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The exploding jeep at the outset and the regiment's retreat to "Back Home Again in Indiana" lend the contrasting timbres, between them is the wounded general's decision of which platoon stays behind ("48 men giving 15,000 men a break"). Rearguard duty behind enemy lines, a breathtaking summation by Sam Fuller in a painted studio set: A hail of gunfire takes out the commanding lieutenant (Craig Hill), revenge swiftly bounces down one icy slope and climbs up another with the camera keeping apace, an unbroken shot ending with a raging close-up of Gene Evans' Sgt. Rock. Grousing grunts in white parkas, bunched in a cave after an explosion punches a hole on the side of the mountain, rubbing toes to dodge frostbite. "Now as a student of atavism..." Leadership is the great fear of the sensitive corporal (Richard Basehart), such that he'll venture into a mine field to rescue the fallen superior (Michael O'Shea) in a crystalline interplay of faces, boots, and crunched snow. The Steel Helmet reworked in a hundred jagged lines of action, a field of battered bodies and thoughts. The danger of telepathy, the value of dry socks, the "psychological warfare" of Commie bugles. (One soldier hears the incessant beat and improvises lyrics, "My home's in Ok-la-ho-ma, my feet are in Ko-re-a.") "Ain't no burp gun fast enough to cut down an old doggy like me," snaps Evans not long before a sniper's ricocheting bullet spells out his doom, he accepts it in a signature Fuller haiku. "Well, I ain't hanging around here to be chopped into Chinese rice balls and washed down with that Russian tea!" Tom Lea for the close, waist-deep in the Ch'ongch'on illuminated by a flickering overhead flare. Cinematography by Lucien Ballard. With Richard Hylton, Skip Homeier, Neyle Morrow, Henry Kulky, Wyott Ordung, John Doucette, George Conrad, and Stuart Randall. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |