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I am always surprised by the fact that no one with the possible exception of James A. Mitchner and the crew that did "The Bridges at Toko-Ri" seem to have caught the feelings that I see conveyed here about the Korean War. Most of the movies from the 1950s and 1960s seem to have basically used the "rah-rah" spirit of WWII films, even though it doesn't seem to have been appropriate. Some were better than others -- "Pork Chop Hill" (1959) and "Men In War" (1957) are the best of the "ground" films I can think of off the top. Even "The Hunters" (1958) did a better job of the air war than some of the early ones.
(That was also the same problem with John Wayne's "The Green Berets", a movie which would have been a rouser in WWII but missed most peoples' views when it came out in 1968. We will ignore the technical problems with that film, like walking off into the sunset of Cam Rahn Bay -- which faces east...)
But to this day I find both the movie "MASH" and the TV show reprehensible for trying to pound Vietnam views and images into Korea, which seems to be far from the truth. The movie was episodic at best and lame at its worst, primarily as Robert Altman is a rather anti-American American director. The TV show wobbled as it tried to combine old-fashioned laugh-track Hollywood sitcom with diatribes from two of the most liberal Hollywood icons, Alan Alda and Mike Farrell. As such, I have seen the film and found it wanting, and ignored most of the TV episodes as tripe.
I'm not sure how one would portray Korea and "get it right." It's only been in the last few years that somebody -- Mel Gibson -- finally did justice to the American Army we took into Vietnam (not the one that came back) and played it straight ("We Were Soldiers"). That makes up for a lot of the largesse of Oliver Stone and his ilk. Ditto the Rangers in Somalia with "Black Hawk Down". Perhaps now someone -- politically correct or not -- will do a decent movie on the Chosin Reservoir or, if it has to appeal to modern sensitivities, the life of black Naval Aviator Jesse Brown.
You guys deserve a decent film.
Cookie Sewell
AMPS
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