DVR Diary: PORK CHOP HILL (1959)

Lewis Milestone's last work as a director was an episode of the TV show Arrest and Trial in 1964. He missed by just a short time a historic opportunity to apply his cinematic acumen to a fourth American war. Until then, every generation had its Milestone war film. The Great War generation got the first and best one, 1930's All Quiet on the Western Front, which arguably has not yet been topped as a movie portrayal of its subject. The "Greatest" generation got several World War II pictures, the best regarded of which is 1945's A Walk in the Sun. Filmed while the war was still on, Walk was inevitably a different kind of picture than All Quiet, though admirers credit it for a relative absence of propaganda and cliche -- much of which can be found in 1943's The North Star and 1944's The Purple Heart. Milestone continued to concern himself with WWII well into the Fifties, directing the decent Halls of Montezuma and a British commando movie, They Who Dare, that I haven't seen. Not until producer/star Gregory Peck recruited him for a dramatization of S.L.A. Marshall's account of the final battle for Pork Chop Hill in 1953 did Milestone turn his attention to the Korean conflict. The "police action" was a war Americans viewed with more ambivalence than the last one, and that gave Peck and Milestone leeway to make a grimmer, edgier picture while boasting of their fidelity to fact.

Peck played a real soldier, Joe Clemons, who led troops in the battle and survived to have a hand in the production. Clemons played talent scout in one noteworthy case, recruiting a fellow West Pointer and Korea veteran to play his real-life Japanese-American executive officer. Here, from a Garland UT newspaper, is the story of how George Shibata broke into the movies.

Shibata didn't get that Wagon Train part, as far as IMDB knows, but he did find work in movies and TV for another decade. I should have figured he had an inside track, since I assume James Shigeta otherwise had first crack at all Japanese-American roles in this period. Shibata brings credibility to a creditable performance that requires little in the way of histrionics and benefits from their absence.  Pork Chop Hill marks the movie debut not only of Shibata but of Martin Landau, who had been busy in TV previously and has only one prominent scene here. Shibata makes a better impression and better represents a certain inclusiveness, justified by facts, on the part of Clemons, Peck and Milestone. Korea was the first modern American war in which whites and blacks routinely fought side by side, and the producers make black actors conspicuous by their presence in comparison to most previous war movies. They actually take something of a chance by having the one malcontent in the cast be a black soldier played by Woody Strode. The part's a bit of a stretch for Strode, who has to play an angry malingerer grown sick and tired of a seemingly pointless fight. Peck as Clemons threatens Strode's "Franklin" (an intro notes that nearly all the soldiers' real names were used) with a court-martial and ten years in prison to keep him moving up the hill. Franklin finally snaps, luring Clemons into a trap where he can frag the officer and claim that he shot the man by mistake should Clemons fail to give the proper countersign. Rather than shoot Clemons, however, Franklin is more interested in making a speech -- one of the film's few false notes -- explaining his disinterest in Korea and his unwillingness to fight for anyone eles's cause. Clemons talks him down all too easily, but merely staging the scene was, as I said, taking a chance in this era. The film takes steps to pre-empt any conclusions that might be drawn from Strode's race by casting another black actor as a soldier of unquestioned loyalty and some eagerness to take Franklin down a few pegs. The Korean War was seen in retrospect as a laboratory in race relations, as illustrated not only by this film but by 1960's All the Young Men, in which Sidney Poitier must take command of a unit in the face of white distrust. I'll have to watch that sometime for comparison's sake.

In the starring role, Peck projects the same sort of harried professionalism that Shibata does. His frustration builds, without ever compromising his competence, as reinforcements, supplies, fresh weapons, etc. prove slow in coming, even as the military portrays him as the triumphant conqueror of the worthless hill. A professional tone prevails among the cast as a whole, with few of the actors getting real showcase moments except for Strode and Robert Blake as a somewhat dumbly heroic runner. The film's really about the situation rather than the personalities. Milestone can sink his teeth into the lethal pointlessness of the battle, as both Americans and Chinese acknowledge that Pork Chop has no strategic significance. Nevertheless, the battle has to be fought in order to prove a point to the Reds (the Chinese, one officer helpfully explains, are "not only Orientals, but Communists") who themselves want to prove a point to the Americans. The Chicoms are willing to spend blood and treasure to take the stupid hill just to show that they're willing. The Americans have to prove that they're no less willing, but it all reduces the actual soldiers, as they well realize, to chips on a bargaining or gambling table. Milestone occasionally cuts to the negotiations at Panmunjon in a way that seems designed to get you to root for a settlement before more soldiers die and to blame the Commies when negotiations stall. You also get chances to hiss the Reds when Milestone shows us a Chinese propaganda broadcaster exhorting the Yanks to surrender and tormenting them with Muzak renditions of "Autumn in New York" during lulls in the action.

As for the fighting, that's why Milestone is directing, and his old tricks still work. He stages some impressive nighttime hill climbing, and he never can go wrong with those lateral tracking shots of advancing troops he perfected in All Quiet. If Pork Chop's battle scenes don't have the visceral fury and terror of All Quiet's, the fact that Milestone doesn't speed up the action to synch it with machine-gun fire, as in the 1930 film, may have something to do with that. Pork Chop Hill is still an above-average battle picture, though the nearest it comes to All Quiet's intensity comes not on a proper battlefield but when the last 25 survivors of Clemons's unit barricade themselves in a shed, piling sandbags against the walls, doors and windows, as the Chinese hit the place with flamethrowers. It's a hell-raising climax and once it's resolved the film closes on a note of exhausted relief rather than victory, despite Peck's narrative boast that "millions of people live in freedom today because of what we did." The film itself belies that claim, and Milestone (despite alleged editorial tampering by Peck) found the right tone and note to close on. At his best, he has to be considered one of the better war-film directors ever, and he's near his best, probably for the last time, in Pork Chop Hill.

Gregory Peck was pretty impressed by his handiwork, as he explains in this trailer, uploaded by ClassicWarMovies1.

ARABESQUE (1966)

Stanley Donen's would-be comedy thriller is the sort of picture that normally tempts me to make a lot of screencaps. This time, however, I felt that I'd somehow be sending a wrong message. For a while, I was very impressed with the compositions of Donen and cinematographer Christopher Challis, but the self-conscious brilliance of it all began to get annoying after that while. The images call attention to themselves too blatantly and the constant recourse to catching the actors' reflections in a variety of surfaces eventually seemed pointlessly pretentious, especially as it sunk in that I was paying too much attention to the cinematography precisely because the story was an empty thing. It wants to be a suspenseful lark in the manner of Donen's Charade, and much of the ballyhoo for this picture identified Donen as the maker of that popular film. Three years separate the two pictures, but by 1966 a camp sensibility was sweeping the land, and you see it all over Arabesque. You hear it, too, in Henry Mancini's generic score. There's a more blatant artificiality to its contrivances, accentuated by all the fake Arabs in the cast. There's also arguably something campy about casting a relative stiff like Gregory Peck in a Cary Grant type role as an archaeology professor caught up in the factional struggles of an unnamed Arab nation. Peck is simply incapable of the Grant-like goofiness the film requires of him. Given the character's line of work, Harrison Ford may have been the happy medium had the role been available twenty years later: Indiana Jones and the Hittite Microdot.

But lest we single out Peck for abuse, let's add that Sophia Loren doesn't exactly achieve comic genius here. Since we're supposed to spend most of the film questioning her affiliations, it's hard to know whether to root for or against her, to laugh at her antics or merely be baffled by them. Sadly, on this occasion it simply isn't enough to just look at her. Her chemistry with Peck is inert, though that's probably Peck's fault. It's probably no accident that his most beloved role is a widower. I don't mean to dismiss the man as an actor; his Ahab in John Huston's Moby Dick has been unfairly underrated for a long time. He's just not the man for a lark like this one, though there was most likely no man for this particular lark. Instead of a second-rate Charade it ends up as fourth-rate Hitchcock. Donen doesn't have the acting talent to menace his heroes that he had in the earlier film. Then he had Walter Matthau, James Coburn and George Kennedy. Here he has a gang of fake Arabs, the most egregious being Kieron Moore as a hipster rebel. Their cumulative lack of threat quickly turns Arabesque into a cinematography appreciation session, though, as I said, after a while even the appreciation stops. I'm glad to champion style over substance when the style is deserving, but here the imbalance between overplanned images and insubstantial story is itself ungraceful. As an unfunny comedy it enters the realm of the truly bad. It's unfortunate, because it's the sort of film I'd like to like. The one thing I do like about it, I suppose, is its innocently condescending portrait of Arab politicians in business suits whose intrigues against each other have nothing to do with religious fanaticism, from back in the day when "Islamism" would have been a meaningless word and someone like Sophia Loren could embody a race's vivacious, thoroughly secular modernity. That part only seems like a fantasy in retrospect.

Anyway, the theatrical trailer has a lot of the imagery I would have screencapped. IAmOnlyLove copied it from TCM, and I copy it in turn here.

THE BRAVADOS (1958)

Along with James Stewart and Anthony Mann, director Henry King and star Gregory Peck set the darker, more mature tone for 1950s westerns with The Gunfighter (1950). According to legend, the film failed at the box office, and 20th Century-Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck blamed the failure on Peck's insistence on wearing a moustache. Peck made no such error when he and King teamed up again eight years later for this widescreen revenge story. By 1958 the concept of the "adult western" was widely enough understood that Fox could promote The Bravados as such a film. For the studio's purposes, however, the term probably didn't denote the moral ambiguities and "psychological" tone the genre had developed so much as the fact that King's movie dealt with rape.

Peck first appears as a stranger riding towards a town where he's heard there'll be a hanging. A deputy is under instructions to allow no one into town but Mr. Sims, the hangman, but he decides to escort a disarmed Peck in so the sheriff can question him. That official finds Peck's interest in the hanging a bit ghoulish, -- he claims not to know the four condemned men -- but agrees to let him stay. In these early scenes Peck is almost menacingly taciturn and icily indifferent to what others think of him.

Beer is fine for socializing before a hanging, but both Gregory Peck and Joan Collins may want stronger stuff later in the picture.

Most people in town mistake Peck for the hangman and open up about the crimes for which the foursome will die; they robbed a bank and killed men doing it. One person knows him, however; Josefa Velarde (Joan Collins), a rancher's daughter who hasn't seen the man she knows as Jim Douglass in some time. For now, Douglass is more interested in meeting the four doomed criminals, the "bravados." The sheriff allows him to take a look, a privilege he'll only grant otherwise to the chubby, avuncular Sims, who's finally arrived in town. Peck gives the quartet a good looking over, but none of them seem to recognize him, and after he leaves, they wonder among themselves who he is and what he's about.

Ladies and gentlemen, The Bravados: Stephen Boyd and Albert Salmi on top, Lee Van Cleef and Henry Silva below.

But the bravados have more important business: breaking out. The profoundly unthreatening hangman is not Mr. Sims but their man ("Curly Joe" DeRita!), waiting for the right moment to stab the sheriff in the back. It comes while Douglass, Josefa and most of the town are attending Mass. In this sequence old-timer Henry King beats Francis Ford Coppola to the punch by 14 years in crosscutting between a religious service, complete with eerie sacred music, and sinister doings elsewhere. He also milks maximum suspense out of the bravados' desperate effort to reach the jail key that fell out of the sheriff's pocket. "Sims" was supposed to use it to unlock their cell, but the sheriff managed to shoot him down before succumbing. The four men reach for it with their arms, legs, a ladle and a blanket, missing several times.

They're still struggling for it when we cut back to the church and the early departure of a shopkeeper's daughter (Kathleen Gallant). She goes to Dad's store, only to get jumped by the head bravado (Stephen Boyd), the gang having made good on their breakout offscreen. Now they have a hostage and human shield, as well as a head start on any pursuers. A posse forms quickly, but Douglass won't join them until morning, assuming that they'll have little chance of gaining ground on the gang at night.

By the time he catches up with the posse they've been pinned down by sniper fire by Bravado No. 2 (Albert Salmi), who departs amid their confusion to rejoin his pals. The gang quickly makes out that they man they know only as "the hunter," the stranger who visited them in jail, is their main pursuer. Boyd delegates the weakest link of the foursome (Lee Van Cleef) to ambush the hunter. Being the weakest link, he is himself ambushed by the stealthy Douglass. He's less interested in finding the other three bravados than in showing Van Cleef a pocket watch. It has a photo of a woman and child inside. It doesn't play a tune, but the scene, including Van Cleef's presence, has to have influenced Sergio Leone a little in the making of For a Few Dollars More. In any event, Douglass wants to know if Van Cleef recognizes the woman. He doesn't, he says, but Douglass won't believe him. It becomes clear that Douglass believes that the bravados raped and murdered this woman -- his wife. That's why he wanted to see them die, and why he's out to make them die now....

Peck's Jim Douglass is the archetypal obsessive antihero of Fifties westerns. His motives are selfish and self-righteous at the same time, and the interest of society in seeing the bravados captured and punished are a secondary consideration at best. Douglass has been letting his grievance stew for an unhealthy period of time. That comes out during his interrogation of Van Cleef, as he regales the terrified man with his imagined version of his wife's pleas for mercy. It's like a man picking at a scab in order to see his own blood and feel familiar pain, and it has gruesome consequences for the men he catches. A lot is left of necessity to our imagination, probably due to Production Code requirements, but we seem to be meant to assume that Douglass tortures two of the bravados to death during his quest. I'm going to spoil the ending in the next paragraph, so some of you may want to skip it.

Fifties audiences may have decided that Stephen Boyd's character deserved death for raping women, but is his death just as deserved if he dies for the wrong reasons?...

In a lot of the Fifties Westerns the antihero relearns civilized values in time to back off from committing any real atrocity. The Bravados is one of the exceptional films that doesn't grant its protagonist that luxury, since he doesn't realize the error of his actions until after he's already done them. Douglass has reduced the foursome to a lone survivor (Henry Silva, portrayed as the brains if not the leader of the group) whom he tracks across the Mexican border. He follows Silva to his home, where his wife is tending a sick child. Douglass invades the home to ambush Silva, only to get KO'd with a ceramic pot by Mrs. Bravado. When he wakes, Silva wants to know what it's all been about. Douglass brings out the watch again and, like all the others, Silva denies knowing the woman. Before crossing the border, Silva and Boyd had killed an old miner who lived near Douglass's ranch, and Silva had pocketed a sack of gold the miner had tried to run off with. Douglass now recognizes the sack as his property, lost the day his wife died. As Silva explains how he got it (which we know to be the truth), and as Douglass explains that the miner had tipped him off in the first place to the four men who had passed through the territory that day, Douglass realizes at last that the miner had fingered the bravados in order to throw the trail off himself. The miner had murdered Mrs. Douglass and taken her gold. The realization devastates Douglass, as well it might. We've seen plainly that the bravados are not nice guys. Boyd, in particular, is a rapist, and when Josefa learns of his latest rape she hysterically urges Douglass to wipe out the gang. But if you go after men, and kill some of them, for something they didn't do rather than what they have done, you may as well have killed innocent men. That's the message of this screenplay by the ubiqitous Philip Yordan, at least, and the most it can offer Douglass at the end is the consolation of the Church and the promise of Josefa's healing love.


King gives The Bravados all the sweep you'd want in a widescreen western. The film looks like it was shot entirely on locations, and that seems to have compelled King to do a lot of day-for-night shooting. It almost works when the old hand uses filters to recreate the tinting effects he'd have used in silent days, but the effect is ruined whenever the camera catches bright white clouds in the sky. Peck gives a strong performance, minimalist at first to keep us wondering about Douglass, then more intense as his catharsis is repeatedly denied. The bravados are a fine ensemble and work well together. Especially good is a scene between Boyd and Salmi in which they commit to stick together after they lose the posse. Boyd explains that his one weakness is women, and Salmi admits that his is cards. We finally realize that this has been an elaborate exercise in outlaw etiquette enabling Salmi to gracefully leave Boyd alone with their female hostage. It's a classical male-bonding scene with a chilling effect at the end. While King can't invest the film with all the outdoor expressionism of Anthony Mann or the lean rigor of Budd Boetticher, The Bravados shares much of the mood of their movies and deserves inclusion among the better westerns from the decade when Americans did them best.