War Hunt

When Robert Redford died last year, TCM responded with one of their 24-hour programming tributes. This gave them a chance to show a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Redford's first big role (he gets an "introducing" credit), in a modest Korean War movie called War Hunt. It's getting an airing tomorrow, August 18, at 6:00 AM as part of Redford's day in Summer Under the Stars, so now is the time to schedule it.

As the movie opens, it's May 1953 in Korea, which means that the Korean War is about to end, or at least the fighting, not that the men on the ground doing that actual fighting know that it's about to end. The negotiations have been going on for ages and they grouse about it. Pvt. Roy Loomis (Robert Redford) is a man fresh out of boot camp who's been shipped over to Korea, and from there to a platoon that's pretty close to the front line, under Captain Pratt (Charles Aidman). Among Loomis' fellow soldiers are a couple of people who would go on to have well-known careers: Sgt. Van Horn (Sydney Pollack), Pvt. Crotty (Gavin MacLeod), and Sgt. Showalter (Tom Skerritt).

But the one guy everybody gives a wide berth to is Pvt. Ray Endore (John Saxon). The only person who doesn't give Endore that wide berth is young Charlie, a Korean orphan who was rescued by Pvt. Endore and now serves as Endore's private aide. Well, Pvt. Loomis doesn't really avoid Endore either, largely because he's new here and doesn't know yet just what Endore is like. The other guys in the outfit certainly try to warn Loomis.

And then one morning Endore returns to camp and wakes up Loomis with his whistling. He's also got a face covered in military-black of the sort used on a night operation when you don't want to be seen in the moonlight. Endore goes out on night patrols by himself, technically AWOL, because Capt. Pratt knows that Endore is able to get good intelligence information. The negatives, especially the big one that Endore likes to knife North Koreans to death, are things that Pratt overlooks because it's war, and war is hell and all that.

Loomis, again being new to all this, doesn't get any of it, and is concerned about the influence all of this is going to have on poor little Charlie. It's bad enough that Charlie has had the horrors of war visited upon him at such a young age; worse is that he's learning all the wrong lessons from a soldier who's showing himself to be increasingly mentally unstable. When Loomis brings up the point about what's going to happen to Charlie after the war, Endore thinks he's going to be able to stay in Korea after the hostilities end and continue to fight his own war.

And then the armistice does get signed, which means that the following night, everybody who's right at the front line with that little bit of demilitarized zone between them, is going to have to be on their best behavior. That's not something that Endore is going to like, and you can guess what he does when the sun goes down and the panic that this engenders in the other guys in his outfit.

War Hunt is a very modest, low-budget affair that somewhat surprisingly got extremely positive reviews back when it was released. It's not that I didn't like it or anything; it's more that the low-budget nature of the movie definitely reveals some of its flaws. Redford and Saxon both do good jobs with their roles, but everyone else is more or less a stock character. Perhaps it's the fact that in 1962, when the movie was released, this side of war was very little seen on screen. The heroic side is what most of the war movies delivered.

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.

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.

M*A*S*H

I mentioned the other day that as part of FXM's meager programming for Memorial Day, they'd be airing M*A*S*H at 10:10 AM tomorrow. It's getting another airing on Tuesday, and more over the next few weeks. With that in mind, I watched it to do a review on here.

It's the summer of 1951, so for those of you who know your history, that means it's the middle of the Korean War. Hawkeye Pierce (Donald Sutherland) is a doctor who was drafted into the army to serve as a surgeon in the Korean War. He's just arrived in Korea to take a jeep to the field hospital near the front along with another draftee, Duke Forrest (Tom Skerritt). Understandably, neither of them wanted to be drafted.

So when the two men get to their new assignment, they don't care too much about Army rules and regulations, trying to organize things to their own benefit as much as possible as a way of dealing with the insanity of war. Also at this particular unit, numbered the 4077th, there's "Trapper" John McIntyre (Elliott Gould), who if anything is even more opposed to the Army way of doing things than Hawkeye or Duke. Unsurprisingly, there are people who enlisted to be in the army, and they would much prefer things to be run by the book, such as Maj. Frank Burns (Robert Duvall), and the chief nurse, Margaret Houlihan (Sally Kellerman), who gets the nickname "Hot Lips".

So there's a running theme throughout the film of conflict between Hawkeye and friends on the one hand, and Burns and Houlihan, with other people like unit commander Col. Blake (Roger Bowen) in charge, at least nominally. M*A*S*H, however, is more of an episodic movie, so that structure of conflict is really more of a frame for the various adventures that Hawkeye, Duke, and Trapper John get into.

The movie was based on a book and, having been successful, was then turned into a weekly TV series that ran for over a decade. Most people would probably know the TV show better than the movie, which presents a problem in that people will probably compare the TV show and the movie. The only actor from the movie who reprised his role on the TV show is Gary Burghoff as Radar O'Reilly. There are also characters in the movie not on the TV show (Duke Forrest), while Cpl. Klinger from the TV show is not in the movie.

Some of the episodes in the movie work better than others, mostly those set at the hospital, with there being a fair bit of dark humor which is understandable when you have to deal with death on a daily basis. Scenes set away from the hospital, such as Hawkeye and Trapper John's trip to Japan to perform emergency surgery on a Congressman's son, don't work so well; likewise, the climactic football game goes on way too long.

For me, it also didn't help that Hawkeye and Trapper John grew into increasing jerks as the movie wore on. Now, I tend to have a fair amount of disrespect for authority, but tend to do so quietly by doing my own thing rather than being obnoxious like Hawkeye. So I found the ostensible heroes to be characters difficult to like, which makes it difficult to like the movie as a whole.

M*A*S*H is a movie that didn't work for me, although watching it I can see why anybody who had to deal with the Vietnam War -- after all, the movie was released in 1970 and has always been seen as an allegory for Vietnam -- would have liked it at the time. By the same token, I can see why a lot of people today would still like it. So watch and judge for yourself.

The Korean War All-Star Morale Booster

Doris Day was TCM's Star of the Month for March, which gave me the opportunity to record a couple of her movies that I hadn't blogged about before. Among them was Starlift.

Sgt. Mike Nolan (Dick Wesson) and Cpl. Rick Williams (Ron Hagerthy) are a couple of Air Force men from Travis AFB out in California, on a bit of leave in Los Angeles. They're not engaged in combat in the war over in Korea, but instead fly the combatants over the Pacific, returning with the injured getting sent stateside. In front of one of the theaters, they see a cardboard cutout of Warner Bros.' newest star, Nell Wayne (Janice Rule). Nell just happens to be from Williams' hometown of Youngstown, OH, and the two were even vaguely acquainted as Williams' dad was Nell's dentist.

Ruth Roman (playing herself) shows up, as does Doris Day (also playing herself). When they hear about Rick's being from the same town as Nell, the two actresses decide to bring him and Mike to their hotel to meet Nell (and James Cagney in another cameo). Unfortunately, Mike is a bit of a jerk, and leads the actresses to believe that the two are actually about to go off to combat, and that Rick and Nell are much closer thank they are in real life. But the actresses agree to go up to Travis AFB to see some of the men before they go off to Korea, in the sort of morale-booster that had been common in World War II.

Ruth Roman gets more into it, sort of the way Kay Francis did in Four Jills in a Jeep, and starts something called "Operation Starlift", to try to get all of the Warner Bros.' contract players to go up to Travis to see the men and perform for them. Meanwhile, Louella Parsons has been handed Mike's line of guff about Rick and Nell, and has made it into a really big story.

Nell keeps going up to Travis as part of Operation Starlift and, as you can guess, on one of those trips she's going to see Rick on the plane that's come back from Honolulu. Rick probably should have told Mike off and then told Nell the truth about what a jerk Mike was. But there's the problem of keeping up appearances for the sake of Nell's career. Worse, Rick's parents wind up in Los Angeles and meet Nell's parents.

The plot of Starlift isn't much to write about. But that's because the plot wasn't supposed to be the point of the story. Instead, Starlift was designed as the sort of morale-booster that every Hollywood studio had made the previous decade during World War II. Unfortunately, public opinion had changed in the intervening half-dozen years, and there wasn't the unanimity of purpose that there was in the 1940s.

Instead, the main reason to watch Starlift is for the cameo performances. Some of them are quite good. Doris Day, as you can expect, does very well with her songs. Gary Cooper shows up for one of the variety shows, playing a Texas Ranger who has to deal with Frank Lovejoy. These two do quite well also. On the minus side, Gordon MacRae's singing style is an acquired taste, and I definitely haven't acquired it. Peter Marshall and Tommy Noonan show up, unrecognizable, spoofing an Italian chef radio show. It doesn't work.

Starlift is an interesting historical curiosity, but not particularly great as a standalone film. It is available on DVD, however, if you want to watch for yourself.

Marnies Let's Go woud have been more interesting

Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and while TCM has been running war movies all weekend, FXM is really only getting into the holiday tomorrow morning, with four war movies. The one I haven't blogged about is Marines, Let's Go, at 1:15 PM Monday (and again 9:50 AM Tuesday).

Some narration introduces us to our stock character US Marines who are serving in Korea during the war. The five main ones are Pfc. Skip Roth (Tom Tryon); upper-class Pfc. Chatfield (David Hedison); naïve Texan Pvt. Newt Levels (David Brandon); nominal leader Sgt. Hawkins (Peter Miller); and Pfc. McCarthy (Tom Reese), nicknamed "Let's Go" because he's born for combat instead of leadership and constantly exhorts his comrades-in-arms, "Let's go!"

The whole outfit gets leave to go visit Japan at about the same time Pfc. McCarthy is set to get a promotion. Everybody else thinks the promotion is going to be terrible for him, as he's not really suited for command, so Roth spends much of the time in Japan trying to get Let's Go busted back to private. As for Hawkins, he's got the chance to have a real honeymoon with his wife; Newt has a girlfriend who he thinks of as a fiancée, Grace (Linda Hutchings), but as we'll see, she has a past.

Roth wangles a series of hotel rooms in a respectable family hotel by claiming that he and his marines are on a secret spy mission. They uses a field telephone to communicate back and forth, but military intelligence picks up these conversations and realize something is going on, although they're too stupid to figure out exactly what.

Along the way, the Marines get in some drunken fights, while Let's Go runs into three sisters who are the main attraction in a nightclub floor show and also have a sumo-wrestler brother. Let's Go finally figures out what Roth has been doing to him, and uses the wrestler to get revenge on Roth.

The marines finally get caught out and are going to get the courts-martial they so richly deserve (well, not Hawkins, who has been spending leave trying to get that honeymoon suite). But just as they're about to get their due punishment, all leaves are called off as the marines have to go back to fight in Korea, adding a roughly 20-minute epilogue onto the movie.

Marines, Let's Go is frankly a terrible movie, with the only saving grace being the location establishing shots and the fact that FXM ran the print in the proper Cinemascope aspect ratio. These marines are obnoxious (and in Newt's case, preternatuarlly stupid), making John Wayne's Spig Wead from yesterday's The Wings of Angels look like a positively normal person. They didn't just deserve court-martial; frankly a good beating from the wrestler brother would have been in order as well.

On top of that there's the gross cultural stereotypes of the Japanese and the Koreans, one of the marines having a Korean wife. Then they all get back to Korea and the battle scenes are tedious, not helped by what seems stock footage. All in all, there's just so much here that makes Marines, Let's Go not worth a watch.

Marines, Let's Go did get a DVD release courtesy of Fox's MOD scheme, and is also available for rent on Prime Video.

I should probably mention The Hunters

I see that for those of us with FXM, they're running The Hunters tomorrow morning (Sept. 26) at 9:45 AM and then again on Thursday at 7:50 AM. The movie doesn't seem to be on DVD, but for those of you who can do streaming, Amazon has it.

Robert Mitchum plays Maj. Saville, a fighter pilot who has been recalled to active duty during the Korean War. On his way to Korea through Tokyo, he meets Lt. Abbott (Lee Phillips), who is going to be serving under him in Korea. He also meets Mrs. Abbott (May Britt), and finds that their relationship is a bit strained because of his mousy personality. As you can probably guess, Maj. Saville and Mrs. Abbott start to develop feelings for each other which is going to cause a strain on the major's professional relationship with his subordinate.

When they get to Korea, they're going to find the third member of their squadron, hot-shot pilot Lt. Pell (Robert Wagner). All of the American pilots are worried about one particular pilot, a Chinese guy nicknamed Casey Jones (remember, Communist China took part in the Korean war on the North Koreans' side). This particular pilot is such an ace that the Americans all want o be the guy to take him down, but of course being a fighter pilot is risky business.

Sure enough, Lt. Abbott eventually gets shot down. And then Maj. Saville decides he's going to ditch his plane to rescue Abbott. Pell offers cover for the two to keep the Communists from strafing them to death, but Pell too gets shot down. The three men have to make a difficult overland journey south back to safety.

The Hunters is entertaining enough, although it's a fairly standard plot, and the trek back to safety really requires you to suspend disbelief. May Britt was just the latest in a long line of glamorous European actreesses brought over to Hollywood to try to be the next big thing. Britt didn't have a particularly noteworthy career, but she wasn't as bad as somelone like Bella Darvi. Airplane buffs will probably also enjoy The Hunters for the aerial footage, although once the planes get shot down there won't be as much to enjoy.

Fox, I think, would do well to put out a low-priced box set of either Mitchum at Fox movies, or Robert Wagner (since he did a lot more) and include this one. It's not going to be remembered as an all-time great, but it doesn't deserve to be forgotten, either.

The Hunters

Tomorrow on TCM brings up a day of films starring Robert Mitchum. One that I haven't blogged about before is The Hunters, which you can catch at 4:45 PM

Mitchum plays Major Cleve Saville, a US Air Force officer during the Korean War. He's heading back from Japan to Korea to take part in more missions against the Communists' MiGs, but first has to deal with another pilot who has serious self-confidence issues. First Lieutenant Carl Abbott (Lee Phillips) has yet to shoot down a plane, and he thinks he's never going to get a good mission. To deal with this, he's taken to the bottle, which unsurprisingly is a problem for a pilot. Anyhow, Lt. Abbott drinks himself into a stupor, such that Cleve and Carl's wife Kristina (May Britt) have to take him back to the Abbott's place in Japan, which seems impossibly big for a soldier, but that's another story. It fairly quickly becomes apparent that the filmmakers want us to think that Cleve would be the more appropriate man for Kristina, and that this is going to be one of the running themes of the movie.

The other theme, of course, is Maj. Saville's difficulties in dealing with the new pilots the Air Force is giving him. Saville fought in the previous war, World War II, and he's a lifer. Flying in World War II was different from flying in Korea, and the young pilots just don't seem to have the same respect for flying that the Major thinks he has. Get off his lawn, or maybe his cloud. The part of the hot-shot young flyer, Lt. Ed Pell, is played by Robert Wagner.

And so we get the set-up for the dramatic climax of the movie. The pilots go on missions, especially wary of one Chinese pilot who goes by the nickname "Casey Jones" who is the one pilot to be the equal of the best American pilots. He's shot down quite a few American planes, and he's back in action. They'd like to get him, but of course it's not going to be that easy.

Indeed, one of the missions is going to see a pilot get downed behind enemy lines! That pilot is Lt. Abbott, and if it weren't for military discipline, we'd probably be happy to see the jerk get what's coming to him, and Saville and the widow Abbott can get married and live happily after. But of course, that would be a terrible ending for a film, so we need something a little more dramatic. And what we get is certainly that: Maj. Saville ditches his plane, and Lt. Pell lets himself be downed too, so that the two of them can find Lt. Abbott and bring him to safety! This despite behing well behind enemy lines and having no real idea of the lay of the land. It also doesn't help that Abbott is fairly injured.

The result is a movie that treads over a lot of territory that we've seen before in previous war movies. Not that it does most of the stuff badly; it's just that other movies did these things better. What The Hunters has going for it is its color cinematography, as well as the presence of Robert Mitchum, who gives a professional performance as always. If you like war movies, The Hunters is entertaining enough but will never achieve greatness.

The Steel Helmet

Memorial Day weekend is almost here, and with that means TCM's annual marathon of war movies. One that I've never recommended before is Sam Fuller's The Steel Helmet, which you can catch Saturday afternoon at 1:45 PM.

Gene Evans plays Sgt. Zack, whom we see at the beginning of the movie among a bunch of dead bodies, somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Korea. All these dead people had been taken prisoner by the North Koreans and summarily shot, but Zack didn't die because his helmet miraculously deflected the bullet in just the right way. Zack is discovered by a young boy scavenging the bodies for whatever he can find, until the boy realizes that Zack is in fact still alive. Zack calls the boy "Short Round", and Short Round, having lost his parents, wants to go with Zack, something Zack doesn't want. Short Round, however, knows the territory better than any of the Americans, so it might not be such a bad thing to have a guide, even if it is a juvenile guide.

Eventually, Sgt. Zack and Short Round run into a larger group of straggler American troops, led by one Lt. Driscoll (Steve Brodie). Driscoll's ragtag band includes black corporal Thompson (James Edwards), who is also the medic; Japanese-American Sgt. Tanaka (Richard Loo), and conscientious objector Bronte, among others. Driscoll doesn't really get along well with Zack, but since Driscoll outranks Zack, Driscoll insists that they complete their mission, which is to find a local Buddhist temple where they're supposed to set up an observation post.

The group gets to the temple eventually, and makes certain that there's no North Koreans hiding out at the temple. Having done a thorough search and not finding any enemy soldiers, the Americans set up camp. But apparently, they weren't thorough enough, as there is one North Korean officer in the temple, who manages to kill one of the Americans and destroy the radio equipment before they capture him. They'd like to keep him alive, since he would prove a valuable intelligence tool, but he proceeds to sow dissension among the ranks, much like Eric Portman's Hirth tries to do in 49th Parallel. The fact that there's a black man here, and a Japanese man who saw his parents sent off to internment camps just a decade earlier, gives our North Korean quite a bit of ammunition. But that's the half of the Americans' problems. What they don't realize is that they're about to be set upon by a ridiculously large North Korean force....

The Steel Helmet is a low-budget film, with a story line that's not complex at all, and relatively few sets. I tend not to be a big fan of war movies, but The Steel Helmet is a very well-made movie. It's grim, as war really is, although not unrelentingly; there's some comic relief involving a character who wishes he weren't bald. It also presents the Americans as less than heroic, or more accurately, having human failures and doing terrible things in the face of extreme emotion. It's human nature, but suggesting American soldiers could be anything less than heroic is still controversial in a segment of our society. I can only imagine what it would have been like back in 1951. Ultimately, it gives The Steel Helmet the effet of being a more honest movie, although I have no idea how truly accurate any war movie can really be.