Korean War Films
The Steel Helmet, 1951, is the great Sam Fuller’s Korean war drama. (If you don’t know Sam Fuller and you care about movies, run – don’t walk – to see Pickup on South Street, Shock Corridor, and yes, The Naked Kiss). It’s gritty, disturbing, and gripping. Fuller served as a rifleman in the US First Infantry Division and saw action in North Africa, Sicily, France, and then on through Europe to Czechoslovakia, so he knew what he was talking about. He also made a very personal film later in his career about World War II, The Big Red One, 1980. What interested me about The Steel Helmet was the extraordinary angst and confusion that the characters display. They are wandering in the wilderness, seemingly without knowing why they are there. They have a mission, but they are isolated from the rest of the army and seem to be isolated from the rest of humanity. The mood has something in common with the great World War I dramas from the twenties and thirties, with their full-throated loathing for war and sense of its absurdity and futility.
Anthony Mann’s Men in War, 1957, with an admirable performance by Aldo Ray as a near-psychotic soldier, has a similar mood of desolation and despair.
Are there any upbeat Korean War dramas? Did Americans kind of gulp and shrug and try to forget the existential abyss that they had stared into in the war, until they got their fill of it and more in Vietnam? I wonder; I was born in 1952, and our fathers had ALL served in World War II and/or Korea. We played World War II constantly when I was a boy – but never, never Korea. Guess I’ve found myself a new research project…
(Find films at Amazon:)
The Big Red One – The Reconstruction (Two-Disc Special Edition)
