Another Hill in Korea

What I’ve Been Watching:  Men in War (1957).

Who’s Responsible:  Anthony Mann (director); Philip Yordan (screenwriter); Robert Ryan, Aldo Ray, Robert Keith (stars).

Why I Watched It:  Mann and Ryan.

Seen It Before?  Yes.

Likelihood of Seeing It Again (1-10):  8.

Likelihood the Guys Will Rib Me for Watching It (1-10):  2.

Totally Subjective BOF Rating (1-10):  6.

And?  I saw this as a kid, almost certainly on WOR, and disliked it.  Revisiting it decades later, I’m not surprised.  No, not because it’s bad—quite the reverse—but because it’s the antithesis of the colorful, Kelly’s Heroes-style war movies I favored then, and still prefer, yet I hope I’m a little more open-minded now.  I think the fact that it’s among a relatively few films made about the “Forgotten [i.e., Korean] War” is a significant factor.  Fresh in viewers’ minds, the war had been over for less than four years when it was released, and its narrow focus is nigh-Aristotelian as it follows a single platoon in its attempts to reach and take a barren hill on September 6, 1950, less than three months after hostilities began.

Befitting its generic title, the film opens with the epigraph, “Tell me the story of the foot soldier and I will tell you the story of all wars,” and Van Van Praag’s 1949 source novel was rebranded as the equally nonspecific Combat in 1951.  Tellingly, the book (originally called Day Without End, as in, say, “the longest day”) was about the Normandy campaign in the previous war, yet the film also seems to prefigure the next one, at a time when we still had only military advisers in Vietnam.  In Home of the Brave (1949), James Edwards played an African-American soldier experiencing racism in World War II, yet here, when he is killed after sitting down to put flowers on his helmet, it’s hard not to flash forward…

So a certain universality was achieved, especially when you throw A Hill in Korea (1956) and Pork Chop Hill (1959)—which was in, yes, Korea—into the mix.  And it’s probably no coincidence that Philip Yordan, the credited screenwriter of this film (which you could categorize just as easily as a war movie or an anti-war movie), was reportedly fronting for the blacklisted Ben Maddow both here and when much of the same cast and crew worked with Mann on God’s Little Acre the next year.  The films share an interesting assemblage of talent that, in addition to Ryan, Ray, and Vic Morrow, includes veteran lensman Ernest Haller, who also shot his Man of the West (1958), and famed composer Elmer Bernstein.

Bernstein, whose contribution here is minimal, also scored Mann’s The Tin Star (1957), a nifty little number with Henry Fonda and Anthony Perkins, and interestingly, Men in War feels almost like a hybrid of the two types of films for which he was hitherto best known, noirs (e.g., T-Men, 1947; Raw Deal, 1948) and Westerns.  I regard his work with James Stewart as one of the latter genre’s best director/actor pairings:  Winchester ’73 (1950), Bend of the River (1952), The Naked Spur (1953; my favorite, aptly co-starring Ryan), The Far Country (1954), and The Man from Laramie (1955).  They also collaborated on Thunder Bay (1953), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and Strategic Air Command (1955).

The closest Mann came to my kind of war movie was in his late-career epic phase, e.g., producer Samuel Bronston’s El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964), whose chariot race rivals that of Ben-Hur (1959).  I’m surprised he made the fact-based The Heroes of Telemark (1965) after its star, Kirk Douglas, had fired him from Spartacus (1960)—of which Kirk was also the executive producer—and replaced him with Stanley Kubrick, his director on Paths of Glory (1957).  Kubrick, ironically, had just parted ways with Marlon Brando on One-Eyed Jacks (1961), which its star directed; after Mann died while shooting A Dandy in Aspic (1968), it was completed by…its star, Laurence Harvey.

Morrow achieved his widest exposure as Sgt. Chip Saunders on Combat! (the premiere of which, “Forgotten Front,” was written by Richard Matheson under his pseudonym of Logan Swanson), and thus, as Cpl. Zwickley, is perhaps the most recognizable among the ill-fated platoon led by Lt. Benson (Ryan).  TV mainstay Nehemiah Persoff (Sgt. Lewis) popped up in occasional features ranging from Bogart’s last film, The Harder They Fall (1956), to the Byron Haskin/George Pal reunion The Power (1968).  Doubling as a writer-producer on The Brotherhood of Satan (1971)—again opposite old pal Strother Martin—and A Boy and His Dog (1975), L.Q. Jones (Sgt. Davis) also directed the latter, based on Harlan Ellison’s story.

When we meet them, the men have just lost their transport and are wondering how they’ll schlepp all of their gear to Hill 465, where they’re supposed to hook up with the division.  The timely arrival of a jeep driven by Sgt. Montana (Ray) is complicated by the fact that his passenger, known only as the Colonel (Keith)—of whom he is fiercely protective—is catatonic after a nearby blast.  So Benson ousts the abrasive Montana, turning the driver’s seat over to the unwell Zwickley, and orders the men to load the gear as they begin the trek through enemy territory, subject to attrition from snipers, artillery, and a minefield (used to great effect in Kelly’s Heroes), the fear of which drives Lewis into a self-destructive panic.

I’ve called Keith the poor man’s Les Tremayne, partly due to the many military men both have portrayed over the years, but I probably would’ve found a less flattering sobriquet if I’d known he was the father of Brian Keith, strike one against Sam Peckinpah’s first film, The Deadly Companions (1961).  The Colonel, sympathetic as he struggles to speak, is at least a change of pace from the obnoxious officers he portrayed in They Came to Cordura (1959) and Posse from Hell (1961). Similarly, I’ve always loathed Ray, yet while tough-guy Montana is not only unlikable but also positively trigger-happy, he is a perfect fit for the actor’s screen persona, and his devotion to the Colonel gives him added dimensions.

Reaching Hill 465, they find it in enemy hands, and the effort to take it wipes out almost the entire platoon plus the Colonel, who rallies long enough to take out a few “gooks” (as they are inevitably called) before being cut down.  At this point the film becomes almost existential as Benson says, “Battalion doesn’t exist.  Regiment doesn’t exist.  Command HQ doesn’t exist.  The U.S.A. doesn’t exist…We’re the only ones left to fight this war.”  Since Sgt. Riordan (Philip Pine) turns out to have survived, that is as incorrect as when he tells Montana—with whom he finally takes the hill, using a flamethrower—“We’ll never see the morning”; we close as they “award” the Colonel’s supply of medals to the dead…

Unsurprisingly, per Wikipedia, the military refused to cooperate with the account of such a, shall we say, dysfunctional unit and, “Unable to get tanks and military extras from the Pentagon, [the filmmakers] concentrate on the landscape,” aptly echoing the combination of internal tensions and rugged exteriors prized in Mann’s Westerns.  The location itself, Bronson Canyon, was ubiquitous in multiple low-budget SF films apiece from directors Phil Tucker—including the immortal Robot Monster (1953)—Roger Corman, and Bert I. Gordon.  Ryan, my main reason for giving this a second chance, appeared in BOF faves such as The Longest Day (1962), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Wild Bunch (1969).