Pork Chop Hill (1959)

Bold! Blunt! Blistering! The battle picture without equal!

Between 1958 and 1961 even though I was only very young I used to go the pictures on my own.I used to cycle about a mile or so to the Astra. On Royal Air force stations the cinema is always called the Astra which I suppose was taken form the RAF motto Per Adua Ad Astra ( From the sky to the stars)

I was fairly unchoosy and used to watch a wide variety of films. Cowboys, comedies and war films. Whatever I was watching the most exciting bit was the trailers.

These were teasers for what was coming on next week. I remember seeing great ones for Sci Fi films that were very popular in the fifties. It was only later that all these invading aliens were in fact coded references to the communists.

There was always some speccy character in school who was into space travel. I never noticed that John F Kennedy said in the early sixties that we would be on the moon by the end of the decade. He was right of course.

One of the films that I always remember in the trailers but never got to see for many years later was Pork Chop Hill.

It is an unremitting film. I then realised that it was directed by Lewis Milestone who directed All Quiet on the Western Front ( 1929) If you watch both of them you can see a lot of similarities.

He obviously liked his theme of the futility of war and he was happy to trot it out for thirty years. Gregory Peck is very good in it as the put upon commander.

It was and is our idea of what the Korean war was like. An implacable enemy who was prepared to keep fighting and taking losses for no apparent reason. No coded references to communists in this one these were the real thing and there were lots of them trying to kill our boys.

Our boys kept on fighting against enormous odds. I will watch it if it is on but not one of the greats. Once you know an artists or writers work you realise how many times they revisit the same theme. Maybe that is all the public wants from them. The same story retold in a slightly different way. It worked in All Quiet so why not do it again for a new generation and a new war. After all there are only so many stories.

The whole thing takes place on the side of a hill with constant fighting and dying and everyone looking very tough in deed.

Our only other view othe Korean war is MASH (1970)but that never came along until the early seventies. MASH was a coded reference to Vietnam, we see no fighting but the consquences of it on the operating tables.

No jokes on Pork Chop Hill