Men in War

Korea. 1950. North Korean armor and heavy infantry roll down the Peninsula as if the South Korean Army weren't even there. Task Force Smith, pulled from occupation troops fat from the good life in Tokyo, goes to the Peninsula and attacks at Osan. Under-armed, under-trained, and under-supported, they'll soon be pushed back to the Pusan perimeter; there to hang on and await the reinforcements steaming across the Pacific.

This is the world of Men in War, a deceptively simply picture about a lost platoon, a headstrong sergeant, a shell-shocked colonel, and a jeep. The platoon wants to rendezvous with Big Army. The sergeant wants to take care of his colonel. Everyone wants the jeep. And away we go.

Men in War boils down to the conflict between the platoon's lieutenant, an improbably old and grizzled Robert Ryan, and the sergeant whose only goal is to get his near-vegetative colonel to the rear. The lieutenant is the audience's proxy, leading by example, advocating human decency, and reeling in horror at the realities of warfare. The sergeant serves as a foil for the idealistic officer, but his brand of cynical survivalism comes at a price.

The film sells this premise through the performances of Ryan (in real-life, a former USMC drill instructor*) as the lieutenant and Aldo Ray as the sergeant. These guys look dirty and smelly and scared, and I believed every syllable of every line of dialogue they uttered. The rest of the supporting cast all kind of blend into the background, but that's ok. This is a morality play, and too many points of view muddy the waters.

That said, Men in War never loses sight of the fact that this conflict takes place in the context of a larger conflict, and it never stops being a gripping war movie. It orients the audience to the platoon's fatigue level, morale, supply situation, and position relative to Big Army.  It conveys North Korean positions, troop strength, and doctrine without resorting to bland exposition. Most importantly, it keeps the audience dialed in on everything from the overall operational situation to the placement of individual land mines. This enhances the film's verisimilitude, lending urgency to its patrols, skirmishes, and battles.

In other words, here's a film about, well, men in war that appears to have been created by people who actually understand warfare. It makes for an engrossing and challenging viewing experience, one well worth the time of both the military history aficionado and the general-interest film buff. I loved it.




*Thanks for that, Jim!

Three Noirs

Odds Against Tomorrow is a heist movie, a noir movie, and a racial parable all wrapped up in one.  Ed Begley is the disgraced former NYPD detective.  Robert Ryan is the hard-bitten ex-con who’d prefer to stay clean, but doesn’t mind a little dirt.  Harry Belafonte is the degenerate gambler who owes a lot of money to some very bad people.

Begley works out the score and recruits his accomplices, but there’s a problem: yan is a vocal racist and won’t trust Belafonte.  How will they work together when things inevitably veer off plan?

It’s a great premise, but it suffers in execution.  The film spends all but the last fifteen minutes setting up the characters and heist, but this leaves very little time for nuance when things go wrong.  I’d have appreciated more time in the crime, more reversals and counter-reversals.  As it was, I could see right off how things were going to go, and after that it was just waiting for the gears to turn.  I wanted to love Odds Against Tomorrow, but I found myself spending most of the film wishing it’d hurry up and the last few minutes wishing it would slow down.  Ah, well.

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In Crime Wave, Gene Nelson is an ex-con trying to stay clean.  Ted de Corsia and a young Charles Bronson (as Charles Buchinsky) are escaped cons looking for a hideout and a big score.  Sterling Hayden is the police lieutenant out to get them all.  This is film noir, so there’s no telling what’s going to happen.

While Crime Wave counts as minor noir (Definition: anything I haven’t heard of before a friend turns me on to it), it’s successful.  Filmed almost entirely on location in ‘50s Los Angeles, it takes us to a place we can never (re)visit and makes us feel at home.  It gives us menacing villains, conflicted, heroes, and hard-boiled cops, and it puts them in a story with enough tension and surprise to keep us on edge and delight us to the end.

Crime Wave is a B-side to films like The Maltese Falcon and Out of the Past, but it’s a solid B-side.  If you have a hankering for a new noir, Crime Wave will scratch the itch nicely.

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Decoy comes as part of a double bill on the same DVD as Crime Wave.  Unlike Crime Wave, which is tense and rewarding, Decoy is dull.

Here’s the deal: some guy in a suit shoots a dame.  Why?  Hey, why not?  It’s ‘50s: everybody wears a suit.  The film goes on to tell us why he shot the dame, but we don’t really care.  Why not?  Because we don’t care about the dame.  Sure, she’s good-looking enough, but she lacks that star quality, that indefinable something that makes us wonder what she’s thinking and what she’s going to think about next, that the part requires.

Sure, there’s another hard-boiled cop (Sheldon Leonard, hamming it up), an innocent, a devilish plot, and perhaps the most fatale femme in the history of the genre.  But the cop’s a jerk, the innocent is a terrible actor, the plot is simplistic, and the femme makes you wonder if she got the part by sleeping with somebody (right up ‘til you learn that she was married to the director).

Ultimately, Decoy just isn’t very good, and that’s too bad.  I was all set to like it.

The Naked Spur

Somewhere along the way, I picked up the notion that there was a twist ending to THE NAKED SPUR. There is, but not the in the way I thought. It’s a twist so much more engaging than anything I’d have imagined that it elevates the picture from merely good to damn good. Unfortunately, it also makes the film nearly impossible to write about.

I will write that the cinematography is not particularly fascinating and the music is grating, relentlessly telling us what to think and how to feel. Mid-career Jimmy Stewart is fine, as always, and the supporting cast does its job well enough that no one struck me as a “favor cast.”

But the real credit here goes writers Sam Rolfe and Harold Bloom, who fashion a story that appears straightforward, but gets more and more complex as things develop. By the end, even though I knew this was a Western of a certain era, I had no idea how things were going to turn out. And that twist, wow. This movie took me by surprise.