The Korean War in Cinema

[Marc James Small <msmall@roanoke.infi.net>]

At 12:01 PM 4/30/2001 -0400, Gernilee Carter Gramling wrote:
>
>    Well, there sure is a glaring absence of movies about the Korean War  
>Police Action(sic). War movies all over the place all the time - but none on 
>the Korean War.    Jeez, if Washington could influence Hollywood to not make 
>films about the Korean War, why can't they get them to stop making the sick 
>stuff they make now?  It must be an indicator of how much interest they 
>really take, and they must have had a lot of interest in keeping the public 
>in the dark about the Korean War.

It wasn't so much an interest in keeping folks in the dark:  it was simply
that the Defense Department had been told that our primary strategic
interest was in Europe and that was were our military IO's concentrated.
In light of the McCarthy Hearings and the public's fixation on Commuist
influence in Hollywood, the American film industry was quite responsive to
government pressure -- and it would have been hard to make a film such as
BATTLE HYMN without USAF support!  Note that the Korean War years do see a
number of war and military films made but that these are on non-Korean
topics.  I'd have to check the IMDB for exact years of release, but I
believe Hollywood was grinding out non-Korean flicks such as STRATEGIC AIR
COMMAND and the like while the Korean War was in progress.

Marc

msmall@roanoke.infi.net  FAX:  +540/343-7315
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