Men in War

The camera rises from an overturned military truck to arch over the smoky landscape and arrive at a close-up of the communications officer whispering in vain, it might be Mizoguchi except that it's Anthony Mann in simultaneously his most visceral and most abstract film. No sickness in war, "you're either healthy or you're dead," the American platoon in Korea dwindles on the way to their destination. The lieutenant (Robert Ryan) is the exhausted leader, his other half is the sergeant (Aldo Ray) who operates on instinct. Authority is a colonel (Robert Keith) strapped to the seat of a jeep with his mind shattered, enemies are camouflaged forms handy with bullets and knives, casualties are names crossed out on a little book. "All I'm trying to do is keep one man alive... just one." No sets, as in The Naked Spur but more so, no interiors, only Mann's concentrated burrowing into the terrain to reflect the moment to moment dread and fatigue in a grunt's journey. The battered field must be crossed between bombings, explosives await under the leaves carpeting the woods. The young corporal (Vic Morrow) shivers from a fever, his pal (James Edwards) relaxes unwisely, the foot freed from its boot jerks and freezes to point up the off-screen stabbing. (His helmet returns, adorned with flowers.) A kinship with Fuller, an ineluctable violence. "God help us if it takes your kind to win this war." Rifle barrels sticking out of tall grass, grenades rolling down rocky slopes, caverns illuminated by flamethrowers. His mission completed, the lieutenant rests his head against the machine-gun and promptly falls asleep, the wind receives the medals of the dead the next morning. "Quick now, here, now, always / A condition of complete simplicity / Costing not less than everything." (Eliot) Peckinpah (Cross of Iron) takes detailed notes, so does Tarkovsky (Ivan's Childhood). Cinematography by Ernest Haller. With Phillip Pine, Nehemiah Persoff, L.Q. Jones, Scott Marlowe, Adam Kennedy, and Race Gentry. In black and white.