The Young and the Brave

Another of the movies that TCM ran over the Memorial Day war movie marathon was another new-to-me movie, The Young and the Brave. After watching it, I think there's a pretty good reason that I'd never heard of it before.

Sgt. Kane (William Bendix) and Master Sgt. Brent (Rory Calhoun) are a pair of US soldiers in the Korean War who were captured by the North Koreans. They escaped however, and are now trying to make their way south to the town where they think they can find safety. Along the way, they try to get information from a couple of farmers, but it's costly. Not for the soldiers, of course, but for the farmer couple who get shot by the commies for their trouble.

Worse for them, they had a son named Han (Manuel Padilla, a Mexican-American kid who looks oh so obviously Korean) who is now an orphan and tries to make his way to safety. Han winds up at an abandoned Army goods dump where somehow a dog got abandoned as well. This being a low-budget Hollywood movie, it's fairly obvious that the kid is going to be able to befriend the dog, and that the dog, a German shepherd now christened Lobo, is going to have quite a bit a skill and be able to help out the kid.

It's also clear that the two American POWs are going to run into Han again and have to bring him along as they try to make their way south, and that two extra mouths to feed are going to be an issue at some point along the way. And then rations get even tighter when the two POWs find a third escaped POW, Pvt. Wilson (Robert Ivers).

This brings in another hoary plot device, that of the POW who gave in to the Communist propaganda and brainwashing attempts, or at least did in the eyes of the two Americans who didn't. The problem for them is that Pvt. Wilson is the only one who knows how to get the radio working again, and without a radio, getting back to safety is going to be that much more difficult, especially with the North Koreans following the Americans not so far behind.

So it's easy to see why a movie like The Young and the Brave isn't that highly regarded. It's cheap, full of tropes, and fairly predictable. And then to top it all off it has the tacked-on plot line of an obnoxious boy and his dog. The only good thing I can say about the movie is tht it at least gave me something to blog about for one more day.