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Combat isn't a poetic ballad but a blow to the head, says Samuel Fuller, his rebuke of Milestone's A Walk in the Sun opens with the audience already besieged by explosions. The body-strewn aftermath of an ambush introduces the mauled terrain of the Korean War, the bestial sergeant (Gene Evans) stomps through it like bundled dynamite wrapped in a beard, a deranged guide for a deranged conflict. He's joined by a munchkin dubbed Short Round (William Chun) and an Army medic (James Edwards), then runs into a lost American patrol surrounded by Red snipers. Among the dogfaces is a fellow World War II survivor (Richard Loo), a conscientious objector (Richard Monahan) lugging a miniature church organ, and a loudmouth comic (Sid Melton) cast as a mute with a faithful burro: A veritable mass of contrasting bodies, races and ideologies sharing a deserted temple with a gargantuan, smiling Buddha statue. "Ah, nothing beats the infantry." Deafening hails of bullets, silence pierced by the sound of a grenade pin being dropped on the floor, the myth of heroism ground down by devastation, that's the war Fuller remembers. The absurd is never far off: The brutality of an exploding cadaver chafes against the hooey of the Korean moppet warbling "Auld Lang Syne," irrational prejudice that can only be faced with irrational patriotism. "If you die, I'll kill you!" In this vision of chaos, the hard-grained mise en scène crumbles in tandem with the rickety spiritual fortress the characters take refuge in. As visceral as any chronicle of the collapsing mind, a race into madness—the depleted protagonist snaps amid gunfire, then simply drops his machine-gun and staggers out of the infernal screen. From here, it's one extended minefield until the scarred serenity of The Big Red One. Cinematography by Ernest Miller. With Steve Brodie, Harold Fong, Neyle Morrow, and Lynn Stalmaster. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |