Comments on: 1950s movies marathon – part 108

By: The best movies of 1957 « Bjørn Stærk's Max 256 Blog

The best movies of 1957 « Bjørn Stærk's Max 256 Blog — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 14:13:56 +0000

[…] The Bridge on the River Kwai […]

By: Bruce Rheinstein

Bruce Rheinstein — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 02:14:30 +0000

All very good films.

The director of The Story of GI Joe is William Wellman, who was awarded the Croix de Guerre with two palms as a fighter pilot with the Lafayette Flying Corps during WWI. If you decide to look at movies of the 1920s, his film Wings is excellent, and you can see why Clara Bow was touted as America’s Sweetheart.

By: Bjørn Stærk

Bjørn Stærk — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 03:51:21 +0000

Interesting, thanks. Pork Chop Hill seems to be from 1959. I’m going through these movies chronologically, so I’ll get around to that one soon. Must have missed or skipped The Steel Helmet – I try to decide early in the movie if I want to watch the rest or not, so I usually end up watching the ones with impressive openings.

My favorite 40s WWII movies are A Walk in the Sun and The Story of G.I. Joe, and the documentary To the Shores of Iwo Jima, all made right at the end of the war. They have something that doesn’t show up very often in the decade that followed. Another big difference is that Korea doesn’t seem to make a big splash in Hollywood, the way WWII did. You hardly notice it’s there, and suddenly it’s over.

By: Bruce Rheinstein

Bruce Rheinstein — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 01:48:25 +0000

Re: Korean War films: I’d argue that Pork Chop Hill, starring Gregory Peck, is pretty good. Likewise, The Steel Helmet, a B-grade film from 1951, is surprisingly watchable. The director, Samuel Fuller, was a WWII infantryman who saw heavy combat. The scene where one of the GIs executes a prisoner was highly controversial at the time, but Fuller defended it saying he’d seen it happen in WWII.