HELL IS FOR HEROES Movie Review

1962 Donald Siegel

Don Siegel's low-budget war film is tough, brutal and short. After a strangely slow introduction set in a little French town, it becomes a fast-paced, realistic look at one small battle in the last days of the European Theater. Co-writer Robert Pirosh is also responsible for the more well-known Battleground (1949), and this film can be seen as a sort of companion piece, with a cast of unknowns on the verge of stardom.

Thumbnail sketches introduce Corby (Bobby Darin), the entrepreneur; Larkin (Harry Guardino), the tough-but-fair sergeant; Henshaw (James Coburn), the fix-it guy; Kolinsky (Mike Kellen), the father figure; and Homer (Nick Adams), the Polish kid who wants to be a GI. The new replacement is Reese (Steve McQueen), a loner with a troubled past. Sgt. Pike (Fess Parker) knows something of that past. Most of that information turns out to be fairly useless, because the squad that thinks it's about to go home is sent back to the front. No sooner have they taken up a position a few hundred yards away from the German Siegfried Line than the rest of their outfit is moved north, and they're left facing a much larger and better-equipped enemy. But, do the Germans know how comparatively weak they are?

The rest of the story is set on that desolate strip of dirt filled with land mines and shell craters. It's grim stuff, brightened by the appearance of Pvt. Driscoll (Bob Newhart), a typist who blunders into the wrong place. He performs one of his telephone routines, which were the hottest thing in early ‘60s stand-up comedy, and gives the film a needed moment of comic relief that is actually funny but does not break the bleak mood that Siegel establishes.

Everything builds to the third act. There, the pace quickens. The violence becomes truly horrifying for the first time, with men screaming helplessly. The pain and the fear they express have a visceral quality seldom seen in mainstream films. Siegel's direction becomes more fluid and experimental in those scenes, too. At key moments, his camera rises unnervingly above the action to give it a new vertiginous perspective. Overall, the young cast is excellent, though at times McQueen is too brooding for his own good. His work, though, can be seen almost as a rough draft of Jake Holman, the character he would play four years later in The Sand Pebbles. As the title and the synopsis suggest, Hell Is for Heroes has both the look and the mindset of a World War I film. The explosions, tension, and gunfire may pump up the adrenaline, but the reality is unchanged. War is about men doing terrible things to each other. Patriotism, courage, right, wrong—those are concepts that have little to do with the final outcome.

Cast: Steve McQueen (Reese), Bobby Darin (Pvt. Corby), Fess Parker (Sgt. Pike), Harry Guardino (Sgt. Larkin), James Coburn (Cpl. Henshaw), Mike Kellin (Pvt. Kolinsky), Nick Adams (Homer), Bob Newhart (Pvt. Driscoll), L.Q. (Justus E. McQueen) Jones (Sgt. Frazer), Don Haggerty (Capt. Mace), Joseph Hoover (Cpt. Loomis), Michele Montau (Monique), Bill Mullikin (Pvt. Cumberly); Written by: Robert Pirosh, Richard Carr; Cinematography by: Harold Lipstein; Music by: Leonard Rosenman. Producer: Paramount Pictures, Henry Blanke. Running Time: 90 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta, LV, Closed Caption.