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The title is a commander's rousing order and a bit of proto-Heller brass doubletalk, all too fitting for the Korean muddle. (Withdrawing American forces aren't really withdrawing, "we're just attacking in a different direction"). The reservist (Richard Carlson) is a family man, his experience in the previous war lands him uneasily at the head of a new Marine unit bound for Inchon. His opposite number is the teenaged recruit (Russ Tamblyn), runt of the military litter, so eager for action that he bayonets the stuffing out of boot-camp dummies. "Leave something for us," yells the kid at bombardiers ahead of storming the shores, soon he's cowering amid gunfire. A veteran's reluctant leadership and a novice's dolorous education at Chosin Reservoir, an enlistment pamphlet signed by Joseph H. Lewis with an ambivalent streak beneath the jingoistic surface. "Can't play it safe here," a deserted street is an arena for the sniper in the window, a tank bursts out of the placid roadside hut. A lateral pan across grim helmeted visages comes to rest on the overexcited lad, the officer brother he hopes to impress can be hugged at last as a corpse in a pile of casualties. Newsreel views of combat, "28 more shooting days till Xmas" scribbled across a bazooka. Face to face with the Chinese ("What are they doing here?"), South Korean comrades saluted by the Dixie serviceman ("The North against the South. This time we're fighting on the right side"). On frostbitten feet for the retreat, whittled but unbowed through the hills and toward the coast. A brush with British Royal Marines sets up a coda recognizably from Reed's The Way Ahead. With Frank Lovejoy, Anita Louise, Nedrick Young, Lamont Johnson, Robert Ellis, Paul Smith, Peter Ortiz, and Dorothy Patrick. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |