America loves its wars. For most of its 250-year existence, America has been at war with someone. Sometimes we can frame it as justified, such as with World War II; sometimes we treat it as a national psychic wound, something done to us despite our being the primary aggressor (Vietnam, I'm talking about Vietnam.) And sometimes we just sweep it under the rug, not wanting to admit that we basically failed to achieve anything worthwhile and arguably just made the whole thing worse. While the Korean War might derisively be considered a sort of expansion pack to World War II, with its causes rooted in the unfinished business of the Asian theater, it was also the first real conflict of the Cold War, America versus the big-C Communist Bloc. Nobody wanted another world war so soon after the last one, especially not after the way the last one ended, so America indulged in its time-honored tradition of lying to itself and called its involvement a "police action." Three years of intense violence, all with complex political machinations behind the scenes, resulting in a stalemate that persists to this day — it's a legacy all too fitting for the moral hypocrisies of the Cold War.
It's perhaps this very moral hypocrisy that Gregory Peck and Lewis Milestone had in mind when they filmed Pork Chop Hill. Named after one of the last major battles of the war, the film depicts the struggle for a complex of outposts atop a hill vaguely shaped like a pork chop, a location of no strategic value but neither side were willing to cede it as armistice negotiations were ongoing. Echoes of the pointless carnage of World War I or the battle of Iwo Jima are a major theme of the film, as is the tradition of generals demanding the impossible for political purposes.
Pork Chop Hill is like many so-called anti-war films in that it seems unsure of its own message. On the one hand, the cruelties of war are not shied away from: the nightmare of storming a hill under cover of darkness, with bad intelligence, incompetent support only getting men killed, and the punishing lack of supplies and dwindling amount of men, with some units only having a handful of survivors. At one point, the men under the command of Peck's character, Lt. Clemons, meet up with survivors of another unit, thought lost. There is jubilation... and then many of them are killed by friendly artillery fire. It's breathtakingly nightmarish for a war film from the 1950s, a recounting of human cruelty approaching Masaki Kobayashi's gutwrenching World War II epic The Human Condition.
But therein lies the difference. Pork Chop Hill is the kind of anti-war film that makes the soldiers to be heroes of no real land, glorifying them while condemning their commanders and either glossing over the enemy* or trying to establish some kind of kinship with them as fellow soldiers helpless to the whims of fat generals sending orders from far away. The result is a film that at times feels like it's unsure of its message. Legendary French director François Truffaut once said that making a truly anti-war film is impossible, and while I don't agree with him in absolute terms, Pork Chop Hill is certainly an example of how an ostensibly anti-war film can nevertheless glorify it.
Pork Chop Hill was a passion project for Gregory Peck, and it shows. His personal production company, Melville Productions, produced the film. Lewis Milestone was attached to direct on Peck's personal request, as he was very enamored with Milestone's classic 1930 film All Quiet on the Western Front. Pork Chop Hill seems to be an attempt by Peck and Milestone to recapture the magic of All Quiet; I don't think they succeeded. Nevertheless, we're treated to some great acting from the likes of Peck, George Shibata as a Japanese-American lieutenant who works closely with Peck's character, and Woody Strode in a very incongruous role as a cowardly soldier who eventually willingly assists in the defense of the hill. While the film feels more a case of re-enactment than storytelling (common with war films of the era) it's nevertheless gripping in its more authentically human moments, such as the officers having to concoct a story saying the nearby hill from which friendly shelling had come from had recently been captured by the Chinese, lest morale collapse completely.
Ultimately, the film doesn't really have much of an ending, and that's probably the point. The fighting would continue on for weeks until the armistice was finally signed, but even with the signing of the armistice, the Korean War is technically not over. Korea was never able to unify in large part because of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, who blocked every motion to establish elections to unite the two sides because he was afraid the Communists would win the election, and so the two sides remain at war. It's been almost seventy-five years since the actual hot war ended and things are looking like they could heat up again sooner than you think. Which of course raises the question: what was even the point of fighting for Pork Chop Hill in the first place, especially since it was ultimately ceded to the Chinese in the end anyway? And maybe that's the driving theme of the film, at least when you dig past all the rah-rah jingoism and Pentagon funding: the senseless waste of lives for a worthless speck of dirt, thrown away just for political posturing.
And just like the film, just like the Korean War, it's a story that has no end.
-june❤
* Other reviews of this film ding it for not including either the North nor South Koreans; in the interests of fairness, while it's true that South Koreans, among others, were present at the battle, sustaining 15 dead and 120 wounded, no North Koreans participated — it was entirely a Chinese operation.
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