills which accompany most action oriented war films. There are no villains. The German's are never seen. The Captain is neither a sniveling coward nor a vain martinet who gets his men killed for his greater glory. Though he is aware his 'efficiency' is being scrutinized by higher ups, he shows some repressed satisfaction at the recovery of the missing man. This is not the kind of film where the more knowledgeable in the audience can guffaw "Aw, real people don't act that way."This is merely a crumb in the vast shitcake of the continuing cruelty of a mankind which seems eternally waging war with itself. Its unfortunate that not only is there no more theatre like this but there are no more films like this, nor even TV like this (not since the 50s actually). It has all been replaced by 24/7 news and a whole host of too highly paid self advertising jackanapes entertainers under the guise of political pundits.

kapop69 Great acting. A real psychological portrayal of soldiers in WWII. Very honest and unglamorous considering the number of BS WWII mythology films in the '50s. Marvin and Kiley are great along with a bunch of guys (Colucci) that I'd never heard of. The fantasy sequences break up the tense yet tedious, claustrophobic atmosphere. Great B&W cinematography with excellent dramatic CUs. I'm not surprised given the human quality of this war movie that it was part of the Stanley Kramer production company. Save Smalls or eat his piece of cake!!!!!! Lee Marvin was one of the great American actors. What an ensemble in this film. All acting is top notch. the characters are all ones that we know–the ladies man, the stoic, the emotional and passionate one...great!