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The Steel Helmet

Screening: Monday 23 July, 6:30pm

The Steel Helmet (Samuel Fuller, USA 1951)

Just as the Korean conflict was escalating, Fuller set about making this grim film about an American patrol lost in the forest. A gruff veteran, Sergeant Zack (Gene Evans) is the sole survivor of a North Korean ambush. Bound and crawling through a field of corpses, he is freed by Short Round, a South Korean orphan. The two then begin their dangerous trek back to secured territory. Along the way, a motley assortment of GI stragglers is accumulated. Fuller's disdain for war creeps into every characterization, but it is Sergeant Zack, gritty, emotionless, almost bestial in his lack of sentiment, who calibrates the film's cynicism. When a crack finally appears in Zack's armor, the dogs of war come sniffing. Manny Farber observed: "Fuller is one of the first to try for poetic purity through a merging of unlimited sadism, done candidly and close-up, with stretches of pastoral nostalgia in which there are flickers of myth." — Steve Seid, Pacific Film Archive

Fuller’s first sensation – "the sleeper of its year" (Lee Server) – and a major commercial hit, The Steel Helmet created a furore on both sides of the political divide. Branded as anti-American because of its critique of racism, it drew the scrutiny of the Pentagon and the ire of J. Edgar Hoover. At the same time, American leftists denounced the film as reactionary, and in Rome, Communists rioted at a screening, breaking windows and throwing seats into the street. (Fuller claimed that the cinema owner sent him a demand for payment of damages.) The first film about the Korean War, Steel Helmet is the ferocious portrait of an Army sergeant who leads a patrol of green recruits to safety. Gene Evans plays the cold, callous sergeant with stony power. "My idea in Steel Helmet was to show anger, the hate of this man who hates everything and everybody. He hated himself" (Fuller). J. Hoberman recently wrote that Steel Helmet "suggests Waiting for Godot rewritten by Mickey Spillane," and Scorsese acknowledges it as an influence on Raging Bull. "A remarkable achievement, filled to overflowing with its unique, intense mix of violence, symbolism, offbeat characterization and hardboiled discourse" (Server). — Ontario Cinematheque

With: Gene Evans (Zack), Robert Hutton (Bronte), Steve Brodie (Driscoll), James Edwards (Thompson), Richard Loo (Tanaka), Sid Melton (Joe), Richard Monahan (Baldy), William Chun (Short Round), Harold Fong (The Red), Neyle Morrow (First GI), Lynn Stalmaster (Second Lieutenant)

85 mins, 16mm.

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