Waste of time

i must have seen a different film!!

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

"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.

Stanley Kramer always made such wonderful social conscious films such Judgment at Nuremberg, the hilarious comedy It's A Mad Mad Mad World and The Defiant Ones. He must have had a bad day when he made this 1952 misery of a film.We never see the enemy. We don't know exactly where the film is taking place and the scenes with the women are absolutely contrived and out right ridiculous at best.For 1952, Lee Marvin looks old already and war in itself is made to look ludicrous by what Small was doing all along during this 80 minute film debacle.Of course, you make every effort to save a missing soldier cornered by the enemy. The enemy was the one who thought of such a miserable film.

This WW2 drama from Columbia Pictures deals with the tense inter-relations between eight weary soldiers stuck in a small worn torn Italian town. Seventeen days waiting it out jammed in a cellar while one of them is pinned down by machine gun fire behind enemy lines. Rain, Cracker Jacks and fruitcake...dreaming about girls...and more girls. The squad is given orders to pull out without going to rescue their pinned down buddy. Mortar and German gun fire bouncing off the rubble strewn streets. Soldiers are flesh and blood...men with ambition, opinions and dreams.Starring are: Lee Marvin, Bonar Colleano, Richard Kiley, George Cooper, James Griffith, Barney Phillips and Dickie Moore. And featured in dream sequences are Mary Castle, Angela Stevens, Sue Casey and Jill Jarmyn.

Edward Dmytryk returned from the McCarthy hearings to direct this slightly expanded stage show of eight World War Two soldiers, sitting around in a wrecked basement, waiting for their chance to go on furlough .... but the sergeant --- played by a Lee Marvin so young that he still has dark hair -- wants to go out and find a missing man. The endless talk talk talk is alleviated occasionally as Marvin goes out to see the company's captain, who also lives in a wrecked basement.Dmytryk and the screenwriters have done very little to expand this for the screen. You may, if you like, interpret this as a failure of nerve of Dmytryk's part: he had originally refused to testify as to who was a Communist before the House Unamerican Activities Committee. A few months in jail broke his resolve, and he spent the remainder of his career directing ever larger, ever glossier and ever emptier films.