Runtime: 85 minutes
Directed by: Samuel Fuller
Starring: Gene Evans, Robert Hutton, Steve Brodie, James Edwards, Richard Loo
From: Lippert Pictures
Yet another DVR special; while the DVR recording (made off of TCM) was only two months old, Samuel Fuller is a director I should view more of, plus a low-budget war movie but one about the Korean War was different from the norm.
Gene Evans was Sgt. Zack, who escaped a massacre of POW’s due to his titular steel helmet. He meets a South Korean boy who helps him; Zach calls the boy… SHORT ROUND. I had no idea that name was used before. After meeting a Black medic on his own, they join an inexperienced infantry unit. What a crew they were comprised of: various white people (including one that is bald due to childhood scarlet fever), a Black man, a Korean boy, and a Japanese-American.
As a low-budget effort, Fuller (a veteran of combat himself) did not focus on the heroics and big battle scenes of war. Instead, the plot concerned the trauma of battle and the personal struggles of that motley bunch of soldiers. Both racism and what we now known as PTSD was presented, after all. The anti-war tale presented scenarios that had no easy answers, conflicts between the soldiers themselves where everyone is traumatized by the whole ordeal, and a Sgt. In Zack that has a crotchety exterior but that is to mask a troubled mind.
The cast is solid overall; this includes everyone from Gene Evans as Zack and Richard Loo as the Japanese-American soldier to Steve Brodie and as Short-Round, William Chun-who only had a brief career. Despite a budget barely over $100,000 and the usage of only a few locations (including Griffith Park in Los Angeles) Samuel Fuller was able to create a compelling treatise on the trauma of combat, filled w/ themes and beliefs that presumably would resonate w/ modern American soldiers today.
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