Cinema: The New Pictures, Jun. 8, 1959

Pork Chop Hill (Melville; United Artists). Silent over the battlefield hang the stars of a clear spring night. Suddenly a loudspeaker, shockingly close, blares among the forward positions: “WELCOME TO THE MEAT GRINDER!” The U.S. infantrymen, slogging up the lower slopes of Pork Chop Hill in central Korea, skip a heartbeat and a stride, and then move grimly forward—^into the meat grinder. And the audience moves with them into this heart-racking film translation of S.L.A. Marshall’s classic report on Pork Chop Hill (TIME, Nov. 19, 1956)—that inopportune Thermopylae where the American fighting man wrote in blood, at a moment when the world was sick of the sight of blood, a great, pathetic page in the history of courage.

The action at Pork Chop Hill began on April 16, 1953, when . two Chinese Communist companies swarmed over the small U.S. garrison. Militarily, the hill was of small importance; morally, it had immense significance. By taking it, the Communists posed two questions that were crucial to the course of the peace talks at Panmunjom: 1) Was the U.S. high command, with a war-weary public at its back, still willing to incur large casualties merely to hold a little ground? 2) Was the U.S. infantryman, his morale weakened by a Congress-coddling rotation policy that moved him out of the line before he had learned to do his job or love his unit, still able to meet the test of battle?

The counterattack starts, as a divisional reflex, before the first question can be answered by the Far East command. But even before King Company can reach the first Chinese defenses, the rusty U.S. chain of command has snapped. The assault group is caught in the full glare of an Allied searchlight battery that has confused Pork Chop with “some other hill,” and before the lights go out, a dozen or more Americans lie dead or wounded. Shocked and bewildered, the green troops nevertheless hold firm, then make a wild charge that carries the Communist outworks.

Higher up, they are caught in the open as the Chinese counterattack in waves, and when morning comes, Lieut. Joseph G. demons Jr. (Gregory Peck), in charge of King Company, subtracts about 60 casualties from his original force of 135 fighting men, and grimly thanks God that 62 men of Love Company will be coming up any minute. But when Love Company does arrive, some hours late, it brings only ten men; the rest are dead, wounded or missing.

Nevertheless, demons and his men push forward. Several hours later they swarm, exhausted but triumphant, into a bunker just below a fortified crest on Pork Chop Hill. A few seconds later, the U.N. barrage blasts the bunker to rubble. Morale collapses. Lieut, demons tonguelashes his men into the firing line, counts what is left of them (35 men), calls up his small reserve, charges the top of the hill and takes it.

There for the next four hours, too weak to raise their rifles, surrounded by several hundred Communist troops, 25 heroic U.S. infantrymen sit caked in blood and sweat and dust, and wait for help to come —wait unaware that all the while, back in the headquarters of the Far East command, a little group of earnest, greying generals are solemnly debating a question that may carry, for the unmilitary observer, some suggestion of the impersonal horror, the mindless irony of war. The question: “Do we really want to hold Pork Chop Hill?”

The film’s imagination of the battle is inevitably untrue to the event; the fighting scenes are almost too spectacularly realistic, and too often they transpire in the middle distance, surrounding the spectator but somehow never quite touching him. The moviegoer never really gets to know the fighting men, not even Hero Peck; but then on the other hand, the film does not sentimentalize or patronize its heroes.

Director Lewis Milestone (All Quiet on the Western Front), strongly seconded by Scriptwriter James R. Webb and Producer Sy Bartlett, seems determined to proclaim the dignity of the individual at the moment, in the heat of battle, when it seems to matter least. Like Lincoln at Gettysburg, Milestone declines to insult the dead with his approval. Like Analyst Marshall, he is satisfied to report simply and brutally: “The American character continues to meet the test of great events.”

Gideon of Scotland Yard (John Ford; Columbia), directed by John (The Informer, Mister Roberts) Ford, a Hollywood veteran who has made more than 100 movies, is based on a detective story (Gideon’s Day) by John Creasey, a 50-year-old Englishman who is one of the most prolific novelists alive.* Their combined skill has produced a fresh and frantic thriller that amusingly wraps up a day in the life of a London policeman.

The day begins for Chief Inspector Gideon (Jack Hawkins) when a “copper’s nark” (informer) turns over a nasty kettle of fish: a member of Gideon’s staff has taken hush money from a dope ring. Gideon rushes off to the office, rips the lettuce off his lapsed subordinate, sends out the alert for a sex murderer from Manchester. Then he looks in at the scene of a payroll robbery, gets word that the inspector he sacked has been killed by a passing car, discovers that the same car was used in the payroll job. Puzzled, he rushes off to testify about something or other at Old Bailey, but the case gets clearer when he checks out a lead on the late inspector’s lady friend. On her premises he gets a fluke chance to catch the main man with cash in hand. And so on until well after midnight, when the chief inspector arrives home at last —coat torn, temper frayed, and bloody well ready for a little appreciation. “George!” his wife hisses with disgust. “You’ve been drinking.”

* In his own name and under eleven pen names, Wordsmith Creasey has published 366 novels, many of them whodunits, which have sold more than 18 million copies in the last 29 years. Creasey often turns out a 60,000-word novel in six days, has written as many as 15 a year. Asked to give an explanation for the rate of production, he once modestly replied: “I can type with only two fingers.”