How someone as workmanlike as director Tay Garnett could take talents the like of Robert Mitchum and Charles McGraw and crank out this piece of sausage is pretty hard to fathom. It's not that the story is so bad for its time (early 1950s), but that the execution is so poor. Mitchum manages to be good insofar as the worst dialog of his career allows him, and McGraw is loaded down with even worse talk. The chemistry between Mitchum and love interest Ann Blyth is nil, the story veers from sickeningly sweet to nauseatingly real (courtesy of some actual combat footage of various people during or just after being roasted alive, etc.), and the majority of the supporting performances are amazingly amateurish for a studio picture of its time. Mitchum plays an infantry officer in Korea at the beginning of the war there. He has a bit of a queasy stomach after slaughtering a bunch of civilian refugees because a few Communist infiltrators were hiding among them, but even his initially outraged girlfriend comes to see that "even a doctor amputating a leg has to cut off some good flesh with the bad," and pretty soon, this mini-My Lai is forgotten (without anyone apparently considering whether a wiser choice than massacre might have existed). But it's the amateurishness of the direction, the high-school-play sort of staging and dialog that make "One Minute to Zero" (a title without meaning or explanation in the film) an anomaly: how could these people, whose talent is undeniable, have made such a silly and childish little home movie. The philosophy of war, the details of combat and life in a war zone in general, even the romance, all are done with the sophistication and expertise of the average seven-year-old boy. This is the kind of movie Robert Mitchum was often accused of sleepwalking through, but in reality, were it not for him, it would be utterly unbearable.
Review of One Minute to Zero
