Men in War

I return to my Robert Ryan film festival with 1957's Men in War, a Korean War film as spare and unsentimental as its title. It was directed by Anthony Mann, a director celebrated by cineastes (but not much remembered by the general public) for making a series of Westerns in the 1950s. Though this is a war film, it has the feel of a Western, with a group of hardened men facing a hidden enemy in a harsh environment.

Ryan stars as the battle-weary Lieutenant Benson, who has a platoon of men who are surrounded by the enemy. He needs to get them to a hill he thinks belongs to the good guys, 16 miles away, but he has no vehicle. Then a jeep shows up, driven by a obstreperous sergeant (Aldo Ray) and a shell-shocked colonel (Robert Keith). Ryan commandeers the jeep, but makes use of Ray, who has an uncanny knack for sniffing out enemy combatants.

The rest of the movie consists of the men working their way to their destination. They are shelled, and then have to navigate their way through a mine-strewn road. In the grand tradition of war films, they are a diverse bunch (there's even a black soldier, kind of daring for 1957), and slowly get picked off one by one. Ryan and Ray continue to squabble, and Ryan tell him, "God help us if it takes men like you to win this war."

Eventually the film climaxes with the remaining men trying to storm the hill, which is directed crisply. I won't say who makes it, but despite the patriotic ending, the fade-out seemed to indicate a a disgusted attitude with war in general.

There's some familiar faces in the cast, including a very young Vic Morrow as a nervous soldier. The terrific but not overbearing score (there are plenty of effective moments of silence) is by Elmer Bernstein.