This really does need re-doing. I think a steely, slightly desaturated bleach-bypass look would be just the job. That look wasn't available when Peckinpah made the film, I know he was going for a desaturated image & ended up with a greeny look, that's even worse now on the Blu-ray. This is a brilliant film & it deserves better.
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Interesting comment. How exactly would a desaturated look end up green? Also, are you suggesting that the color should be re-done but in a different manner from the original so as to attain what you say Peckinpah (or rather Coquillon) was aiming for but did not manage to achieve?
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I don't know, maybe going away from warm colours he ended up with green, there wasn't really a way to desaturate a print then (he'd been better off with a cold look), what's worse, the picture is so flat on the Blu-ray)

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With bleach-bypass (so beloved by film-makers about 15 years ago) you get deep blacks desaturated colours, a cold look, I'd think perfect for Cross Of Iron. This is achieved by bypassing the bleach bath on the processing machine. Peckinpah didn't have that option then. Meanwhile, I'd rather have my memories of this film than own the rotten looking Blu-ray.
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Thanks - I'm curious since all the other reviewers that criticized the colors said it was not an authentic representation of the original. It seems you are saying that it is actually an authentic representation of the original, its just that the original was not what Peckinpah and Coquillon intended. Also, hadn't Vilmos Zsigmond already famously flashed the print of McCabe & Mrs Miller 6 years earlier to get a desaturated look?
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Yes there was, and that kind of grading, if not commonplace, was often used in 70s films - the end of Taxi Driver was deliberately desaturated through a Chemtone process to avoid getting an X rating because of the quantities of onscreen blood, for example. John Huston and Oswald Morris were experimenting with how far the process could be taken long before that, desaturating the Eastman-shot Moby Dick through adapting the Technicolor dye-transfer system on the release prints to get the look of vintage whaling prints. Freddie Young used pre-exposed stock on The Deadly Affair to create a muted color range that Sidney Lumet called 'colorless color.' The opening sequence of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is another example, albeit in a very different style. Had Peckinpah really wanted a drastically desaturated look - something that he never really went for in any of his films - he certainly would have had the means to do it in 1976-77, either in-camera or processing the release prints.
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I'm thinking back to a documentary I saw on the telly about Peckenpah, I can't remember much about it, I think it was about the time of Cross Of Iron, & it in he was at the lab trying to mute the colours (not "drastically desaturate" it)*. He didn't use flashed stock when he shot it & probably didn't have any budget left to muck around too much. But...I'd be happy with a full colour version, as long as it looked good. That's all I really want, a good looking Blu-ray of Cross Of Iron.

*or was it a doc about Cross Of Iron? In it, they talk of how the ending came about...they ran out of money, Peckenpah came to the set one morning & no crew or cast, shooting finished, no money left!
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Though it never hit the crisis point it did on Convoy, Peckinpah's drug abuse problem was so bad on the film that he reportedly forgot he had already filmed certain scenes and had sent the actors home and would turn up on set expecting to shoot them for the first time. The story was that the only day he turned up on the set on time was the day after they'd finished shooting. But I do know several of the editors who worked on the film - it was basically a tag team effort with different editors working on different sections of the film by the end - and they seemed to be able to find the money for that. It wouldn't have been a huge problem to simply grade the film with a muted look without going through any elaborate special processes, but Peckinpah's state of mind may well have changed from day to day during the process

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The interesting thing is that the new BD has quite a muted color scheme - not in a desaturated sense but more in a sepia-tinted sense. I actually really like how it looks and the reviewer of the disc on this site suggests that is how it should actually look. While you do not agree with the reviewer on liking the colors, you do seem to be suggesting that it was the original color (regardless of Coquillon's and Peckinpah's actual intent). It would be great if you could remember where you saw/heard all this.