WAR IS DECLARED BY NORTH KOREANS; FIGHTING ON BORDER
The Russian-sponsored North Korean Communists invaded the American-supported Republic of South Korea and their radio followed it up by broadcasting a declaration . . .
—New York Times, 25 June 1950
THE NEWS WAS ONLY A SURPRISE TO THOSE WHO THOUGHT THAT THE war to end all wars was World War II, not its disastrous predecessor, the Great War, which was only the prelude to more war. But the Soviet Union’s detonation of an atomic bomb at the end of August 1949, and the formation of the People’s Republic of China three weeks later, did not encourage optimism. Korea had already been partitioned at the thirty-eighth parallel in 1945, resulting in a Soviet backed North and a United States supported South. A line of demarcation between two states—one communist, the other allegedly democratic—resulted not only in a geographically divided peninsula, but an ideologically divided one as well.
The free elections that were to have been held in 1948 only occurred in the South, with the election of the American-educated Syngman Rhee as president of what was designated the Republic of Korea. The Soviets merely installed their puppet, Kim-Il-Sung, as head of North Korea. The only difference between the two strongmen was political. Both were dictators, one less oppressive than the other, and each working to bring about reunification under his own form of government. Border clashes were inevitable. First, there were skirmishes. Finally, there was all-out war. The American withdrawal from Korea in June 1949 left its ally weak. The South Korean army was too busy routing out communist guerillas, and Rhee was too involved in jailing communists and communist sympathizers to give much thought to war. The Soviet Union, on the other hand, supplied the North Koreans with arms and military advisors, making them a superior fighting force.
The events of 25 June 1950 pointed to a civil war of an unusual kind, a United Nations police action, which involved 1,319,000 Americans, of which “33,629 did not return.”
On 27 June 1950, the New York Times made it official: “Truman orders U.S. Air/Navy Units to Fight in Aid of Korea; U.N. Council Supports Him.” There was no need for Congress to declare war. The president had already done so as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. And whenever there is war, declared or otherwise, Hollywood signs up. A Korean War plot template was unnecessary; the one for World War II would do: home front/combat/home front cum combat/home front romance/combat romance.
Samuel Goldwyn decided that the public needed a follow-up to The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which portrayed the adjustment problems of three returning World War II veterans: a banker (Fredric March), a former soda fountain attendant (Dana Andrews), and a sailor who had lost both arms (Harold Russell). I Want You (1951) would begin four years later with a family adjusting to the start of a new war, in which their sons will have to serve. The follow-up was no Best Years. The new trio did not command the same interest or sympathy as the men in Best Years, who felt more at home in the military than in civilian life. There was little screenwriter Irwin Shaw could do with a World War I veteran (Robert Keith) with two sons, one of whom (Dana Andrews) had shown his patriotism by serving in World War II, while the other (Farley Granger) tries to dodge the draft until he realizes that his selfishness could cause him to lose the respect of the girl he loves. I Want You was little more than a self-ennobling recruitment film. One could predict that the draft dodger would have a change of heart, and that his older brother would re-enlist rather than have his children ask, “What were you doing, Daddy, when the world was shaking?” (As if any child would use such an expression. Usually, it’s “What did you do in the war, Daddy?”) There was no shaking at the box office. I Want You was a great disappointment to Goldwyn, who expected at least a nomination for best picture. It was only nominated for sound recording, losing to The Great Caruso, which had the most glorious soundtrack of any movie that year.
Hollywood knew how to divert attention from a porous script by interspersing montage sequences, newsreel footage, and staged combat, thus providing enough action to cover the gaps in the narrative. One simply waited for the fighting to cease so the story could resume—not that there was much of one in A Yank in Korea, released by Columbia in February 1951. This “Yank” (Lon McCallister) had nothing in common with Americans who went abroad to study (A Yank at Eaton, A Yank at Oxford) or join the Royal Air Force (A Yank in the RAF). He was a cocky kid who wound up in Korea after a reporter mistakenly identified him as his hometown’s first enlistee. Rather than lose face and the love of his life, the protagonist finds himself with men who do not know why they’re in a strange land, except that “somebody has to do the job.”
There is more combat than plot, with McCallister graduating from callow youth to war hero. At the end, he visits the family of a dead buddy, who had left behind a letter for his children in case he did not return. With emotions in check, McCallister reads the letter, making no attempt at eloquence. The letter was a plot resolver, with “The End” coming on so fast that one wonders if anything was accomplished—except that some of the enemy were killed, a munitions dump was destroyed, a locomotive was repaired, and a boy became a man. A Yank in Korea made no attempt to justify the war. It’s a job that has to be done, and if “your conscience tells you something is right,” you do it. But what was “right” about Korea is never explained. And by all means leave a letter for your family, telling them that if you don’t return, you’re up there helping God.
A “job” is what it was. There was no Pearl Harbor to remember, no hit song like “Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition.” No glory, either—only drudgery captured in black and white photography that gave the landscape a bleak, wintry look, even when the action took place in another season. It was not just a dirty war. It was a visually drab one without calibrations of tone. There was also nothing cosmopolitan about Korea—no Paris, London, or Lisbon; no OSS operatives, French resistance fighters, ladies with a past, or men without a future; no actors on the order of Clark Gable, Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, Spencer Tracy, Robert Taylor, Ingrid Bergman, Greer Garson, Claudette Colbert, Hedy Lamarr, Gene Tierney, or Ann Sheridan, who all served their country so memorably on celluloid during World War II (and Gable in the Air Corps as well) and whose star power made an allied victory seem inevitable, even when the headlines suggested otherwise. If Korea evokes any cinematic memories, it is of grim-faced soldiers with rags wrapped around their feet, trudging through unforgiving terrain and making the best of a questionable job.
The early Korean War films were World War II retreads, using such standard plot templates as men at odds with one another (Retreat, Hell!, The Steel Helmet): a lost patrol in search of a leader (The Steel Helmet): the gung-ho youth tested in the refining fire of combat (Retreat, Hell!); the kid next door who becomes a war hero (A Yank in Korea); wives left behind (Retreat, Hell!, Sabre Jet); and boy meets girl in wartime (One Minute to Zero). Inferior films like Tank Battalion (1958) and Marines, Let’s Go (1961) simply used Korea as background for action movies that would have been programmers in the 1940s. The best of them were site-specific, whether filmed in Griffith Park in Los Angeles (The Steel Helmet), Camp Pendleton in North San Diego County (Retreat, Hell!), or on a Twentieth Century-Fox soundstage (Fixed Bayonets), so that the characters seem to have stepped out of World War II and into Korea without any alteration of personality. The enemy was now the North Koreans, and as of October 1950, the Chinese, who had entered the war.
The Korean war films of 1951–52 were, understandably, short on details, since history was being made on a daily basis. It was the same in the early days of World War II. Wake Island fell to the Japanese two weeks after Pearl Harbor; then Paramount released Wake Island in August 1942. The battle could only be the climax; it was preceded by a story of male bonding between characters from different social and military strata—a major and a construction engineer—and for comic relief, two privates who die together, sharing the fate of their superiors. By 1942, audiences were familiar with the “band of brothers” plot, which they had seen in movies as varied as What Price Glory?, The Dawn Patrol, Gunga Din, and Beau Geste. The same was true in the early days of Korea. In the absence of facts—at least facts that could be dramatized—A Yank in Korea fell back on war as rite of passage, tracing the main character’s journey to manhood, which was not peculiar to Korea. In fact, the film could have been made ten years earlier as “A Yank at Pearl Harbor.”
But unlike the American World War II film, which got off to an unmemorable start with Republic’s Remember Pearl Harbor (1942), the first film about Korea was a masterpiece. The Steel Helmet was written, directed, and produced by Samuel Fuller. More accurately, it was “written quickly” (reportedly in a week) and shot in ten days in October 1950, opening in January 1951, a month before the programmer A Yank in Korea was released. In fact, Yank did not open in New York until 1 April. The Steel Helmet had its New York premiere at Loew’s State on 24 January. Although The Steel Helmet cost a mere $104,000, it ended up grossing $6 million. Remember Pearl Harbor, remembered today for the patriotic song that inspired the title, was made by a studio, albeit one on Poverty Row. The Steel Helmet was an independent film, produced by Deputy Corp. and released through Lippert Pictures, the creation of Robert L. Lippert, who graduated from organ accompanist for silent movies to exhibitor, and finally to producer with his own distribution company.
After a dedication to the United States Army infantry, The Steel Helmet opens, appropriately enough, with a shot of a helmet. The bullet-riddled helmet belongs to Sergeant Zach (Gene Evans), whose eyes slowly come into view, as he drags himself up to the top of a hill, his hands bound behind his back, zigzagging along the ground. As yet, there is no dialogue. The next shot is of a pair of legs belonging to someone carrying a M-1 rifle. The “someone” is a boy, who speaks the first words in the film: “South Korean.” But to the bound Zach, the boy is a “gook.” The boy, whom he names Short Round, then asserts that he is not a “gook” (apparently he has heard the racial slur before), but a South Korean. After freeing Zach, the boy insists upon accompanying him, despite Zach’s objections. Short Round explains that when a Buddhist saves another’s life, they must travel together, because the life that was saved is in the other’s hands. Short Round is so endearing that even the misanthropic Zach cannot deny him.
Prejudice in its various forms permeates The Steel Helmet, which is a recreation of the World War II scenario of unity in diversity, best exemplified in Bataan (1943) with a patrol consisting of whites, a Moro, a Latino, and an African American. The Steel Helmet has an even more diverse mix, consisting of an African American medic; a racist sergeant; a lieutenant who realizes that the sergeant, crude as he is, is a better leader than himself; a World War II conscientious objector with the literary surname of Bronte; a bald private obsessed with hair-growing remedies; and a Japanese American sergeant who massages the private’s head with mud, claiming the treatment worked for his bald mother. Tempers flare, insults are traded, but differences—racial and otherwise—are resolved as the men band together to fight a common enemy.
Like many war movies, The Steel Helmet revolves around a single operation: this time commandeering a Buddhist temple as an observation post. Although the temple seems deserted, the statue of the Buddha that greets them is so sinisterly awesome that it suggests otherwise. Danger is lurking. A North Korean major hiding on the second level will soon emerge for the kill. As the men enter the temple and see the statue confronting them—as if questioning the appropriateness of their being in a place of worship where none of them belongs except Short Round—they realize they are in a sacred space. One by one, they remove their helmets in respect. Since Fuller knew that the Buddha was too powerful a symbol to use just once, he cuts to it periodically to emphasize the irony of a temple being used as a military outpost that eventually becomes a charnel house. The Buddha exudes a stony serenity, neither sanctioning nor condemning what takes place within his sacred precinct, but letting it play out at his altar as he observes from on high the violence that men wreak on each other. The Steel Helmet is a war film without a villain. The North Korean major, who looks like a teenager in uniform, is a hard- line communist, who (don’t ask) speaks perfect English and knows enough about racism in America to remind the African American medic that he has to ride in the back of the bus. The medic admits he’s right, but “a hundred years ago, I couldn’t even ride a bus. At least now I can sit in the back. Maybe in fifty years, sit in the middle. Someday, even up front. There are some things you just can’t rush, Buster.” To the post-civil rights generation, the medic may seem like an Uncle Tom, but Fuller is implying that in the army he acquired both a skill that made him the equal of any white man, and a sense of self-worth that made racial injustice at least bearable. The North Korean then baits Sergeant Tanaka about the internment of Japanese Americans during the last war. Tanaka admits that major “struck a nerve,” but goes on to say that he served with one of the most highly decorated units in World War II, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, comprised of second-generation Japanese Americans.
The military was upset about the reference to the internment camps, claiming that this was the first time a film referred to their existence. The allegation was untrue. Five months after President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on 19 February 1942—which authorized the internment of West Coast Japanese Americans in relocation camps in remote sections of California, Arizona, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, and Arkansas— Twentieth Century-Fox released Little Tokyo, USA (1942). At the end of the film, a newspaper headline barrels on to the screen: “All Japs to Be Evacuated / Manazanar Settlement for Japanese Evacuees in Owen’s River Valley.” Brenda Joyce, best remembered as Jane in the Tarzan movies of the 1940s, justifies the evacuation:
And so, in the interests of national safety, all Japanese, whether citizens or not, are being evacuated from strategic military zones on the Pacific Coast. Unfortunately, in time of war, the loyal must suffer inconvenience with the disloyal. America’s attitude toward this wholesale evacuation can best be summed up, I believe, in the last four lines of a poem by Robert Nathan, entitled, “Watch, America”: “God, who gave our fathers freedom / God who made our fathers brave, / What they built with love and anguish / Let our children watch and save. Be vigilant, America.”
The poem has nothing to do with the internment—unless the vigilance that Nathan stresses is to be directed at the Nisei, who were rumored to be ready to spray produce with arsenic, blow up dams, and poison the water supply.
The military was also disturbed by the killing of the North Korean major, technically a POW, as if Americans had never killed POWs before. If one views the major as the villain, his villainy is the villainy of war, in which each side tries to kill the other. To the major, the Americans are the enemy. When Short Round is killed, Zach shows no emotion, until he realizes the major is responsible. Then, in one of his frequent irrational moments, he shoots the major. When the lieutenant excoriates him for killing a POW, Zach realizes what this act will do to his career, the only one he has. “If you die, I’ll kill you,” he shouts at the soon-to-be corpse. Zach’s killing of the POW unhinges him. He becomes as stone-faced as the Buddha, imagining he is back at Normandy. The extreme close-ups of Evans’s eyes staring into space, as if there was no horizon—a kind of ocular stupor—was a perfect metaphor for war itself. When a platoon arrives at the temple, the four survivors straggle out, becoming members of another march into the unknown. Before he leaves, Zach pauses at the lieutenant’s grave, marked by his helmet set atop his rife. Earlier, the lieutenant had asked Zach to exchange helmets, thinking that Zach’s would bring him good luck. Zach refused. Now, in a silent gesture of repentance, Zack replaces the lieutenant’s helmet with his own. “There Is No End to This Story,” the end title reads. The war was far from over, and Fuller had more to say about it.
Fixed Bayonets (1951), Fuller’s second Korean War film, was released eight months after The Steel Helmet. This time, the studio was Twentieth Century-Fox, with which Fuller had a seven-picture arrangement. Fixed Bayonets is another rite of passage movie, concerning not the change from smart aleck to hero, but from follower to leader. Early in the film, Corporal Denno (Richard Basehart) admits he can only take orders, not give them. He is so eager to avoid assuming command that when Sergeant Lonergan (Michael O’Shea) is wounded, he risks his own life crossing a minefield to rescue him, only to have Sergeant Rock (Gene Evans in a role similar to Zack in The Steel Helmet) inform him that he has brought back a corpse. Lonergan’s death leaves only Rock in charge. Rock does all but hold a mirror up to Denno, forcing him to see what he is and what he must be: “Nobody goes out looking for responsibility. You’re not a corporal for nothing.” When Rock is killed, Denno becomes a leader by default, ordering the sergeant’s body to be stripped of “everything we can use” before he is buried.
Since the military was unhappy with The Steel Helmet, Fox made certain that Fixed Bayonets had the Pentagon’s imprimatur. Thus, the opening title was in the form of a dedication to “the Queen of Battles—the United States Infantry.” “King” would have been more appropriate, but the Pentagon was pleased, particularly with Fox’s expression of gratitude for its cooperation.
Fuller did not exploit the film’s point of departure: a rearguard platoon left on its own to protect a division that had been ordered to retreat. The forty-eight men of the platoon were the equivalent of the “Battling bastards of Bataan, / No mama, no papa, no Uncle Sam,” left on their own. On 11 March 1942, General Douglas MacArthur boarded a PT boat with his wife and son and left Corregidor for Mindanao, vowing, “I shall return.” But by that time, many of the battling bastards had died on the Bataan Death March. Similarly, in Fixed Bayonets, the platoon is expendable; the division, like MacArthur, is not.
Fuller served in the First United States Infantry Division (“The Big Red One”) during World War II, and he gave The Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets a real sense of place—even though Griffith Park doubled as Korea in The Steel Helmet, and Fixed Bayonets was filmed entirely on a Fox soundstage. Neither film could be mistaken for a World War II movie in disguise. Korea was a war of guts, not glory. In each film, the enemy is the communists. A captive in The Steel Helmet identifies himself as a “North Korean communist.” In Fixed Bayonets, the men know they are fighting “Reds” and “commies.” Fuller’s heart is clearly with his foot soldiers; one senses that if he could, he would have joined them.
Fuller’s achievement is even more impressive when contrasted with Columbia’s Mission over Korea (1953), in which the army fliers are clean shaven, the photography is evenly textured with varying shades of gray, foxholes are non-existent, testosterone is mid-level, and actresses like Maureen O’Sullivan (as the uncomplaining wife of a captain on a mission [John Hodiak]) and Audrey Totter (as a nurse attracted to a playboy lieutenant [John Derek]) serve purely decorative purposes, like happy faces on a refrigerator. The plot is a World War II clone. A carefree lieutenant and swinging bachelor teams up with a serious-minded captain and family man in a war that everyone despises, but no one abandons. “I hate this police action. I’m no cop,” one of the men complains. The war film, unless it was an adaptation of a classic novel like All Quiet on the Western Front or From Here to Eternity, followed a simple course: The hero either lives or dies, and wars are either won or lost, with defeat masked as bravery in the face of insurmountable odds. Within each possibility, there is a variety of plot permutations. In Mission over Korea, the lieutenant could survive after performing an act of heroism (Gene Kelly in For Me and My Girl), or return to civilian life with a disability (John Garfield in Pride of the Marines). The lieutenant could perform a selfless act that results in his death (Ronald Reagan in International Squadron), while the captain could be reunited with his wife and children (Fredric March in The Best Years of Our Lives). One could live, the other die (Pat O’Brien and Randolph Scott, respectively, in Bombardier). The writers of Mission over Korea chose the last scenario. The captain dies, despite the lieutenant’s attempt to save him. The ending deprived audiences of seeing Maureen O’Sullivan again. But at least they saw what Tarzan’s mate looked like in her early forties, which was not all that different from the way she looked in Tarzan’s New York Adventure (1942), her last appearance in the series.
Retreat, Hell! (1952) contrasted the youthful desire for combat with the wariness of seasoned professionals, as the war entered its first phase. The script was a throwback to the “men–at-odds–with-each-other-who-grow-into-mutual-respect” plot. The men here are an unmarried colonel (Frank Lovejoy), whose family is his battalion, and a captain (Richard Carlson) with a family of his own. There was no way Retreat, Hell! would have been considered a World War II transplant, although it had the same kind of measured rhythm, whereby the plot was suspended periodically so the grenades could be lobbed, the screen could smoke up, tanks could roll, and bodies could drop, after which the plot would continue until it was time for another mortar round. Meanwhile, audiences wondered which of the principals would end up on a stretcher or in a body bag. Neither the colonel nor the captain ends up this way; even the boy-turned-man (Russ Tamblyn) is left wounded but proud. Tamblyn, who had to trace a character arc as if he were crossing the rainbow bridge to Valhalla, gives the best performance in the film.
Although Retreat, Hell! had the backing of the Defense Department and the marine corps, it did not shrink from expressing the marines’ disillusionment when the rumor that the war would be over by Christmas 1950 proved to be false. Nor did it downplay the danger of frostbite, which in one case is so severe that amputation may be necessary, although that possibility is only fleetingly mentioned. It is also clear that no one had been informed that China had entered the war until the colonel notices that some of the dead are Chinese. Korea may not have been a war fought on two fronts, but it was one against a dual enemy, reducing the chances of an American victory.
Early World War II films such as Wake Island and Bataan portrayed what were, historically, defeats as preludes to ultimate victory (“Their spirit will lead us back to Bataan,” the end title of the film assured us). Retreat, Hell! ends on a similarly ambivalent note. After being ordered to withdraw, the colonel passes the news on to the battalion. When one of the marines asks if this means a retreat, the colonel bellows, “Retreat, hell! We’re attacking in another direction.” The climactic line is a more defiant version of what Major General O. P. Smith said at the time: “We are not retreating. We are merely advancing in another direction.” A chorus of “The Halls of Montezuma,” which played over the opening credits, is reprised, as if to convince audiences that the war would end triumphantly. History decreed otherwise.
Joseph H. Lewis seemed an odd choice as director of Retreat, Hell! His strengths lay in melodrama (So Dark the Night) and film noir (My Name Is Julia Ross, Gun Crazy), Supposedly, after Jack Warner saw Gun Crazy, he put Lewis under contract. When no project was forthcoming, Lewis managed to get out of his contract, only to be offered Retreat, Hell! under a separate arrangement. Lewis brought in a profitable film for Warner Bros., despite the interference of producer-writer Milton Sperling, Jack Warner’s son-in law. Lewis wanted the Chinese attack, one of the most awesome sights in the film, to be photographed in long shot, with the soldiers streaming down the hill in a suicidal charge, as if they were embracing death. Lewis covered himself with a few close-ups, but not enough for Sperling, who added some of his own. Still, Lewis was proud of the film, another mark of his versatility, which became even more apparent when he moved into television, directing episodes of Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Zane Grey Theater, and Big Valley.
Seventeen years before audiences associated the mobile army surgical hospital with Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970), they learned in MGM’s Battle Circus (1953) about the makeshift operating rooms that could be dismantled like circus tents when the unit was ordered to move on—or if the enemy was advancing, could be torched in compliance with the military’s scorched earth policy. Written and directed by Richard Brooks with frontline realism, Battle Circus is a tribute to the doctors and nurses who performed delicate surgery under primitive conditions, never shirking their obligations and even treating prisoners who needed medical attention. In one breath-holding scene, a North Korean prisoner (Philip Ahn, who made a career of playing Asians, both friend and foe) bolts from his bed, seizes a grenade, and threatens to pull the pin as he raves incoherently, mainly out of fear and disorientation. This is the most chilling moment in the film. A nurse (June Allyson), equally frightened but trying to conceal her fear, approaches him, speaking as if to a child, until she persuades him to hand her the grenade.
Filmed at Fort (then Camp) Pickett in Blackstone, Virginia, Battle Circus brought the war home in a way that most Korean War films did not. The only false note was the romance between a hard-drinking and equally hard-loving major (Humphrey Bogart) and the nurse, the pert and winsome June Allyson, who seemed as if she should be off playing Nellie Forbush in South Pacific, announcing that she’s “as corny as Kansas in August” and “as normal as blueberry pie.” It was just that Bogart was eighteen years older than Allyson. He had a seen-it-all face, while Allyson looked as if she had never even had a pimple. Their love scenes were not so much May-September as father-daughter. It was not a question of Major Jed Webbe putting the moves on Lieutenant Ruth McGara, but of Humphrey Bogart coming on to June Allyson. The two acquitted themselves professionally, but their improbable romance detracted from a powerful film about a military unit that remained largely unknown until M*A*S*H (both the film and the TV series) arrived. If mobile surgical units were as lively in Korea as they seemed in M*A*S*H, the war might not have been so unpopular. The men and women in Battle Circus lived in constant fear for their lives, yet forged on, as if the specter of death were hovering elsewhere. Unlike the surgeons in M*A*S*H, they had no time for sex and football.
Nineteen fifty-four found MGM, once the Tiffany of studios and now surviving in diminished splendor, still programmed in Korean War mode. Men of the Fighting Lady (1954), released a year after Battle Circus, was one of the few Korean War movies filmed in color. It also had an impressive lineage—at least on paper—along with a seal of approval from the military. The script was a conflation of two stories: the Pulitzer-Prize winning author James A. Michener’s “The Forgotten Heroes of Korea,” and Commander Harry N. Burns’s “The Case of the Blind Pilot.” Michener, in fact, appears as a character played by Louis Calhern at the beginning and end of a flashback, replete with authentic footage of bombing raids, air attacks, takeoffs, rockets being fired, and a crash landing on a carrier, all of which had been skillfully edited into the film, thus authenticating it. The footage was taken during the war itself. It was not studio-generated or pulled arbitrarily from some film library to hold the attention of moviegoers interested in action rather than story. As it happened, audiences got both.
Men of the Fighting Lady did not mute the pilots’ disillusionment as the war moved into its final phase. A World War II hero (Keenan Wynn) compares the last war, in which he won the Navy Cross, with the present one: “We knew what we were fighting for then.” As for Korea, “We’re obsolete. It’s a police action. No one wants to hear about it.” One of the pilots uses the vernacular, calling the war a “nut house cheese game.” In 1954, the war was over—or rather, an armistice had been signed. It was not that it was open season on Korea; it was simply that Korea had besmirched the national image that had been rendered immaculate after Japan’s unconditional surrender in August 1945. There would be no more of such days of glory. Men of the Fighting Lady was, unintentionally, self-referential. With actors like Walter Pidgeon, Van Johnson, Louis Calhern, and Keenan Wynn, who harked back to the studio’s golden age, one could see the difference between MGM in 1944 and the studio a decade later. Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (1944) ran 138 minutes; Men of the Fighting Lady ran eighty, enough time for a movie that had the usual mix of characters (a sympathetic flight surgeon, a cynic, a daredevil, a recruit) and a climactic Christmas scene, when the men receive filmed greetings from their families, including one from the family of a pilot (Wynn) that had not been notified of his death. During World War II, stock footage augmented the plot. In Men of the Fighting Lady, the footage, authentic to the core, was integral to the plot, which could not have proceeded without it. The fusion of narrative and non-narrative was in sharp contrast to the war itself, which was a disconnect between myth and reality. The myth was that Korea was a police action; the reality was that Korea was a war. “Police action” was a euphemism.
The most harrowing scene in Men of the Fighting Lady involves Van Johnson giving instructions to a blind and agitated Dewy Martin about how to land his plane on the deck of the carrier. Martin manages, but he will always be sight-impaired. When John Garfield returned home in Pride of the Marines (1945), he was blind, but Eleanor Parker was waiting for him. One never knows if the girl Martin left behind will be at the dock when he arrives. That was the difference between the two wars. One was worth fighting; the other was a “nut house cheese game.”
The films that came out after the Korean War were not revisionist, yet they posed questions about the war’s efficacy, questions that, when challenged, were never answered with a historical overview, but instead with a cliché like “You don’t get to pick your war; you get the one that’s given to you.” Such was the answer in The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), derived from another Michener work (this time, his novel of the same name) and released seven months after Men of the Fighting Lady. Although Bridges was also filmed in color (but this time in the more prestigious Technicolor), Loyal Griggs’s cinematography avoided the eye-catching lushness of such epics as Gone with the Wind (1939) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943). Since director Mark Robson had made only two films in color before Bridges, Return to Paradise (1953) and Hell Below Zero (1954), he approached Technicolor as a process, not a painterly enhancement. Bridges was also a better fit for Robson than I Want You, which he could not raise to anything higher than domestic drama with a wartime slant. Bridges is precise in its documentary-style depiction of bombings and flight deck landings, and one is only aware of color in the few scenes between naval lieutenant Harry Brubaker (William Holden) and his wife Nancy (Grace Kelly). Technicolor brought out Kelly’s cool beauty, which did not come through in her black-and-white films, High Noon (1952) and The Country Girl (1954).
Because it was made a year and a half after the July 1953 armistice that left Korea as divided as it was before the war, Bridges had the advantage of hindsight. The war is nothing other than a thankless job that has to be done, with dissent countered by explanations that could easily have been expressed in a single word, expediency. Nancy is convinced that the war is “senseless,” until Admiral George Tarrant (Fredric March) explains to her that the bridges are the North Koreans’ supply lines and must be destroyed. When Brubaker protests that Korea is a “dirty war” and “militarily, a tragedy,” Tarrant replies, “[A]ll though history men have had to fight the wrong war, in the wrong place, but that’s the one they’re stuck with.” And so, it seems, were the men who fought in Korea. This is the closest the film came to questioning America’s involvement in the conflict. It’s the wrong war and the wrong place, but that is what happens when a fort is fired upon, an archduke is assassinated, a country is invaded, and a line of demarcation is crossed. To use the buzz phrase of the millennium, “Stuff happens.”
Men of the Fighting Lady and The Bridges at Toko-Ri probably could have been filmed in black and white, but the result would not have been as effective. The same was true of Universal-International’s Battle Hymn (1957), directed by Douglas Sirk, who had also been a translator of Shakespeare, an art historian, and a painter. Sirk’s palette is dominated by blue, often suffused with white, except for the flat and dull landscape of Nogales, Arizona, standing in for Korea and resembling an unending expanse of beige. Even the sky, vibrantly blue in Arizona, looked washed out in Korea.
To Sirk, blue had a sacramental quality. It is the color of the Madonna, with its evocation of purity and spirituality, which he used so creatively in Magnificent Obsession (1954). Battle Hymn was Sirk’s quasi-sequel to Magnificent Obsession. The film is loosely based on the autobiography of the same name by Reverend Dean Hess, an air force colonel during World War II, who later returned to Korea to train pilots. In Magnificent Obsession, the self-absorbed Ron Kirby (Rock Hudson) undergoes a spiritual awakening that enables him to put himself at the disposal of others. In Battle Hymn, Dean Hess (Hudson again) discovers that atonement for the deaths he inadvertently caused in a bombing raid can be achieved in a way other than self-recrimination.
Battle Hymn opens in the summer of 1950, a month after the outbreak of war. Reverend Hess has just delivered another guilt and repentance sermon in a church with blue stained glass windows. (The Hess bedroom is also bathed in blue.) When the deacon (Carl Benton Reid) gently suggests that he vary his topics, Hess turns the congregation over to him, explaining that he is returning to the air force to train Republic of Korea (ROK) pilots. Hess has been unable to clear his conscience of the deaths of thirty-seven children that resulted from his accidental bombing of a German orphanage during World War II. The silhouette of a cross appears against the blue window of the church, symbolizing the one Hess must carry until he atones by organizing an airlift for Korean children left orphaned by the war.
Battle Hymn may have had its patriotic moments (“The Battle Hymn of the Republic” is played over the opening credits and reprised at the end by Korean children), but it is essentially one man’s spiritual journey. Although the Defense Department and the army lent their cooperation, Battle Hymn is not a recruitment film like I Want You. The pilots Hess encounters in Korea are far from poster boys for the air force. Hess inherits a company of undisciplined men, including his World War II buddy, Captain Dan Skidmore (Don DeFore), that he must make combat ready. After learning that Hess is a minister, the men are dismayed; some are even disappointed, wondering why he isn’t a chaplain instead of their CO. After Hess learns that orphans are scavenging for food in garbage cans, he demands that they be fed with the others, signaling the beginning of his spiritual renewal.
When Skidmore flies off course, causing Lieutenant Maples (James Edwards, the fine but undervalued African American actor, featured in other Korean War films such as The Steel Helmet, Men in War, The Manchurian Candidate, and Pork Chop Hill) to bomb refugees and children, Hess comforts him as a fellow sufferer. With the help of a Korean ivory carver (Philip Ahn in a white chest-length beard), who explains that war is the lesser of two evils—some lives must be destroyed so that others can be saved—Hess begins to see himself as part of a divine plan,. Hess has his own epiphany as Skidmore lies dying. He lessens his friend’s fear of death by describing it as a passing from darkness to light. Then Hess understands the reason for his presence in Korea: “Perhaps through the agony of war, in reaching beyond myself, I found myself.”
Although Hess was the film’s technical advisor, he did not have script approval. Even so, he must have been flattered by the hagiographic screenplay by Vincent B. Evans and Charles Grayson, who all but made Dean Hess a candidate for canonization. In the film, Hess emerges as the guiding force behind the “Kiddy Car Airlift” of the Korean orphans to Jeju island. But such was not the case, as Dr. George F. Drake has argued, alleging that Hess took credit for a rescue operation that he neither planned nor witnessed. Hess, however, did arrange housing for the orphans before they arrived at Jeju. But with Hudson as an amalgam of Christ and Moses, audiences expected a savior, not a member of the housing authority. Moviegoers were not disappointed; only those who knew the truth were. Sirk, who generally worked closely with his writers, wanted Battle Hymn to follow the same plot trajectory as Magnificent Obsession, in which Ron Kirby (Hudson, in his third film with Sirk) found redemption by embracing a mystical form of altruism. In Battle Hymn, Hess (Hudson, now in his seventh film with Sirk), trying to find peace of mind in the ministry, finds it by bringing peace to others in time of war.
Other Korean War films were not so uplifting. The heroes were not pilots in the wild blue yonder, but infantry contending with the elements and the enemy. Paramount’s Cease Fire (1953) presented the plight of the foot soldier in Korea in the form of staged realism, part documentary and part feature film. Director Owen Crump flew to Korea in April 1953 with his crew to make a movie that had the texture of a documentary, with real soldiers playing characters who, in most cases, bore the men’s real names. Thus “Elliott” is Sergeant Richard Karl Elliott, and “English” is Corporal Harold D. English. The battle scenes were staged like historical reenactments on television’s History Channel. Still, there was a visceral authenticity in a number of tense scenes—in particular, a scene involving two soldiers crawling down a path, feeling for land mines.
Cease Fire opens like a traditional war movie. The barrel of a tank gun juts into the screen, an effect that, in the 3-D version released in late November 1953, looked as if the gun were aimed right at the audience. After the credits, the film becomes a quasi frame narrative beginning on the last day of the war, as reporters eagerly await news from Panmunjom, and ending with the birth of a baby, signaling hope for the future despite a past that did little to inspire it. But an armistice had been signed, the boys were going home, and all’s right with the world until the next crisis. The film’s final words, “Peace is born again in Korea,” is laughable in light of a Korea still divided between a totalitarian North with its record of human rights violations, and a jittery South within missile range. Even the withdrawal from Pork Chop Hill was euphemized, with one of the soldiers bitterly commenting that the war was supposed to have ended “when we got kicked off Pork Chop.” In 1953, such a statement would not have made much sense to anyone but a Korean War buff.
In his New York Times review (25 November 1953), Bosley Crowther complained that the sequence with the reporters was producer Hal Wallis’s way of making Cease Fire seem more like a typical movie. The attempt was certainly unnecessary, as was “Brothers at Arms,” a marching song sung by a chorus of male voices heard intermittently and sounding like something from an operetta on the order of “Stout-Hearted Men” in Naughty Marietta. Finally, capitulating to the short-lived 3-D craze detracted from Cease Fire’s importance as the first Korean War movie shot on location by a major studio. The acting may not have been Oscar-worthy, but casting real soldiers made it clear that Cease Fire was not another Hollywood version of Korea—despite attempts to make it so—but a film in which audiences actually heard from the men at war.
Anyone puzzled by the reference to Pork Chop Hill in Cease Fire had to wait until the end of the decade to learn about one of the most frustrating battles of the war. Pork Chop Hill (1959) made no attempt to downplay the futility of fighting an unwinnable war as it was winding down at a discouragingly sluggish pace. Six years after the signing of the armistice, Hollywood was unwilling to admit that the war had been lost, only that a police action had ended. In 1953, Korea was as divided as ever, and the GIs returned to an America that was in a less celebratory mood than it had been at the end of World War II. In 1954, the Battle of Dien Bien Phu marked the end of French rule in Indo China, and the beginning of American involvement in Vietnam, which, like Korea, was also partitioned between the communist North and the anti-communist South. Since Korea had become the “forgotten war,” the newly demarcated Vietnam induced shudders in those with long-term memories. In 1973, the war in Vietnam would also end with an armistice and even greater ignominy, when Saigon fell to the Vietcong two years later. “When will they ever learn?” as Pete Seeger lamented.
Although Lewis Milestone, who directed All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)—an indictment of both the Great War and war itself—seemed a perfect choice for Pork Chop Hill, it was not a happy experience for him. The film starred Gregory Peck as Lieutenant Joseph Clemons and was co-produced by Peck’s Melville Productions. The actor wanted a vehicle that would showcase his ability to play another war hero like Captain Bill Forrester in The Purple Plain (1954). But there is little comparison between the two movies. The Purple Plain, set in Burma near the end of World War II, had a far better screenplay, as one would expect from Eric Ambler. Peck’s Forrester was psychologically complex, like the characters he portrayed in Spellbound, The Gunfighter, and especially Twelve O’Clock High. The death of Forrester’s wife made him suicidal, and it is only through the love of a Burmese woman that he reclaims his humanity.
Pork Chop Hill takes place three months before the end of the Korean War. Unlike Forrester, First Lieutenant Joseph G. Clemons Jr. was a real person, who was in his early twenties when he traveled from West Point to Korea. Peck was in his early forties and wanted to invest Clemons with a heroic aura, which, historically, was impossible. Clemons won the Distinguished Service Cross, but it was given for holding out in an impossible battle that left fourteen of his 135-man company alive. Although Peck affected a heroic persona, he could not deflect the script from the path it had taken as a combat film. Peck was nominally the star, but the battle captured the spotlight. Milestone may have been unhappy with the result, but it was his best war film since A Walk in the Sun (1945), with its rough poetry. Pork Chop Hill has the same linearity as A Walk in the Sun, the same unity of action centering on a single military operation—blowing up a bridge in A Walk in the Sun, taking a hill in Pork Chop Hill. As Windy (John Ireland) writes in a letter to his sister at the end of A Walk in the Sun, “We just blew up a bridge and took a farm house. It was so easy—so terribly easy.” Taking—and holding—Pork Chop Hill was not so easy. Clemons knew that the hill had no strategic importance, dismissing it as a “stinking little garbage heap.” But the Chinese, who had entered the war on the side of North Korea in fall 1950, captured it to demonstrate their tenacity, holding on to a worthless outpost while peace talks were dragging on seventy miles away at Panmunjom.
Pork Chop Hill also benefited from hindsight, which made it possible for the filmmakers to stand back and view the war critically. Clemons is ordered to retake Pork Chop, a collective term for the area designated as a neutral zone. (The film conflates two battles that took place in April and July 1953.) From the expression on his face (and Peck excelled at projecting stoicism), Clemons would be carrying out an order in which he did not believe. That was bad enough, but the film implies that Clemons did not know that Pork Chop was a bargaining chip the American team at Panmunjom hoped to use to their advantage while negotiating a truce. The chip was a slug. The Americans took the hill but were no match for the Chinese, who persisted in fighting. A withdrawal was ordered, and Pork Chop Hill became a battle won and lost.
Although the film takes certain liberties with history, Pork Chop Hill is a worthy addition to the American war film genre. Milestone used his trademark tracking shots to survey the terrain, slowly moving down the ridge to reveal bodies, helmets, weapons, and trenches, as if he were panning a graveyard where the dead had not yet been buried. The battle sequences are thrilling, especially when the Chinese send up a war cry, rushing down the hill with suicidal fervor to keep a worthless piece of land from falling into American hands. To prevent the film from becoming a documentary, screenwriter James R. Webb added a human dimension to the characters, particularly Private Franklin (Woody Strode), a would-be deserter who hides in a bunker. Franklin is ready to kill Clemons, until he realizes that everyone is involved in the same futile operation. Although Private Franklin is fictitious, American, Korean, and Chinese soldiers had been known to take refuge in bunkers to avoid trench warfare. Humor is virtually absent from the film, except when an assistant production officer arrives, hoping to photograph the men’s beaming faces as a morale-booster for the folks back home. Clemons was as civil as he could be in the presence of a clueless non-combatant, asking only that he tell the truth about a campaign that was denied sufficient reinforcements.
During World War II, Axis Sally and Tokyo Rose delivered cynical greetings to GIs over the air, and now Webb invented their Chinese equivalent, a well-spoken man broadcasting from the comfort of his bunker and reminding the men that they can have long lives if they withdraw: “Why must you die when you haven’t begun to live?” He conjures up the future they could have by playing a recording of the Vernon Duke classic, “Autumn in New York”—an ironic choice, given the verse “Autumn in New York / Is often mingled with pain.”
At least in A Walk in the Sun a bridge was blown up and a farmhouse taken. In Pork Chop Hill, there was no victory, only an exercise in one-up-manship carried out under orders. As co-producer, Peck would not allow the film to end on a negative note, only a false one. His voice, unfaltering and authoritative, admits that while there are no monuments to the fallen at Pork Chop Hill, “[V]ictory is a fragile thing, and history does not linger long.” And is it not entirely true that “millions live in freedom today because of what they did.” The peninsula is still divided, and South Korean families have little chance of being united with their relatives in the North.
Like American World War II movies, the Korean War movies of the 1950s only portrayed one side of the story, the American side. That there was even a Japanese side to World War II was never dramatized until Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), in which the weekend of 5–7 December 1941 unfolded like made-to-order tragedy, in which a delayed message, a poor typist, and a Sunday that was anything but a day of rest conspired to create the “day that will live in infamy.” And while 25 June 1950 was a day of lesser infamy, it was characterized by greater disillusionment, which did not escape the attention of director Anthony Mann, whose Men in War (1957) ranks high among great war films. Men in War did not look at Korea from a four-year vantage point, which would have allowed a more reflective and perhaps revisionist view of the war. Set three months after the war began, the film is unflinchingly objective in its portrayal of men who will never experience grace under pressure, only the pressure that robs them of grace. The screenplay was attributed to the prolific Philip Yordan, a front for the blacklisted Ben Maddow, who adapted it from Van Praag’s novel Combat (1950), originally entitled Day without End. Short on both heroics and propaganda, Men in War is a variation on the odyssey theme, in which Lieutenant Mark Benson (Robert Ryan) leads the remnants of his platoon through enemy-infested territory, with landmines adding to their peril. Maddow’s script is scrupulous in its observance of the classical unities of time, place, and action. The action is limited to a single day, 6 September 1950; the setting is the Pusan perimeter; and the platoon’s attempt to return to its battalion constitutes the main action. Despite Maddow’s leftist leanings, his screenplay is apolitical. “There is no political issue in this film’s war. It is a game, a game over space.” And the space is another hill that must be taken at the loss of all but one member of the platoon.
Men in War lives up to its title. It is an intensely psychological study of two men: a by-the-books lieutenant (Ryan), trying to do the right thing in a wrong war, and a maverick sergeant (Aldo Ray) from another company, concerned only with the welfare of his traumatized colonel (Robert Keith, of the riveting eyes). The sergeant cares more about the colonel than the protocols of war. The colonel is a surrogate father, whose dying word is “son,” the only time he speaks in the entire film. There are few war films in which male bonding is portrayed as selflessly as in Men in War.
Denied the military’s cooperation because of the fronted script, Men in War forged ahead on its own steam, benefitting enormously from Elmer Bernstein’s score, which was at times sweepingly orchestrated, at other times, starkly monodic, as when death was in the air. Mann, who early in his career revealed an affinity for film noir in Two O’Clock Courage (1945), T-Men (1947), and Raw Deal (1948), had director of photography Ernest Haller provide some noirish touches, such as shots of trees glazed by moonlight in an otherwise ominously dark forest. At times the screen seemed to be exploding, veiled in white smoke, as if Mann was shielding the viewer from the attack, and then lifting the veil to reveal the carnage left behind. Men in War opens with an epigraph: “Tell me the story of the foot soldier, and I will tell you the story of all wars.” At the end of The Unnamable, Samuel Beckett provides a coda that sums up the foot soldier’s lot dramatized in Men in War: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I go on.”
The most ambiguous end-of-war film set in Korea was Columbia’s The Bamboo Prison (1954), in which Master Sergeant John Rand (Robert Francis) poses as a collaborator—or “progressive” as the North Koreans labeled men who showed (or feigned) sympathy for communism—in order to obtain information that would speed up the peace talks at Panmunjom. Sergeant Rand then passes the information on in ingeniously encoded form to Corporal Brady (Brian Keith). Hitchcock might have done something outstanding with the “people are not what they seem” script (the camp’s chaplain is a communist in a cassock). Lewis Seiler was no Hitchcock, but he did his best to keep an engrossing but implausible movie on track, despite the turn offs, dead ends, and erratic rhythm that alternated between slapstick and serious.
The writers, Edwin Blum and Jack DeWitt, were familiar with war movie templates. The camp informer, a bogus priest (E. G. Marshall), was inspired by a similar character, Price (Peter Graves), in Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 (1953). The POWs mock their captors with double talk and made-up words that sound erudite (like Ronald Reagan throwing around technical sounding gibberish at a befuddled Raymond Massey in Desperate Journey). “Comrade Instructor” (Keye Luke) is so literal-minded that he does not realize the men are ridiculing everything he is trying to teach them. The commandant (Richard Loo) is so convinced of Rand’s sincerity that he cannot see that Rand’s broadcasts denouncing American imperialism and Wall Street warmongers contain hidden messages for his superiors.
The writers did not find their resolution in the catalog of war movie plots, but in an August 1953 news story in which some of the returning prisoners reported that “a few of their fellow Americans had refused repatriation.” The number was actually twenty-one, and most of them eventually returned to the United States with dishonorable discharges. If one forgot that Rand is role-playing, his decision to remain in North Korea implied that he had embraced communism. Robert Francis delivered his anti-American diatribe so forcefully that it was easy to come to that conclusion. The reason for Rand’s rejection of repatriation in front of American military personnel is never explained, except in the final scene, when he joins a truckload of other progressives. Since Rand has been working as a mole, one assumes that, with the cessation of hostilities, his next assignment will be herding the errant sheep back into the fold. Virtually nothing is known of the progressives. Did they switch allegiance because they had been subjected to thought control sessions? Did they choose collaboration out of fear of torture and privation? Or did communism make more sense to them than the Constitution? And if Rand ever succeeded in reeducating them, how would they be received back home? The Bamboo Prison poses more questions than it answers. American POWs who refused repatriation, such as the progressives, were given ninety days to reconsider. However, according to the New York Times (17 September 1996), two men who had a change of heart were not only dishonorably discharged, but received prison sentences as well. When Rand tells Corporal Brady, “I’ll be back,” he means back to the States. One would like to believe that the ninety-day grace period was waived for the progressives after they saw the light; otherwise, they would have been given the turncoat treatment. But their reconversion would mean an additional ten minutes or a sequel, neither of which Columbia had any intention of funding. Despite its unsatisfying resolution, The Bamboo Prison is still a provocative film, overly melodramatic at times, but honest—and even daring—in admitting that there were men who were not ready to return home.
The most disturbing portrayal of collaboration during the Korean War appears in Time Limit (1957), adapted from the play of the same name (but with an exclamation point for emphasis) by Henry Denker and Ralph Berkey that lasted on Broadway for 127 performances during the 1955–56 season. Denker adapted the play himself, ensuring a faithful stage-to-screen transfer. The director, Karl Malden, in his only stint behind the camera, made certain that the play lost none of its momentum as it moved to another medium. Malden, who had assimilated the mechanics of moviemaking by working with Elia Kazan in A Streetcar Named Desire, On the Waterfront, and Baby Doll, and had been a stage actor since 1937, knew how the essence of theater could be preserved on film. The transfer was not that difficult this time, since the play was a study in escalating suspense, with enough false assumptions and wrong starts that the dangling plot strings could be knotted together in the shattering dénouement.
In the military, collaboration is treason, even if the so-called collaborator served the enemy in order to save the lives of others. Hence the dilemma posed in the film: Is collaboration treason, if sixteen POWs were saved from certain death? Or was it another case of one sacrificing himself for many—who, as it turned out, were unworthy of his magnanimity? The plot pivot is simple enough: POW Major Harry Cargill (Richard Basehart) is accused of making propaganda broadcasts for the enemy and admitting to engaging in germ warfare. As Colonel William Evans (Richard Widmark) probes deeper into the case, he is confronted with contradictory statements made by the unusually self-assured Lieutenant George Miller (a creepy Rip Torn), who shrugs when confronted with an inconsistency. And how to explain the testimony of sixteen men who swore that one of their own died of dysentery, all sixteen sounding as if they had rehearsed the same script? Then there are the major’s cryptic utterances: “My brother died that I might live. May I be worthy of his sacrifice,” and “Whoever kills one man kills the world. How many worlds have I killed?” These are the sentiments of one who believes in universal brotherhood, but they could easily have been expressed by a communist. There is a suggestion that the major was not so much a collaborator as an infiltrator. Eventually, the ugly truth comes out, illustrating the lengths to which POWs will go when they learn that one of their own has betrayed them. No longer able to bear the hunger, the cold, and the torture, Captain Joe Connors defected to the enemy, an act of treachery that all except the major believe merits death. The men draw lots to determine who will be the executioner. The task falls to Miller, who strangles Connors. After burying him, the men agree to testify that he died of dysentery.
The film poses a dilemma that is irresolvable. If treason is punishable in the military, is strangling a traitor murder or execution? What kind of collaboration is worse: switching sides for better treatment, or doing so to save lives? Everyone in the camp was a collaborator of some sort, even those who worked together—literally collaborate—to kill Connors. Morally, murder is more serious than an act of collaboration that did not result in anyone’s death. Neither the play nor the film reached closure. Even when Connors’s father learns the truth about his son, he still insists that Major Cargill has committed treason. The ending is moderately hopeful, implying that with Richard Widmark (forget his character) handling the defense, Cargill will have a strong advocate. The viewer is left with Cargill’s explanation that the military must understand there is a time limit on courage, beyond which there is only survival. Upholders of the code would say, “Collaboration is still treason, even if the prisoner breaks under pressure.” One doubts that even Solomon would have been able to adjudicate such a case. In Prisoner of War (1954), the situation was much simpler, with an army captain (Ronald Reagan) infiltrating a Korean POW camp to obtain evidence of enemy atrocities by posing as a collaborator, as do two other prisoners. The atrocities—forced marches, physical and mental torture—are gruesome enough, but in documenting them, Prisoner of War became just another atrocity film. There are no atrocities in Time Limit, only a challenge to the audience to vote on whether an act of collaboration that saved lives is treason, and whether ridding a prison camp of a collaborator responsible for one death and capable of causing others is murder.
Almost a decade after the armistice, War Hunt (1962) arrived with little fanfare, written, produced, and directed by relative newcomers. John Saxon heading a cast that included several stage actors, such as Charles Aidman and Sydney Pollack, the latter going on to become one of the industry’s premier directors (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Out of Africa, Tootsie). War Hunt also marked the film debut of another actor who proved to be as comfortable behind the camera as he was in front of it, Robert Redford. The director of War Hunt was Denis Sanders, a two-time Oscar winner in the best short subject category for A Time Out of War (1954), a reenactment of a temporary truce between two Union soldiers and a lone Confederate during the Civil War, and in the best documentary short subject category for Czechoslovakia 1968, now included in the National Film Registry, devoted to the preservation of films of historical and cultural significance. The producer was Denis’s brother, Terry. Denis, who came of age during World War II, had a special affinity for the combat film. He and his brother subsequently adapted Norman Mailer’s sprawling novel, The Naked and the Dead, for the screen in 1958. Except for Bernard Herrmann’s score, the movie version fell short of the original, but in 1958, a faithful screen transfer would have been impossible for linguistic reasons alone. It was bad enough that Mailer had to use “frig.” But in 1958, what was the euphemism for a euphemism?
War Hunt did not need euphemisms. Stanford Whitmore, who served in the marines in World War II, wrote a screenplay that should have heralded the arrival of a new talent. But in 1962, Korea was still an open wound. World War II was the only war whose scars were proudly displayed. Audiences in need of a war movie fix turned out for Hell Is for Heroes (1962), with Steve McQueen and Bobby Darin, whose names, at least, were familiar. Yet War Hunt closed the book on the Korean War movie, after which filmmakers would be traversing ground already marked by the footprints of others.
War Hunt inverts the conventions of the war film. The untried Private Loomis (Redford), who also serves as the film’s narrator, is assigned to Company E, 2nd Battalion, during the last days of the war. Given the short period between his arrival and the cease-fire, Loomis has no opportunity to grow into a hero, only to enter the war’s nether world. This is not a coming of age film in which Loomis loses his idealism upon entering the Korean inferno. Instead, it is a journey to the abyss that brings this 1950s Candide to the edge of civilization, beyond which lies barbarism.
Within the war that is winding down is another war waged between Loomis and Raymond Endore (John Saxon) for the soul of a Korean orphan, who has become Endore’s surrogate son and trainee in the art of guerrilla warfare. Endore keeps the boy in the bunker with the other men, who ignore Endore’s violations of protocol and even his nightly forays behind enemy lines. When Loomis sees Endore blackening his face and going off into the night, he is naturally suspicious but told to steer clear. The others know what Endore does, but do not report it: He cuts the throats of enemy soldiers as they sleep.
Heroics have no place in War Hunt. Captain Pratt (Charles Aidman) informs the company at the beginning of the film that the war is being won at the conference table at Panmunjom, and that the fighting must continue to give the negotiators greater bargaining power. Although Loomis fits in easily, he is increasingly disturbed by Endore’s attachment to the boy, suspecting that Endore is making him into a replica of himself. That Endore is more than just a loose canon is obvious. He is prized for his reconnaissance skills, even though they include cold-blooded murder, which if reported would have led to a court martial. The reason for his bloodlust is never explained, but from John Saxon’s coldly expressionless face, it is obvious that his conscience has ossified. Either Korea has turned a soldier into a serial killer, or it has activated his potential for becoming one. War Hunt does not pass judgment on Endore, but merely allows him to reveal himself through his actions. Endore even has a leitmotif announcing his presence: four plaintive notes orchestrated into dissonance, as a simple theme swells into a danger signal.
Ignoring the truce, Endore takes the boy into the demilitarized zone, forcing a show down. As Endore stands like a warrior atop a hill, Captain Pratt shouts up to him, “The war’s over.” Endore shouts back, “Which war?” He plans to stay on, continuing his nocturnal throat-cuttings and training the Korean orphan to do the same. A scuffle ensues between Pratt and Endore, resulting in Endore’s death. Having peered into the heart of darkness, Loomis has seen the darkness of the heart. When Pratt asks, “Soldier, are you all right?” Loomis—looking as if he is trying to comprehend the incomprehensible—replies, “No.” And he never will be.
Nor will the Korean War—with its hills that cannot, but must be, held; its defeats translated into redeployments; its attitude of eyes opened and minds shut—ever be all right. In act 2 of Jean Giraudoux’s The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, produced on Broadway as Tiger at the Gates, Hecuba is asked to describe the look of war: “Like the bottom of a baboon. When the baboon is up in a tree, with its behind end facing us, there is the face of war exactly: scarlet, scaly, glazed, framed in a clotted, filthy wig.” That metaphor makes it possible to see the Korean War from what is literally a different perspective. War Hunt anticipates Apocalypse Now (1979) and Platoon (1986), each of which portrays war as a breeding ground for potential psychopaths who could never find in civilian life what they did on the other side of the divide, where darkness alone is visible. In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kurtz looks into the abyss and utters the now legendary response, “The horror! The horror!” Screenwriter-novelist Stanford Whitmore has linked Endore with Kurtz, both of whom are in the thrall of a land where they can reign with impunity. Had Endore survived, one could imagine him, like Kurtz, fortifying himself in a compound with a fence decorated with human heads, the equivalent of a “No Trespassing” sign. Endore had already discovered a deserted village where he could found his kingdom. But even then, he would not have confronted the darkness within himself and recoiled in horror. Like Macbeth, he is so steeped in blood that he has reached the point of no return. Only death remains.
Korea was too ugly a war to be passed off as an appendix to World War II. Movies were not the same mass medium they were in the 1940s. In the postwar years, small town movie theaters gave way to drugstores, supermarkets, and even storefront churches. There was no way Hollywood could portray Korea as anything other than a job that had to be done. “You win or you die,” as Captain Skidmore says with a shrug in Battle Hymn. Korea was not a war to be won, but a United Nations police action to be fought. Hollywood could not ignore Korea, but it was a no-win situation, historically and otherwise.