This was shot on a minuscule budget in ten days. It's not an insulting movie or a bad one, but the headlong and inexpensive rush shows.
This was one of Sam Fuller's first big hits. It's about a squad of infantrymen manning an isolated observation post during the Korean war. Fuller had been a Chicago newspaperman and he wrote and directed this effort as if rattling off a story under a deadline. Bing bang boom. The point is made and the story rolls along. Sometimes it rolls along even if the point fails to be made. I used to read equally cogent stories of the Korean war in comic books when I was a kid.
There are no bankable stars but most of the cast are believable. It's good to see Richard Loo, a Hawaiian-born Chinese, playing a Japanese again, only this time on our side. A North Korean prisoner gets to needle him about the relocation camps. James Edwards, an African-American, gets needled too, but he's as stalwart as ever.
It's an ensemble film but primus inter pares is the bearded, funky, cigar-chewing, ugly Gene Evans as the tough top sergeant who dislikes officers, conscientious objectors, charming young Korean boys, and -- let me see, who else exists? Evans is an actor whose appeal has always eluded me, although his home town, Holbrook, Arizona, was always a comfortable little outpost in the middle of the desert, until recently when it was engulfed by sprawling malls. The cultural center of the tiny place used to be the Dairy Queen, located where the through road, which no one of discernment would call "a highway", makes a dogleg.
Anyway -- where was I? -- anyway, Evans has one glorious moment on screen. In the midst of the final battle, with bullets whizzing and shells exploding, men being blown to bits, and everything wreathed in smoke, Fuller shows us Gene Evans hammering away at the enemy from behind a machine gun. Then -- with no warning whatever -- Fuller cuts to a close up of Evans' face as he stops firing. Evans' eyeballs widen and he seems for a moment transported. His face seems to glow by means of some inner mechanism. He stumbles to his feet and amid the carnage wanders around hallucinating -- "Did you hear the colonel?" What a scene! A huge and somehow ominous statue of the Buddha appears to play an important role in this movie but I don't know what it is. The one thing I'm sure of is that Fuller's experience as an combat infantryman in the First Division shaped the remainder of his life. He never forgot it or rather he never got over it, and he'd been no longer a kid. He was thirty-four. For years afterward he woke up at the slightest sound. But none of this stopped him from the kind of reckless enterprise that this movie represents.
This was one of Sam Fuller's first big hits. It's about a squad of infantrymen manning an isolated observation post during the Korean war. Fuller had been a Chicago newspaperman and he wrote and directed this effort as if rattling off a story under a deadline. Bing bang boom. The point is made and the story rolls along. Sometimes it rolls along even if the point fails to be made. I used to read equally cogent stories of the Korean war in comic books when I was a kid.
There are no bankable stars but most of the cast are believable. It's good to see Richard Loo, a Hawaiian-born Chinese, playing a Japanese again, only this time on our side. A North Korean prisoner gets to needle him about the relocation camps. James Edwards, an African-American, gets needled too, but he's as stalwart as ever.
It's an ensemble film but primus inter pares is the bearded, funky, cigar-chewing, ugly Gene Evans as the tough top sergeant who dislikes officers, conscientious objectors, charming young Korean boys, and -- let me see, who else exists? Evans is an actor whose appeal has always eluded me, although his home town, Holbrook, Arizona, was always a comfortable little outpost in the middle of the desert, until recently when it was engulfed by sprawling malls. The cultural center of the tiny place used to be the Dairy Queen, located where the through road, which no one of discernment would call "a highway", makes a dogleg.
Anyway -- where was I? -- anyway, Evans has one glorious moment on screen. In the midst of the final battle, with bullets whizzing and shells exploding, men being blown to bits, and everything wreathed in smoke, Fuller shows us Gene Evans hammering away at the enemy from behind a machine gun. Then -- with no warning whatever -- Fuller cuts to a close up of Evans' face as he stops firing. Evans' eyeballs widen and he seems for a moment transported. His face seems to glow by means of some inner mechanism. He stumbles to his feet and amid the carnage wanders around hallucinating -- "Did you hear the colonel?" What a scene! A huge and somehow ominous statue of the Buddha appears to play an important role in this movie but I don't know what it is. The one thing I'm sure of is that Fuller's experience as an combat infantryman in the First Division shaped the remainder of his life. He never forgot it or rather he never got over it, and he'd been no longer a kid. He was thirty-four. For years afterward he woke up at the slightest sound. But none of this stopped him from the kind of reckless enterprise that this movie represents.