The Hook

Every Memorial Day weekend, TCM has a war movie marathon, and because Hollywood disproportionately made movies about World War II, that's what the movies in the marathon are disproportionately about. I recorded some of the non-World War II movies this past Memorial Day, and recently got around to watching another one, The Hook.

The movie tells us at the start that it's a story of men in war, not men at war, and the two are different. Also, it could be a story from any war, but that the filmmakers decided to use Korea in 1953 (so not long before the end of the war) for the story. Now, with that out of the way, we can get to the action in the story.

A small group of soldiers is on the coast trying to get a bunch of fuel loaded onto a ship for getting away from the North Koreans in the possibility that any armistice give this area to the Communists. Anything they can't bring with them on the ship, they're supposed to destroy. The group is led by Sgt. Briscoe (Kirk Douglas), with Privates Hackett (Nick Adams) and Dennison (Robert Walker Jr.) serving under him, and a fourth man. A North Korean plane comes overhead and the pilot shoots the truck with the fourth man in it, before the pilot has to scuttle the plane.

The pilot, however, is still alive, so Pvt. Dennison insists on bringing him along, because to do otherwise and just leave him to die would probably be a war crime considering his wounds aren't fatal. So they bring him on board the ship for the long voyage to safety, the captain having to take an evasive course, and hold the pilot (Enrique Magalona), who doesn't speak any English, prisoner in their cabin.

Now, here's where things start to get complicated. This is a UN-chartered transport ship, not a military ship, flying under a Finnish flag of neutrality, so the captain, Van Ryn (Nehemiah Persoff) is in charge here, and isn't going to give the same orders as the military might. And when Sgt. Briscoe is able to get in touch with headquarters, there's a really big problem. Headquarters has been attacked by the North Koreans, and Briscoe's commanding officer has died. So the Republic of Korea officer now in command insists that Briscoe and his men execute the pilot themselves, because surely the South Koreans are going to do it if he reaches there.

Sgt. Briscoe is a career soldier, and Hackett has a past with him, but you get the distinct impression that Dennison was drafted and had no desire to fight in what's nowadays the "forgotten war". Brisco, also being in comman, tries to order Dennison to do the deed, because that's the only way Dennison is going to learn how to be a soldier and act properly in a real life-or-death situation. As for Hackett, he has that past, which involves Briscoe saving Hackett's bacon when Hackett was court-martialed for killing a man while drunk.

But can Dennison kill the North Korean pilot? He definitely has moral problems with it, and it might even be a war crime. But at the same time, you can definitely sense the North Korean planning how to effect an escape, at least as much as you can on a ship. And why doesn't Briscoe just do it himself if Dennison and Hackett won't?

The Hook is most definitely not an action movie, but a thoughtful character study that asks us what we would do in a difficult situation like this. I found the story interesting if one that has a pitfall in just how long it can go on for. As with submarine movies but in a different way, there's only so much you can do with the basic premise. But the acting is good from all four soldiers as well as Persoff's ship's captain.

The Hook is a different sort of movie than one might think of when one thinks of war movies, but it's definitely worth a watch.