“The war has a bigger meaning. The only trouble is it came along too soon after the real big one. It's hard to sell anybody on it.” That quote from The Hunters is a relatively accurate assessment of Hollywood's attitude toward the Korean War—or should it be the Korean Police Action? The patriotic we're-all-in-this-together spirit of the World War II films …
1960 Hall Bartlett The story of a unit that loses its officer while in enemy territory goes back at least as far as World War I, with John Ford's The Lost Patrol. Hall Bartlett sets this variation in Korea with mixed results. The creative, off-beat casting virtually guarantees as much. After all, how many other films put Sidney Poitier on the screen alongside heavyweight champion Ingemar J…
1953 Richard Brooks Robert Altman's M*A*S*H uses the Korean “police action” to comment on Vietnam. Richard Brooks's film, set in the same kind of Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, is understandably less sharply focused, reflecting America's less passionate feelings about that war. It's a curious film—flawed, but more good than bad…
1955 Mark Robson Though the subject is the Korean conflict, this is really a Cold War film, perhaps the archetypal Cold War film, with Red-baiting politics, a strongly pro-military agenda, and an absolute blindness to the situation it addresses. To a degree, that attitude has to be expected from a film made with the full cooperation of the Navy—including liberal access to aircraft carriers…
1958 Dick Powell The F-86 Saberjet is a very cool airplane, beautifully designed with sleek lines that somehow recall the great World War II fighters. Hollywood didn't make nearly enough movies about it. In fact, this lumbering soap opera is probably the F-86's finest hour. Aerial photographer Tom Tutwiler makes it look as quick, graceful, and agile as any plane that ever graced the…
1962 John Frankenheimer In their adaptation of Richard Condon's brilliant novel, John Frankenheimer and George Axel-rod invent the post-World War II thriller. The form had traditionally been a matter of heroism and suspense built around an innocent man caught in the wrong place. Condon and the filmmakers move to a deeper, darker level of paranoia where all of the fears and hatreds of the C…
1970 Robert Altman The long-running television series is so deeply imbedded in the public imagination that the true nature of Robert Altman's anarchic film has been largely forgotten. Younger viewers who have not seen it and expect a longer version of the sitcom are going to be shocked, because in these more politically sensitive times, M*A*S*H could not be made. What …
1957 Anthony Mann Anthony Mann's war film is a bleak piece of work. The conventional elements used by Hollywood to put an entertaining gloss on grim subjects are missing—no romantic interests, no humor, no folksy characters, no real sentiment until almost the end. In their place are two actors playing flinty, combative opponents. Lt. Benson (Robert Ryan) has been ordered to lead his…
1959 Lewis Milestone Some see Lewis Milestone's Korean War film as an anti-war companion piece to All Quiet on the Western Front. Others note the onscreen introductory statement of grateful thanks for the cooperation of the United States Army and see it as an apology for military-political bungling. Milestone himself claimed that studio interference altered his original conception of the s…
1951 Samuel Fuller Reportedly written in one week and filmed in 10 days, Sam Fuller's war film is a low-budget marvel. It tells a simple, carefully paced story without a single wasted frame. Though Fuller takes time to comment on other social issues, he has stripped the standard combat story down to its fundamentals, eliminating extraneous details. The film begins literally at ground level…