Should trouble come

Ethiopian soldiers of the Imperial Army’s Kagnew Battalion in Korea, 1953

Watching the movie finally got me to read SLA Marshall’s Pork Chop Hill. Part II begins with a chapter on a patrol into a hazardous area of the front line known as the Alligator Jaws in the spring of 1953. The small patrol runs into a much larger Chinese force and fights them off from a ditch with a foot of water flowing through it.

But here’s a twist: this patrol is composed of Ethiopian troops sent to Korea by Emperor Haile Selassie. The troops acquit themselves well. One corporal’s arm is blown off at the shoulder by a Chinese grenade, and he calmly hands his weapon off to the man beside him and continues giving orders. This patrol’s performance is especially noteworthy since they are newly arrived in Korea and this is their first combat experience whatsoever.

Here’s how the action concludes as the Ethiopians withdraw to safety.

In that interval, [Lieutenant] Wongele Costa abandoned his position on the left side of the ditch. The casualties were carried to the position on the right flank. But in the darkness, he missed one man, not knowing that [Private Mano] Waldemarian was dead. So he called for lights again to assist the search. When the flare came on, he could see Waldemarian in the ditch. He sat there in a natural position, the rifle folded close in his arms. Wongele Costa crawled over to him, found that he was dead and so returned, carrying the body. Thereby he simply followed the tradition of his corps. Fiercely proud of the loyalty of their men, officers of the Imperial Guard are likely to say to a stranger, “Should trouble come, stay with me, I’ll be the last man to die.”

Chills.

Marshall goes on to note that among the Ethiopians, “in battle, it is the officer invariably who takes the extra risk to save one of his own.” He credits their success in withstanding Chinese attack to pre-patrol preparation, with the leaders carefully familiarizing themselves with their area of operations daily so that they knew their way even in the dark. And, in broken terrain, the Ethiopians would hold hands to avoid losing each other (by this point in the book Marshall has described American attacks falling apart this way at least ten times), a technique that “western troops would . . . scorn as beneath dignity.” The tradeoff, of course, is vulnerability to artillery and mortars, but on this patrol everything worked. Fitness for purpose.

The Ethiopian presence in Korea was a fascinating surprise to me, and I intend to learn more about it.

Pork Chop Hill

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.

Devotion and Glass Onion

Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell as Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner in Devotion, and Daniel Craig as Benoit Blanc in Glass Onion

My family’s Thanksgiving Break arrived just in time this year, giving both my wife and I some much-needed rest and our kids a lot of good time at home, all together. As an added bonus, the break started off well for me when my father-in-law took me to see a movie, and then my wife and I spent the evening of Black Friday on a date that included steaks and another movie. And what is more, both movies were good. After months of nothing interesting in cinemas, this has been a good couple of days.

The films are Devotion and Glass Onion. I intended to review Devotion the morning after seeing it, but just because I’m on break doesn’t mean I’m not busy. After seeing Glass Onion last night with my wife and wanting to review that, too, I decided to put together a joint review of both. I hope one or both of these will sound appealing to y’all, and that you’ll find something here to enjoy.

Devotion

Devotion, based on the book by Adam Makos, tells the true story of Ensign Jesse Brown and Lieutenant Tom Hudner, naval aviators who saw action in the Korean War. The movie transpires over the course of 1950, when Hudner was transferred to a naval air station in Rhode Island and met Brown, the first African-American naval aviator and therefore still a curiosity to outsiders despite being mostly accepted by his fellow pilots. When their commander assigns them as wingmen for fighter training, Hudner and Brown test each other in skill and daring, slaloming through the masts of sailboats and buzzing a house in the nearest town. It’s friendly and professional, but they’re also clearly feeling each other out.

The early tensions of the Cold War loom in the background, and after their squadron is issued powerful and dangerous new aircraft—the F4U Corsair—Brown and Hudner deploy to the Mediterranean and finally to Korea. Here, late in the year, after the Chinese intervene and stream across the Yalu River into North Korea, overrunning American and UN positions and surrounding and pinning down Marine units at the Chosin Reservoir, Brown and Hudner provide close air support, attacking ground targets, strafing Chinese units as they mass for attack, blowing up bridges. It’s facing MiGs and anti-aircraft fire in Korea that will most sorely test Brown and Hudner’s skills and friendship.

As played by Jonathan Majors and Glen Powell (also of Top Gun: Maverick, making this his second naval aviation role this year), Brown and Hudner are a study in contrasts. Brown is stolid, stoic, but with something simmering just below the surface; Hudner is gregarious and upbeat but by no means naïve. Brown is a married family man and a teetotaler; Hudner is single, on the prowl, and doesn’t mind throwing one back with the boys.

One could call this standard buddy movie material but Majors and Powell play it with great skill and subtlety, making Brown and Hudner feel like real men with real depth to them, and so what begins as a professional relationship with some low-key rivalry grows into a friendship that takes on great weight and meaning by the end. The more they get to know each other, the more each grows. Iron sharpeneth iron.

The acting is good across the board, especially Majors and Powell but also Christina Jackson as Brown’s wife Daisy, who takes the usually thankless role of the wife waiting for her husband back home and gives it serious heart. As strong as Brown and Hudner’s relationship becomes over the course of Devotion, it’s Hudner’s relationship with Daisy that gives the film is greatest emotional weight. Fittingly, they have a coda together.

The main draws for me were the aviation and the Korean War setting. Both are excellently done in Devotion. Korea doesn’t get much attention nowadays—it has really earned its nickname of “The Forgotten War”—and I’m glad to see a good film that provides a small but clear window into the topic. The film stresses both the continuities of this conflict with World War II (having fought in that war gives an aviator an authority that even rank doesn’t) and change (the integration of the armed forces, most obviously, as well as a change in opponents). The handful of battle scenes showing the ground conflict are well-executed—a nighttime attack in which more and more and more Chinese troops appear in the flickering, wavering light of flares was even scary.

The aviation also proved excellent. I’ve learned since watching Devotion that director JD Dillard insisted on practical effects, real aircraft, and real flying wherever possible, and the film has a strong sense of verisimilitude and authenticity as a result. The filmmakers’ painstaking attention to detail makes everything feel real. Devotion’s flying sequences may not have quite the palpable sensory thrill of Top Gun: Maverick, but they’re close, and for the same reasons. The combination of practical effects and real planes with Erik Messerschmidt’s rich, moody, classically styled cinematography also means that Devotion looks great, far better than a comparable film like Midway.

Furthermore, the aviators in this film act and talk like real pilots, worrying over things like weather, visibility, maintenance, windspeed and direction, the approach when landing on an aircraft carrier, and more. Brown, for example, excels in his F8F Bearcat but worries about the overwhelming torque and limited cockpit visibility in the Corsair. This is not just about verisimilitude, but sets up important events later in the movie. It’s just good, solid filmmaking.

I have not yet read Makos’s book and can’t vouch for the truthfulness or accuracy of every detail of Devotion’s story. Certainly some aspects of the film feel like stock Hollywood elements, especially a racist Marine who keeps reappearing and challenging Brown. But the rest strikes me as true to the source material. I especially liked that a crucial moment in the plot is motivated by the respect Brown and a white aviator have for each other because they’re both Southerners. The respect afforded all the characters in all their particularity gives the film a complexity that makes not only the action but the situation feel real.

Devotion’s refusal to make sweeping statements, avoiding political grandstanding or simplistic caricature in favor of closely examining the friendship between two wingmen, makes it a more subtle, nuanced, mature examination of racial division and healing—not to mention comradeship, courage, professionalism, and love—than I’ve seen anywhere in a long time. But more than that, it’s a well-crafted and moving telling of an important true story, and that alone makes it worth seeing.

Glass Onion

Following up my review of Devotion with a review of Glass Onion means going from the sublime to the ridiculous. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Glass Onion opens (in May 2020, the last halcyon days of the pandemic before society started eating itself) with a series of oddballs receiving an elaborate puzzle box. Communicating with each other by phone, they work their way through the puzzles to receive a signed invitation to a private island getaway from an old acquaintance, tech billionaire Miles Bron (Ed Norton). They convene in Greece for the boat ride to the Glass Onion, Miles’s elaborate, showoffy mansion where he keeps a Porsche on display on the roof (since there are no roads on the island) and has rented the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. The guests are Claire (Kathryn Hahn), an annoying liberal politician from New England; Birdie (Kate Hudson), an annoying fashionista with a talent for saying stupidly offensive things and is being kept from her phone by her assistant (Jessica Henwick); Duke (Dave Bautista), an annoying manosphere Twitch streamer who arrives with his girlfriend, Whiskey (Madelyn Cline); and Lionel (Leslie Odom Jr), who is just a scientist.

But two unexpected guests arrive as well. One is Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), who has no connection with Miles but has dark forebodings about unexplained invitations to gatherings like this. The other is Andi (Janelle Monáe), a cofounder of Miles’s tech company who was elbowed out of her leadership role, her fortune, and more. She was invited, but it was clearly pro forma. No one expected her to come, and they are disturbed that she has. Blanc notes, observes, hypothesizes.

Blanc is also greatly bothered. Miles has planned this get-together as a murder mystery roleplaying game. Why would he suggest the idea of himself, murdered, to a house full of people who wouldn’t mind doing exactly that?

I can’t write much more without giving anything away, and I certainly don’t want to do that. But a clue as to what to expect from Glass Onion arrives early, delivered by Yo-Yo Ma, of all people, at a bizarre Covid party held at Birdie’s penthouse apartment. When a music box in Miles’s puzzle begins playing a classical tune, Yo-Yo Ma explains that the tune is Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor, a fugue being a seemingly simple tune that, when played back and layered over itself, changes, revealing extraordinary complexity and unexpected surprises. The central metaphor of a glass onion, which is both layered and clear at the same time, also suggests a great deal about the way the film works.

And that is one of the joys of Glass Onion—the complexity, the careful construction, the doubling back and revelation. It had a lot of genuine surprises and was brilliantly crafted. I’d even rate its plotting as better than Knives Out. The other joy is the humor. Glass Onion is hilarious from beginning to end, with a lot of well-earned laughs deriving from character and well-executed setups and punchlines, not just references and allusions as in a lot of other comedy these days. There’s also plenty of pure silliness, but the fact that a lot of the jokes also work as plot points or signposts for the viewer points back to the quality of the film’s construction.

The cinematography is good, the costumes and sets are great, and the performances—cartoonish as the characters are—are good. Craig is especially good as Blanc. In the first half of the movie I wondered why Blanc, who was mostly cool and collected in Knives Out, was so befuddled and buffoonish in this one. But in the second half… And Janelle Monáe, whose natural sanctimony I usually find off-putting, was truly brilliant in a role that turns out to be a bit of a fugue or glass onion itself.

I did have a few misgivings about Glass Onion. The setup and middle act were brilliant, but the film missteps tonally in the end. Some of the climactic action is bothersomely childish. Again, I can’t elaborate without giving too much away. And while the characters were all wildly entertaining and well-performed, they were still broad caricatures whose foibles and flaws felt like familiar types and some of the jokes at their expense were low-hanging fruit. Dave Bautista’s manosphere influencer, for instance, rants about masculinity and is obsessed with guns but lives at home with his mom. Got it. One suspects Rian Johnson spends way too much time online. Fortunately, almost all of the characaters reveal more about themselves as the film goes on, doubling back, layering.

But these are minor problems. Knives Out, the first Benoit Blanc mystery, was one of my favorite movies of the year when it came out in 2019. I wrote that it “was the most fun I’ve had at the movies this year.” That’s probably also true of Glass Onion.

Conclusion

I’m glad to say that after a long cinematic dry spell this year, I’ve gotten to see two good films in just a matter of days. Devotion and Glass Onion are solid, well-constructed movies and well worth seeing in theatres. Glass Onion in particular is a Netflix film and as far as I know will only be in theatres for a week. I hope y’all will check it and Devotion out.

Happy Thanksgiving!