Pork Chop Hill
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Gregory Peck as Lt Joe Clemons with Woody Strode and Norman Fell in Pork Chop Hill (1959)
Last week was my wife and children’s spring break, and while they spent a few days in Charleston I caught up on a backlog of war movies. The one I most looked forward to was 1959’s Pork Chop Hill. The Korean War is underrepresented in the war film canon and, owing largely to my granddad’s service there in the Air Force, I’ve always been interested in what few films there are about the conflict. As it happens, this is one of the best.
Pork Chop Hill focuses on just a few US Army infantry companies and a few days in the spring of 1953. (By coincidence, the 70th anniversary of the action depicted in this film is this coming week.) As peace negotiations between UN forces and the Communist Chinese and North Koreans drag on elsewhere, American outposts on Pork Chop Hill are overrun and orders come down to Lt Joe Clemons (Gregory Peck) to retake the hill.
The hill is tall and steep and the barbed wire entanglements Clemons’s superiors said had been obliterated by artillery fire are still there when his men finally reach the top. Clemons’s company takes heavy casualties; the men start bleeding away in ones and twos well before they reach the trenches. Motivation and exhaustion pose further problems. Officers and NCOs have to urge their men forward and even to fire their weapons. But properly led—and with ample application of automatic fire and grenades—the GIs retake the trenches and bunkers at the top of the hill bit by bit.
Here Clemons’s depleted company consolidates its control of the hilltop and faces further dangers: friendly fire, Chinese holdouts, repeated communication failures, enemy artillery bombardment, lack of ammunition, lack of food and water, and lack of reinforcements. Even the arrival of another understrength company under Clemons’s brother-in-law, Lt Walter Russell (Rip Torn), proves temporary when Russell’s men are ordered back off the hilltop. Heavy Chinese counterattacks prove harder and harder to repulse and each one leaves Clemons with fewer men. By the end, Clemons and his handful of surviving infantry sit stranded atop the hill, waiting. If the Chinese drag out peace negotiations long enough to retake the hill and if Clemons is not reinforced, he and his men will be annihilated.
Pork Chop Hill is a masterfully crafted, no-frills, no-nonsense war film—a true classic of the genre. It tells a specific, narrowly focused story exceptionally well. This shouldn’t come as a surprise as the director, Lewis Milestone, made his name 29 years earlier with the original screen adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front. The film is finely staged and shot, balancing the confusion of combat with the coherence necessary to filmmaking in comprehensible but intense combat scenes.
The film also has good performances from an excellent cast. Pork Chop Hill is an amazing who’s-who for movie buffs. In addition to Peck and Torn in the leads (though Torn doesn’t appear until about two-thirds of the way into the film), Martin Landau, George Peppard, Norman Fell, Robert Blake, and Gavin MacLeod play small parts as officers, grunt infantry, and radio men, and the legendary Harry Dean Stanton appears in an uncredited early role. Real-life West Pointer George Shibata plays a Japanese-American officer and Woody Strode stands out as a fearful GI the officers suspect of malingering. Strode’s interaction with James Edwards, a fellow black infantryman who makes it his job to keep an eye on Strode, injects some understated personal and racial drama into the story.
Pork Chop Hill’s technical qualities and its cast are all excellent, but it’s the film’s atmosphere and attention to detail that sells it as a great war film. When Clemons’s company steps off, the march uphill is agonizingly long, and the attempts to breach the Chinese wire frustrating and lethal. The trench warfare is presented matter-of-factly, which only makes it more hair-raising. While there is plenty of rifle and machine gun fire to worry about, artillery and grenades are the real threats. Even throwing a single grenade into an enemy machine gun position can prove hazardous, with one soldier missing and being wounded when his own grenade bounces back and explodes nearby. Less frightening but much creepier is the wry taunting of Chinese political officers via loudspeaker, providing a kind of evil Greek chorus to Clemons’s attacks.
The film also dramatizes the immense difficulty of communication especially well. Clemons has two radio men and uses multiple runners but still can’t relay or receive messages effectively, a problem that only grows worse once he has seized the top of the hill. There is perhaps no better dramatization of Clausewitz’s dictum in On War: “Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult.”
In The Mask of Command, the late Sir John Keegan presents case studies in four styles of military leadership: the Heroic (Alexander), the Anti-Heroic (Wellington), the Unheroic (Grant), and the False Heroic (Hitler). One could usefully apply the same taxonomy to war movies. In its straightforward, unassuming presentation; its nuts-and-bolts attention to the work of combat; its stoic, uncomplaining reflection on danger and hardship; and its steadfast refusal to exaggerate either the glories or horrors of war, Pork Chop Hill is the Unheroic war film par excellence. I strongly recommend it.
The film is based on the book of the same name by the influential but controversial Brigadier General SLA Marshall, which he wrote based on after-action interviews with the men involved in the real attacks on Pork Chop Hill. I’m ashamed to say I’ve owned a copy since grad school but never read it. I intend to fix that this weekend.
