"Pork Chop Hill" with Gregory Peck, "The Men" with Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray "Fix Bayonets" with Richard Basehart and "The Steel Helmet" with Gene Evans who also starred in "Fix Bayonets", are the top Korean War dramas. This one seems like a second bill WWII git them Nazis and Jap films. The romance angle: the reluctant widow/woman trying to fight off her addiction to gunslingers can be seen played out in westerns and gangster flicks. Robert Mitchum is not as human as he was in "The Story of GI JOE" instead this "Mustang" ( Old Army-ese for a ranker who made it to the officer class without a West Point, VMI, or a well placed political connection) just is Ares gift to the warrior class. Charles McGraw and William Talman two of the best sinister looking and sounding actors of their era, become bland nonentities in this flick. There are some grim moments: Talman's descent into a flaming hutch after his recon plane is shot down, the North Korean infiltrated refugee column being blasted apart,and the gradual attrition on Mitchum and McGraw's outfit ( the film is set right at the beginning of the Korean "ShootOut" before MacArthur's Inchon Landing temporarily turned the tide) but overall there is a lack of tension and good action set pieces to make this film a contender as a Good war movie/Action Film. Perhap's director Tay Garnett suffered from MGM-itis every thing must be pretty because this movie ain't hard or gritty enough. Now if Aldrich,Siegal, Fuller,or Milestone had directed it...
Review of One Minute to Zero
