The Korean War is the altercation I, like most Americans, know least about, except that the US once again sent in troops, and it was against godless Communists rather than Allah-driven terrorists. Did we win or lose? Or was it an absurdist stalemate? We’ll all have a chance to learn more from the Harvard Film Archive’s remarkable series “From Both Sides: The Korean War on Film,” which is co-sponsored by Harvard’s Korean Institute. Vintage Hollywood films and American propaganda shorts are counterposed with several recent South Korean features that look back on the war a half-century afterward from a distinctly non-American vantage.
Things starts up with that paranoidal pearl The Manchurian Candidate (1962; March 6, 9 pm), a Kennedy-era gumbo of anti-McCarthyist liberalism (the Enemies Within are a slimy arch-conservative senator and his ruthless, Lady Macbeth–like spouse) and staunch liberal anti-Communism fueled by American fear of Fidel Castro. Flash back to a POW camp in North Korea where American soldiers are held captive by comic-book Yellow Peril Commie villains. How offensive you find their portrait will depend on whether you see it all as knowingly tongue-in-cheek. I do.
Sam Fuller’s Steel Helmet (1951; March 7, 9 pm) is a gritty, tabloid, Korean War–set “B” melodrama based, Fuller said, on his World War II experiences. It was controversial in its time because Fuller dared to show an American soldier shooting an unarmed Korean POW. Fuller was called from California to the Pentagon to explain himself. That he did by putting on the phone a WW2 general: yes, we did shoot prisoners of war. End of story.
War Hunt (1962; March 8, 9 pm) is new to me. In his first flick, Robert Redford finds his forever heroic persona: an idealistic private in Korea appalled by a fellow soldier (John Saxon) who crosses the border and brutally offs North Korean soldiers. According to the HFA description, “Their relationship is further challenged by their respective friendships with a Korean orphan.” Neither have I seen The Brotherhood of War (2004; March 10, 7 pm), a Korean-made feature about two brothers in the early 1950s drafted to fight for the South. The HFA says it’s “epic and extremely violent.”
How many notice that Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970; March 14, 9 pm) was set in Korea during the war? Nobody making this smug movie bothered with Asian or ’50s-period verisimilitude. This film is about LA, with its golf courses and its football field, and not one Korean soldier ever in sight. People say that M*A*S*H is not really about Korea, it’s about Vietnam. If so, Vietnam was a frat-party saga of voyeurism, womanizing, sexism, and martinis. If you were a randy guy in 1970 about to be drafted, what’s not to like about heading for Saigon?
