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The Steel Helmet (1951)

Looking through American World War II films made during the war itself, one notices that many have overt strains of bellicose patriotism and propaganda. That war, the final world-consuming crisis for several decades, impacted even civilians living oceans away from the violence. The Korean War cannot be described as such. When North Korea’s Kim Il-sung ordered the invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, the U.S. military that countered the invasion was a shadow of what it was five years earlier. What was originally described as a “police action” and nominally pitted United Nations forces (of which the U.S. provided ninety percent of troops) against Communist troops failed to garner much attention from the American public even as it was being fought.

Released a half-year after North Korea’s invasion, The Steel Helmet is one of the first films set during the Korean War. Directed, produced, and written by Samuel Fuller for the independent studio Lippert Pictures, the film was made on the cheap ($104,000; just over $1 million in 2020’s USD) and shot in ten days. The Steel Helmet bears little resemblance to its older cinematic cousins, the WWII films released during that war. Convulsing with bitterness, racism, and post-traumatic fury, this is an attempt to portray life as an American infantry soldier with emotional honesty. The details of battle scenes might not be as accurate as they could be – and certainly not how Korea itself and the film’s Asian characters are portrayed – but The Steel Helmet succeeds in its primary goal.

Surviving a North Korean massacre, Sergeant Zack (Gene Evans) is found by a South Korean boy he will nickname “Short Round” (William Chun; this nickname, also used in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Jonathan Ke Quan’s character, refers to a flaw in a gun’s ammunition). Short Round knows English and begins following Zack – much to the latter’s annoyance. The boy won’t listen to, “beat it, kid”; nor does he appreciate being called a, “gook”. Zack and Short Round soon encounter Corporal Thompson (James Edwards), a black medic who is the last surviving member of his unit. The accidental trio shortly stumble onto a small, battered patrol commanded by Lieutenant Driscoll (Steve Brodie), who immediately suspects Thompson – because of his race – to be a deserter. Just as the trio argue with Driscoll and his unit, the soldiers are ambushed by snipers and take cover in an abandoned Buddhist temple (to the film’s discredit, it resembles nothing like an actual Buddhist temple and the centerpiece statue looks nothing like the Buddha). There is a North Korean soldier hiding in the shadows of the temple. And unbeknownst to the American soldiers, an enormous wave of North Korean soldiers is advancing on their position.

The events and characters of The Steel Helmet are fictional, but they have been adapted from Fuller’s war diaries and adjusted for the difference in setting. The Steel Helmet’s limited budget ensures that the violence is contained to the premises of a soundstage; the hordes of North Korean soldiers appearing in the film’s finale either the product of stock footage or Asian college students from UCLA hired as extras. There are no soldiers in The Steel Helmet who show complete deference to authority or accept the reasons why the United States military is in Korea at all. The encompassing political reasons for the Korean War are of little concern to them – survival becomes their only motivation. As a portrait of an infantry soldier’s mentality in desperate circumstances, The Steel Helmet benefits from Fuller’s military service during World War II. The soldiers’ actions and mindsets always seem realistic.

With his scruffy beard and punctured helmet, Zack is a grunt soldier that has become disillusioned with a war that has not even lasted a year. The anger he feels about the adversity he and his comrades have faced is boiling over. Zack is constantly searching for something or someone to take his emotions out on. His somewhat contemptuous attitude towards Short Round suggests racial resentment (more on the film’s depiction of racism later in this review) and that he has no patience for those who cannot defend themselves when the enemy is near; his initial behavior towards Driscoll’s squad is colored by grief manifesting as antagonism.

Fuller’s attempts to articulate the deranged psychology of battle-hardened infantry soldiers are taken to extremes rarely seen in American films in the 1950s. The most chilling example occurs as the film’s closing act begins. A prisoner of war (POW) is unexpectedly murdered by Zack as North Korean soldiers draw near. Zack carries out this murder with concealed, stone-faced passion. Even without the gruesome images that are allowed in modern cinema, the murder is shocking and, considering the characterizations of those involved, conceivable. It is lawless battlefield “justice” where the executioner is also the judge and jury. For moviegoers accustomed to the mostly propagandistic – intentional or otherwise – World War II films released in the prior decade, the notion that a member of the United States military could commit a war crime must have been unconscionable. Then and now, other American viewers not nearly as critical of the military’s conduct might have seen what is an obvious violation of the Geneva Convention as justified.

Joseph Breen’s office at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) was tasked with enforcing the Hays Code (censorship guidelines that applied to American films until 1968, when replaced by the present-day ratings system). As one might expect, the Breen Office voiced vehement objections to this scene – especially since Zack is never punished on-screen for his actions. Nevertheless, Fuller campaigned to keep the scene and it remains in the film. The Breen Office’s reasons for backing down on this appear to stem from the fact that Driscoll threatens a court martial immediately after Zack fires his gun – a peculiarly minor concession, it seems. The Breen Office’s ultimate approval of the film’s debate on racial relations are unclear, and I have been unable to find any explicit reason in freely available literature describing that aspect.

The film’s prisoner of war (played by Harold Fong, whose character is credited as “The Red”) is an English-proficient North Korean soldier. Observing the unit that has captured him, the audience will notice that this is a motley bunch. Granted, the notion of a diverse military squad is a war film cliché. But after President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948, note that this is one of the first depictions of an integrated U.S. military in film. A decade earlier, Cpl. Thompson would have been bandaging the wounds of black soldiers and might not be allowed near a wounded white comrade. One of Driscoll’s subordinates is Sergeant Tanaka (Richard Loo; a Chinese-American actor who nevertheless made a living playing numerous Japanese antagonists during the 1940s), who served in the 442nd Infantry Regiment – which was composed almost entirely of second-generation Japanese-American (Nisei) soldiers – during WWII.

Under watch by the Americans, the North Korean soldier will attempt to stoke racial divisions among his captors. Speaking to Thompson, he notes the hypocrisy of a black man fighting for a nation that has failed to recognize non-white people as equal under the law. The prisoner notes that, if Thompson ever returns home, there will still be “whites only” services and that he will have to sit in the back of public buses. Thompson keeps his cool, acknowledging the reality of the prisoner’s words. Nevertheless, Thompson reasons, he is assisting the nation he cares for, showing that he can perform as ably as anyone regardless of race. As Thompson implies, perhaps one day the United States will achieve the ideal it is purported to be – in his individual way, he shall serve the best he can.

Then there is the nighttime conversation between the North Korean and Tanaka. The POW begins by remarking that Americans despise Asian eyes, and then – in what is possibly the earliest, non-documentary mention of this in American cinema – evokes the Japanese-American concentration camps that Tanaka and his family almost certainly were forced into. An exhausted Tanaka, with a fatigued but barely annoyed glance, tells the North Korean major that his charade is too transparent:

THE RED: …They call you “dirty Jap rats” and yet you fight for them. Why? TANAKA: I’ve got some hot infantry news for you. I’m not a dirty Jap rat. I’m an American, and if we get pushed around back home… well, that’s our business… knock off before I forget the Articles of War and slap those rabbit teeth of yours out one at a time.

If The Steel Helmet had been made a few years, perhaps a few months, earlier, these disapproving mentions about the United States’ terrible record on racial equality might never have appeared in the film. The legitimate concern that black Americans would not support the United States military resulted in films like The Negro Soldier (1944). In World War II, the then-segregated military was viewed unfavorably by a substantial minority of African-Americans, so the government (and a cooperating American film industry) reasoned that directly addressing the nation’s painful racial history might be counterproductive. And so soon after World War II’s end, the “yellow peril” that was the Japanese was substituted for another anxiety: communists. Still, the prevailing attitude among American narrative media in the early 1950s was to celebrate the “patriotic” Japanese-Americans and those who served in the 442nd – erasing almost entirely the unconstitutional and inexcusable internment of Japanese-Americans.

As Fuller realizes as he dons his Cold War glasses, the likes of North Korea, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China could easily use the United States’ racism to undermine its message. Those nations did exactly that and continue to do so (the Soviet Union succeeded by the Russian Federation). America’s idealized self-perception as democracy’s champion collapses quickly even at a cursory glance of its racial relations. The Steel Helmet should be applauded for including this dialogue in the film, but these scenes are brief and never fully adopt Thompson or Tanaka’s point of view. Both are portrayed as intelligent, composed soldiers. But beyond their soldiering, we learn little else – The Steel Helmet is Zack’s movie, with everyone else not nearly as developed as Gene Evans’ central character.

Fuller avoids glamorizing military service and war. Despite Korea as his setting, Fuller makes little constructive use of it and his Korean characters. Fuller might have found his own wartime mentality analogous to Zack’s, but the film becomes one-dimensional as it cannot branch out to detail the other American soldiers’ personal responses to the war they are fighting. The Steel Helmet is homiletic, so be warned if you are not seeking a war film that is unafraid to moralize – sometimes without artistry. But given the restricted budget and the film’s abbreviated 85-minute runtime, I found myself forgiving the film for most of these flaws.

Communist and far-left commentators accused The Steel Helmet of being pro-American propaganda; the far-right, Breen Office, and the Pentagon were horrified by the film and blasted it as anti-American. J. Edgar Hoover, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), even launched an investigation into Fuller for suspected Communist sympathies. Such reception must have allowed Fuller a strange satisfaction, if one accounts his future reputation for addressing controversial themes with heavy-handed metaphors and allegories.

Moderately popular when first released, The Steel Helmet languished in obscurity in the decades after. That is unsurprising – the film was made and distributed by an independent studio. Thanks to the Criterion Collection and their special relationship with Turner Classic Movies (TCM), The Steel Helmet has found renewed attention thanks to its home media availability and the occasional TCM broadcast (it is regularly scheduled around Memorial Day and/or Veterans Day, in addition to the odd showing outside May and November). It is a fascinating addition to the lengthy list of American war films, supplying an era known for its propaganda-heavy elements with a forceful rebuke.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. Half-points are always rounded down. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog (as of July 1, 2020, tumblr is not permitting certain posts with links to appear on tag pages, so I cannot provide the URL).

For more of my reviews tagged “My Movie Odyssey”, check out the tag of the same name on my blog.