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KOREAN WAR
OPPORTUNITY
LEGENDARY FILM MAKER JOHN FORD MADE
A STIRRING DOCUMENTARY
By Steve Bergson, UK Researcher &
Writer
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The Second World War was only five
years gone when the Korean conflict
caught fire. Because it is seen in
Cold War terms as an ideological battle
with communism, and Western powers
had been busy demilitarising when
North Korea invaded the south, it
was a very different kind of war.
Not one that caught the public imagination.
Feature film output about the war
showed there was an ambivalent patriotism
with titles such as The Bridges at
Toko-Ri (1954) and one remarkable
film, made in 1951, by legendary filmmaker
John Ford, that brings feature film
production values to the coverage
of the battlefield. A documentary
shot in colour that has all the sincerity
of purpose and devastating effect
of the opening sequence of Saving
Private Ryan, only for real.
 Ford
by now had the title Rear Admiral
and, although an illustrious Hollywood
director of films such as Stagecoach
and My Darling Clementine, he was
called upon to document his country's
military endeavours. Stern patriot
that he was, he ended up filming something
not in the US Defense Department's
script.
The colour of Ford's film gives the
images of a war that had turned into
something the US no longer wished
to celebrate, an immediacy that combat
footage didn't have again until the
later years of the Vietnam War. It
chronicles the retreat from the north
that the Western troops were forced
to make when the Chinese became involved,
threatening to turn the Cold War hot.
In 1952, Hollywood made a routine
film about this called Retreat, Hell!
with Frank Lovejoy. In dramatizing
the fighting withdrawal by US marines
from the Chosin Reservoir, it includes
scenes of actual napalm strikes on
snowy hillsides. Those strikes were
real, printed in monochrome from This
Is Korea!. Here they're not only in
colour but they include the scenes
Hollywood omitted, like the Marine
corpses being dragged through the
snow. Retreat, Hell! takes its title
from the famous quotation by marine
General, O.P. Smith. He appears in
Ford's film for real.
The combat footage is startlingly
vivid. When a bomb explodes nearby,
the camera shakes. You feel the cold
of the Korean POWs and marines as
they trudge through the Korean mountains.
The narration is sparse but asks the
viewer to "Remember Valley Forge"
and when it wonders aloud, "What's
it all about?" there isn't an
appropriate flag-waving answer.
Doesn't Feature Big
Although there are complete copies
of the film available, This is Korea!
is a rare title that doesn't feature
big in the Ford filmographies. The
uncut rushes reels are held in the
Navy collection at the US National
Archives at the University of Maryland
near Washington DC. William Murphy,
President of AVArchives, a consulting
organisation for audiovisual archives
and libraries and for television documentary
producers, knows the material. He
comments: "no great documentaries
have emerged out of the war like John
Huston's The Battle of San Pietro."
Opinions vary about the range of
coverage that exists of the Korean
War. Murphy doesn't think it was as
well covered as the Second World War
but Elena Brodie-Kusa, from the ABC
News team that researched the Emmy-nominated
series, The Century, thinks it's a
matter of where the camera was pointing.
"The Korean War was well chronicled,
certainly in line with WWII but neither
were covered with the honest, on the
ground coverage that occurred during
Vietnam. Vietnam reports focused more
on the brutality of the ongoing war."
The most striking aspect of Ford's
coverage -- especially if you look
at the unedited material -- is how
like modern news filming it is, even
though it was shot on 35mm with heavy
cameras. "We finally start to
see what I will term 'real' footage,"
says Brodie-Kusa. For her, Korea was
a turning point: "I was shocked
to see the 'on the ground' footage
-- its slant -- as well as wounded
in color."
Alf Penn, archive researcher for
Thames TV's series about the war,
thinks we mainly see the US perspective.
He points out that it's now often
forgotten how much this was a United
Nations war involving troops from
around the world including Britain.
"Much of the British coverage
is only from the point of view of
UK regiments," he says, "which
although interesting and sometimes
heroic and glorious, is only a cameo
view of the war itself."
As ever in conflict situations, the
"enemy" point of view is
rarely available. A little valuable
material is available from collections
like ETV (a collection now held at
the British Film Institute in London)
or the Imperial War Museum in London,
giving a Soviet or Chinese viewpoint
but almost none from the British newsreels.
Little exists from the other allies.
The coverage followed the US lead,
just as in the operational sphere,
where some wonderful blunders could
occur such as putting the Greeks and
Turks on adjacent positions on the
front line!
Twelve Hour Loan
Penn garnered material from Russia,
China, and North Korea through a variety
of surreptitious contacts -- sometimes
collecting footage from the back door
of a foreign legation at 10pm for
a 12 hour loan of rare archive evidence.
Even where they didn't make the cut,
he made sure these valuable glimpses
never found their way into the infamous
cutting room junk bin.
When he was researching the series,
even at the US National Archives (NARA),
few of the gems were catalogued so
it was often painstaking work. The
Public Domain material was the crock
of gold at the end of the rainbow
for him. Although it takes time to
access this material, something not
appreciated by production companies
on a tight deadline, at least the
film is safe. Bill Murphy worked at
NARA until 1999: "Motion pictures
created by federal agencies are defined
as records under the Federal Records
Act and other laws and regulations,
and, as such, they cannot be destroyed
without NARA's approval. Federal agencies
are required by law to transfer their
noncurrent, permanently valuable records
to NARA. In practice, all films and
footage showing military operations
during wartime are considered permanently
valuable."
It's just as well. The processed
nature of the coverage of Korea makes
the Ford footage in the National Archives
even more valuable. Not the film Ford
set out to make (nor indeed the war
Truman expected MacArthur to wage),
it chronicled a key moment of the
last century. "Every nation on
earth was involved in some way,"
says Penn, "and every nation
on earth was terrified that we would
have another world war."
A lot of war footage has passed through
the gate in the half century since
but, as Brodie-Kusa puts it, "you
certainly never saw that kind of footage
during WWII." and if nothing
else, the visual record stands out:
"From all the research we did
for The Century--I can tell you Korea
was not a 'forgotten' war visually."
By Steve Bergson, UK Researcher &
Writer
First Published Spring 2001
Editor's note: International Historic
Films of Chicago now distributes the
edited film on VHS
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Email: stevebergson@lineone.net
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