The Steel Helmet (1951) Writer-director Sam Fuller, celebrated as a master of low-budget pulp classics, once said there was only one way to convey the true experience of war to movie audience......
........by firing a machine gun over their heads.
Armed with a rock-bottom budget, no stars and a less-than-30 days shooting schedule, Fuller delivered the next best thing to pulling off that machine gun stunt......
In this legendary Korean war movie, delivered to theaters at the very start of the conflict, Fuller rubbed audience's faces in the carnage, nihilism and random cruelty of war like no other director could.
Even with limited resources available to him, he poured a lifetime of his own World War II combat experience into "The Steel Helmet"......including his battle tours in North Africa, Sicily and Omaha Beach on D-Day......
Unlike the patriotic, flag-waving war films that Hollywood pumped out in WW 2, Fuller took an brutal, unflinching look at warfare and its dehumanizing effects on the men thrown into the perpetual meat grinder of combat........
Even more shocking, the director cast a cold, jaundiced eye on the American society and its values the soldier's were fighting to uphold.........a culture where black soldiers would still have to sit in the back of the bus when they came home.......and Asian G.I.'s had their friends and family imprisoned in American interment camps for the duration of the war on Japan.
No wonder Fuller came under the investigative gaze of the infamous House On UnAmerican Activities and the FBI.....
Unafraid, Fuller packed all of his world view into the 90 minutes of "The Steel Helmet".....following the fortunes of veteran infantry Sargent Zack (Gene Evans), whose endless blood-soaked combat experiences have drained the last drop of humanity out of him.
The only survivor of his unit, Sgt.. Zack unwillingly puts up with a Korean boy sidekick
and joins a bedraggled, lost platoon.......with all of them taking refuge in a deserted Buddhist temple and making a desperate stand against the vast North Korean army.
By the time the last shot if fired, Zack is left even more demoralized and possibly close to total madness.......and you the viewer get a Fuller-ized view of war and what it does to people who fight it.....should they survive.
An absolute must-see for all hardcore movie buffs, "The Steel Helmet"'s takes aim at
5 stars (*****). a most definite BQ FIND OF FINDS.
(and yes, if the Korean boy's name 'Short Round' sounds familiar to you, Steven Spielberg borrowed it for Indiana Jones's little sidekick in 'Temple Of Doom'.......
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