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Director: Lewis Milestone
Screenwriter: James Webb

By Roderick Heath

Lewis Milestone was one of the major directors of classic Hollywood cinema, but has never really received his due since as an inventive and interesting talent, one whose career ran over thirty years and was littered with great and superior films. Born Leib Milstein in Chișinău, then in Tsarist Russia but today in Moldova, Milestone came from a wealthy and progressive-minded Jewish family. Sent to Germany to study engineering, he instead fell in love with the theatre, and bought a ticket on a steamship to the United States, arriving at Hoboken aged eighteen. After struggling through odd jobs, Milestone gained his foothold in the New York theatrical world as a photographer, before he enlisted in the US Army in 1917, where he served in the Signal Corps alongside quite a few other soon-to-be-notable filmmakers, including Josef Von Sternberg. Becoming a US citizen after his discharge and changing his name to Milestone, he was brought into the movie world by an independent producer he had met in the Signal Corps, starting as an assistant editor and augmenting his income by moonlighting as a card sharp, before moving on to work under figures like Henry King, Thomas Ince, and Harold Lloyd, labouring in any capacity on the movie lot he could turn his hand to.

Milestone made his directorial debut with Seven Sinners (1925), a comedy that did well enough to make him over the next few years a sought-after director of films in that genre, including his best-regarded silent work, Two Arabian Knights (1927), a pinch of the hugely popular wartime comedy stage play What Price Glory?. Milestone beat out Charlie Chaplin for the first and soon-defunct Best Comedy Director Oscar. Milestone swerved hard to prove his range by making the early gangster film The Racket (1928), and after producing his first Talkie, New York Nights (1929), he was hired by Carl Laemmle to direct a prestige production, an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s merciless but popular antiwar novel All Quiet On the Western Front (1930). Easily Milestone’s most famous work, All Quiet On The Western Front proved a definitive early example of completely successful sound cinema, in part because Milestone elected to film much of it like a silent, complete with dynamic tracking shots, and added sound effects in post-production. He also fought with Laemmle to maintain the novel’s downbeat ending, and the film’s Oscar-garlanded success justified his uncompromising approach.

Milestone’s output through the 1930s was powerhouse, including The Front Page (1931), Rain (1932), Hallelujah, I’m a Bum (1933), The General Died at Dawn (1936), and Of Mice and Men (1939), all displaying his talent and determination not to be pinned down in any genre. But during World War II, Milestone’s career became defined by one particular irony: for all the pacifist passion of his most famous film’s outlook, the skill he’d revealed on All Quiet on the Western Front for directing warfare scenes was called upon now to be applied to movies engaged with motivating audiences for the war effort. Milestone managed the pivot of attitude by bringing a proto-Sam Peckinpah feel for the brutality inherent in both the fascist yoke and resistance to it in Edge of Darkness (1943), The North Star (1943), and The Purple Heart (1944), whilst still etching those films with sigils invested with his old, humanistic touch, and more fully rekindling that attitude for A Walk In The Sun (1945). Like King Vidor and Rouben Mamoulian, other star directors who midwifed the shift from the silent to sound era with their creative potency only to lose critical respect with long and stumbling late careers, Milestone never really fought to escape the studio production treadmill, with an ultimately hindering effect on his late career when contemporaries like John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock were going from strength to strength.

So, after the war, Milestone slogged through some stodgy studio programmers. Still he managed some vital work, including a peculiar take on the film noir style, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), a low-budget but intelligent and quasi-expressionist take on Les Misérables (1952), and Pork Chop Hill. The Rat Pack comedy heist film Ocean’s 11 (1960), whilst remembered now chiefly as the source for the more popular 2001 remake and its sequels, was at the time dismissed with snark as a low ebb for a director once labelled “the American Eisenstein.” Milestone ended his career even more ignobly as the sole credited director of the 1962 remake of Mutiny on the Bounty, although that legendarily chaotic shoot was begun by Carol Reed and quarrelsome star Marlon Brando also reportedly filmed some of it. Nonetheless the actual film that resulted from all that retained a sobriety and substance that made it feel worthy of having Milestone’s name attached. For its part, Pork Chop Hill, as Milestone’s last war film, was a nod back to his glory days and also an intriguing anticipation of where the war film as a genre was heading.

Pork Chop Hill was also one of the relatively few truly serious war movies to deal with the Korean War, when it was already being referred to as “the Forgotten War,” just a few years after it came to a juddering halt with a technically ongoing ceasefire. For Koreans the war unfolded amidst their homes and scarred their land, minds, and bodies, its impact a constant, haunting memory and imminent reality. For the United Nations-mandated interventionist forces it was a gruelling, vicious, yet weirdly half-hearted and often baffling experience, one that ground to a halt in general stalemate as huge numbers of Chinese volunteers added weight to the North Korean Communist forces, in a moment when the Cold War era was at its hottest. It also saw the onset of a new age of warfare, both technologically and in terms of service experience for soldiers who were mostly conscripted, that had its own peculiar, even disorientating qualities, and which would become all the more difficult to keep controlled in the Vietnam War. In keeping with that sense of neglect and almost hallucinated ambiguity in the collective memory, films about the conflict are thin on the ground compared to World War II or Vietnam.

But the films the war did inspire in Hollywood were interesting and varied, ranging from the measured realism and noble tragedy of Mark Robson’s The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1953), which portrayed the new era of jet warfare, to The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which used the war to hinge a freakishly bizarre evocation of the age’s mental and political landscape upon. Much later, the raucous, satirical lilt of Robert Altman’s MASH (1970) used it more blatantly as a parable for the then-raging Vietnam War. Combat movies also proliferated, including Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet (1951) and Fixed Bayonets (1951), Julian Amyes’ A Hill In Korea (1956), Anthony Mann’s Men In War (1957), and Pork Chop Hill. Combat movies as a breed are slightly different from classical war films, which usually tend to be as much interested in the social, historical, and political backdrops to the warfare, and the private lives and home front experiences of the combatants. Combat movies rather are particularly preoccupied with depitcing the world of people immersed in the zone of struggle as a subject compelling in and of itself, and are often driven by a particular realist bent, trying to capture the immediate sensory and psychological states of warriors as well as the bloody, muddy business of fighting, where the urge to survive often becomes the only coherent objective. In contending with a war that proved infuriating and inconclusive in terms of geopolitical struggle, a common theme in most of the Korean War combat films was a sense of almost free-floating, semi-surreal entanglement in a conflict and place the people fighting barely understand or care about. Perhaps the fighters have supernal flickers of a new, post-World War II sense of international responsibility and fellowship, anti-communist ethics, or plain old patriotic service ethos to sustain them, or a more immediate and personal duty to fulfil.

Pork Chop Hill portrays an authentic battle, played out over about a week to the loss of 214 American soldiers and possibly thousands of North Korean and Chinese troops, and ending less than three weeks before the armistice was signed at Panmunjom. After the war’s conclusion, the battle was studied by soldier-turned-historian S.L.A. Marshall and turned into his well-regarded book, Pork Chop Hill: The American Fighting Man in Action, Korea, Spring 1953, and screenwriter James Webb recommended the novel to the production outfit Melville Films, who bought the movie rights from Marshall (to Marshall’s annoyance later when he realised he sold them for a song). Webb wrote a script based on one particular chapter, regarding K or ‘King’ Company, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, and their furious fight to hold the eponymous hill, named for its general shape. With Webb writing the script and Sy Bartlett producing, actor Gregory Peck signed on as both star and investor. This gave Peck serious clout over the production, so after Milestone was hired to direct, they clashed fiercely over what kind of movie they were making. Milestone later reported with some bitterness that his conception was ruined by Peck’s desire for a more heroic slant to the story, and dismissed the result as a just another war film.

But, whilst not exactly a return to the outright antiwar sentiment of All Quiet On The Western Front, Pork Chop Hill sees the director argue the point until arriving at a zone of ambivalence, keeping the viewer aware of both the awesome spectacle of human bravery and dedication found in the story, whilst also highlighting with accusatory clarity the failings also on display, honestly portraying the screw-ups and indecision that constantly define the battle, and identifying early on problems that have continued to dog the United States’ existence as a superpower. Pork Chop Hill’s lack of pretension in either direction, straining neither to glorify nor vilify the struggle, is part of what it distinguishes it from a modern perspective: whilst conventional for its moment in some aspects, in others it still feels anticipatory and modern. War is hell, the film says, and hell is a bureaucratic snafu with guns. Pork Chop Hill is also interesting as a reflection on the changing nature not so much of the enemy being fought in the early Cold War era, although that’s certainly in the mix too, but on the Americans fighting, portraying the modern, desegregated US Army with an unstable and evolving sense of just what patriotic service means. The battle for Pork Chop was controversial even as it unfolded, given the hill had no apparent strategic importance, rendering the conflict close to nihilistically futile to many onlookers.

The film on the other hand diagnoses the battle as a particularly intense and vicious arm wrestling match between two inimical political and social blocs, where the very lack of a point is the point, and with the armistice itself in the balance, hostage not to victory but to each side demonstrating determination not to lose. Close to the end of the film, after becoming frustrated with the Red delegates at the armistice talks, an American Admiral (Carl Benton Reid) and a General talk through their opposite’s stonewalling (with a Chinese delegate literally blowing smoke): the General suggests, in dated terms, they need to save face. “I could say let ‘em have their face and let’s get on with the truce – but these aren’t just Orientals, these are Communists,” the Admiral muses, on the way to the above epiphany as to the battle’s meaning. Milestone intended in his original conception of the film to make more of the intercutting between the literal and diplomatic warfare, contrasting such different forms of combat and the way each influences the other, and also the ways they remain entirely distinct and abstract to each-other. But apart from that late scene, portrayal of the negotiations were finally limited to a montage playing out under the opening credits, which is in its own way a clever interpolation that sets the scene for the conflict we’re about to witness as an illustration of Ambrose Bierce’s famous satirical quip that cannons are devices for realigning maps.

Milestone’s opening shot proper is a survey of the American trenches on Pork Chop, currently occupied by Easy Company, with Milestone noting customary GI sarcasm in contending with unglamorous circumstances, having named a dugout the Korea Hilton Hotel, with a sign erected bidding visitors to “Visit the Starlight Roof,” and a coop full of chickens kept with an admonition, “Admire But Don’t Touch.” A Chinese soldier (Viraj Amonsin) employed to make propagandist broadcasts delivers his morning taunts over a loudspeaker system in a customarily insinuating voice, another novel element in a war that, the propagandist notes acutely, has cost the US more lives than its War of Independence and yet everyone back home seems to have forgotten about, and generally affecting a mutual sympathy whilst condemning stubborn leaders dragging the conflict out. Meanwhile a periscope for keeping a safe eye on the enemy swivels about under the blaring loudspeakers, like an anticipation for some future age of warring cyborgs. The actual assault that chases Easy Company off the hill isn’t shown, but later the men assigned to recapture them find signs of a recently vacated life all over the hill, inheritors of a paltry and temporary kingdom.

Lt Joe Clemons (Peck) is the commander of King Company, currently stationed in a reserve position close to Pork Chop and 70 miles from Panmunjom. Clemons receives a call from his immediate superior Colonel Kern (Bob Steele), telling him of Easy Company’s eviction by a sudden, overwhelming Red assault, and ordering him to retake the hill. Clemons is faced with an immediate difficulty in that his weapons platoon – those men who carried the likes of flamethrowers, bazookas, and heavy machine guns – has been detached, and so must make do with three platoons of plain infantry. Clemons is nonetheless assured that another Company, Love, will also be hitting the hill from another side, and they will converge at the top. Surveying a model of the hill displaying the fortifications and general layout of their task, Clemons formulates a basic plan, to lead his 1st Platoon himself with his 2nd Platoon, under his stalwart second-in-command Lt Tsugi ‘Suki’ Ohashi (George Shibata), sweeping up the hill on his left flank, and keeping his 3rd Platoon in reserve, a formulation that can’t really afford any hiccups. King Company are delivered close to Pork Chop by truck in the middle of the night, with an assurance the artillery barrage currently being laid on the hill’s southern slope will be lifted at Clemons’ command.

As King Company start up the hill, they’re initially confident when there’s no immediate fire, only to be taunted by the voice of the propagandist, who knows exactly who and where they are: “You’re coming to visit us in our new home. Care to hear what happened to the previous tenants?” the broadcaster asks, and caps things off by playing a recording of Taps echoing sonorously across the benighted landscape. Soon the defenders let loose on the ascending soldiers, a fusillade made even more murderous when huge searchlights behind the American lines suddenly light up the hill in stark and merciless detail. Clemons gets them shut off as quickly as possible, but it’s still a few minutes of utter hell. Slowly the night gives way to day, and the agonised progress of the attackers up the slope has barely made any ground, forcing Clemons to send out runners in a desperate attempt to make contact with both Suki’s platoon and Love Company, becoming increasingly bitter towards the latter for their bewildering and possibly cowardly absence.

One runner Clemons chooses, the very young Pvt Velie (Robert Blake), manages to reach Suki, who tells the messenger his detachment is just as badly mauled and can’t come to the rescue. Returning to Clemons, Velie encounters a machine gun nest: trying to blow it up with a grenade, Velie misses the toss and instead severely injures himself, but destroys the nest with a second attempt, and staggers as a bloodied mess back to Clemons to deliver the news. Eventually a dozen soldiers from Love Company reach Clemons, led by Lt Marshall (Martin Landau), who tells Clemons the men with him are all that’s left of the Company after being ambushed on the way and that two ranking commanders over him have been killed. As if by way of a cruel cosmic joke, two more of his surviving soldiers are killed by a stray artillery shell even as Marshall explains the bloody business, a sight he witnesses with glaze-eyed horror. Finally, with these paltry reinforcements, King Company manages to reach the Chinese lines and storm the fortifications at the top of the hill.

When the Americans do finally recapture the Korea Hilton, they find to their surprise that some of Easy Company are still holed up within: two of the soldiers confront each-other with unpinned grenades in hand and, recognising each-other as friendlies with gleeful smiles, they turn and urgently hurl away the explosives. The merry reunion ends abruptly when another stray barrage crashes down upon the two meeting squads and wipes many men out. Some of the men are convinced the barrage was friendly fire, requiring some fierce assertion of discipline from the stern Cpl Jurgens (James Edwards), and Clemons’ insistence the fire came from the nearby, enemy-occupied hill dubbed Old Baldy – an assurance that, as Suki acknowledges privately to him later, is entirely untrue. Clemons sends word back to Army Command that he doesn’t have a hope of holding onto it without reinforcements, but finds his reports keep getting muddled in one way or another. A public relations officer (Lew Gallo) turns up to report on a successful action and discovers the truth of their by-the-fingernails position to his deep chagrin, and when another reinforcing company does arrive, they’re soon ordered to pull out again and leave Clemons and ruined band to their plight.

Elements of Pork Chop Hill are certainly generic for a war film of the ‘50s, particularly the jots of comic relief, mostly supplied by the testy Sgt Coleman (Fell) and radio operator Cpl Payne (Cliff Ketchum), who likes telling cornball jokes based on his upbringing around the Texas Panhandle. This sort of thing does nod back to Milestone’s early success with Two Arabian Knights, and thankfully this isn’t as intrusive as, say, Bob Newhart’s contributions to Don Siegel’s otherwise remarkable existential entry in the genre, Hell Is For Heroes (1962). More original and interesting is the way it tries to vary the familiar sprawl of representative characters and types in the ranks and present them as part of a landscape where people flit by, in a manner that feels anticipatory of the likes of Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line (1998) and the sense of utterly random fate where people loom in and out of the craziness. To leverage this approach Milestone leans on an array of character actors and emerging stars, including Landau, Edwards, Blake, Rip Torn, Woody Strode, Norman Fell, Harry Dean Stanton, Clarence Williams III, Harry Guardino, George Peppard, and Gavin MacLeod. Their faces, specific enough if not at the time particularly well known for the most part, help impose cohesion on the film’s depiction of the chaotic and hellish zone of nullity Pork Chop’s flanks become during the slog towards the summit.

Pork Chop Hill’s unvarnished critique of an often confused and clumsy US war machine is notable, and one element of the film that feels like a rough but coherent draft for a later era of films, particularly those made and set in the Vietnam era, even if ultimately steers clear of the kind of cynicism towards military authority many of its aesthetic children would purvey. The dedicated rigour of leaders like Clemons and Suki on the ground level and their constantly bitching but mostly committed men is contrasted with the incoherent orders, friendly fire, garbled communications, and overstretched manpower all conspiring to leave them in the lurch. Some of this of course is par for the course in any army in any war, and that’s part of the turmoil of combat Milestone works to explore here. This in turn connects with a more conscientious motivated but even deadlier brand of hesitation and mixed messaging, filtering down through the higher echelons and sourced in general uncertainty as to whether it’s worth throwing more soldiers into a fight nobody’s quite sure is worth it: late in the film one of Clemons’ superiors, Major General Trudeau (Ken Lynch), refuses to commit more men to the fight because he isn’t sure Pork Chop won’t just going to be given away a few days later in the peace talks.

Realism has always been considered the key and indispensible virtue with war movies, particularly today when pyrotechnics and special effects and make-up arts can so readily deliver colourful carnage, but I’ve often held a sneaky conviction the genre was at its best when in the black-and-white photography style of the late 1950s and early ‘60s. Whilst the brazen crimson gush of gore is muted, the dust, heat, and physical exertion registers vividly in the monochrome palette and harsh contrasts of Sam Leavitt’s cinematography. Like many directors with a singular moment of great influence early in their career, Milestone was being chased by other filmmakers at this time: Stanley Kubrick had raided Milestone’s stylistics for his Paths of Glory (1957) on the way to evolving his own, and a few years later David Lean would tip his hat to Milestone’s influence in Doctor Zhivago (1965). Here, Milestone’s familiar visual strategies for depicting warfare are redeployed in a particularly systematic way, especially when battle is first joined on the mountainside. His camera sweeps in alternating directions in lateral tracking shots, first moving slowly and steadily, attentive to the anxious and ready faces of the Americans as they near the barbed wire banks below the trenches. The tracking shots start moving at a swooping pace as the Red soldiers shoot down upon the Americans and the attackers launch themselves at the wire, criss-crossed by shots moving and up and down the slope along with the assault: in this way Milestone invests both a physically manifest sense of action with the camera whilst carefully diagramming the run of action.

Milestone’s roots in the era of Soviet montage-influenced editing also manifests, particularly when, as the struggle up the hill is suddenly illuminated by the unwanted searchlights, he cuts with furiously between shots of a Chinese soldier leaping out of shelter, grenades in hand, as if popping out of a hoary netherworld with demonic vengefulness to rain suffering on the luckless GIs. As the struggle up the hill emerges from night to day, Milestone returns to a mournfully slow movement as the camera tracks down the slope, beholding parched earth littered with dead and mangled bodies. The emphasis is on the battle as a zone constantly punctuated with sudden, annihilating events, through which the character dash, crawl, and die. During an artillery barrage, PFC Forstman (Guardino) and his buddy Cpl Chuck Fedderson (Peppard), assigned to bring up ammunition, dash for shelter in a hole already being occupied by Coleman and Payne, but leave again as Forstman is irritated by Coleman’s territorial attitude. As shells fall again, one hits the foxhole, killing both Coleman and Payne. As he and Forstman dash up the hill, Fedderson is also killed. Forstman doesn’t notive at first, still calling out to him to keep up before realising what’s happened. Forstman’s shock registers as alternating tears and outraged frustration in a tremendous moment for Guardino: “I told ya to hurry up didn’t I – didn’t I?!” he screams at his oblivious pal. Clemons comes upon the sobbing, hysterical Forstman and urges him back to the trenches, before finding the mangled bodies of Coleman and Payne.

Forstman is introduced early in the film, believing he’s due to be rotated back home and initially refusing to go with the deploying Company, until Suki, claiming to be particularly ornery over being denied leave, warns Forstman, “You’re talking to a man in a black mood, and I’m liable to shoot you.” Shibata as Suki is one of the film’s most interesting elements. Born in Utah, Shibata was an authentic soldier, having served as a paratrooper in World War II and later becoming the first Asian-American ever to graduate from West Point, before serving during the actual Korean War as a fighter pilot. His performance has the definite quality, both positive and negative, of bring a non-professional actor – some of his line readings are a bit wooden, and yet he project an easy stoicism and quiet good-humour that plays particularly well off Peck. Shibata’s presence also points to another quality of the film, which considers the increasingly multicultural texture of the American armed forces in the desegregated army, avoiding any sense of rhetoric in contending with this evolving reality but suggesting other dimensions to the unfolding drama, suiting Milestone’s politically progressive bent but also his businesslike dramatic approach. Nisei Suki is joined by many African-American men amongst the ranks, most particularly the carefully contrasted diptych of Jurgens and Pvt Franklin (Woody Strode), two Black men with sharply diverging attitudes to their service. Edwards had appeared in The Steel Helmet before Pork Chop Hill and would later turn up in The Manchurian Candidate, making him something of an emblematic figure in movies for this particular pivot in the history of the US armed forces and an emerging archetype of a strong and patriotic Black soldier, offering firm and clipped authority. During the initial assault on the hill Velie, marching close to Franklin, keeps offering him a helping hand before Franklin angrily drives him away.

Later Clemons sees Franklin and recognises he’s trying to hang back and avoid the fighting, and orders the Private to stick close to him for the rest of the climb, with a promise to make sure he get him court-martialled. Later Clemons passes him to Jurgens’ charge, with Jurgens pointedly not putting up with any shit from the shirker. Franklin still manages to slip away from the combat and threatens to shoot Clemons when stumbles upon him holed up in a shelter. Franklin tries to work up the nerve to shoot Clemons, warning the commander it’s the easiest way to avoid getting tossed in the stockade for ten years: “For what? Because I don’t wanna die for Korea? What do I care about this stinkin’ hill? You oughta see where I live back home – I sure ain’t sure I’d die for that!” Clemons solicitously retorts that a lot of his comrades have had lives just as tough as his, but still do their duty. Franklin on one level is a fairly familiar kind of character in a war movie, the man who doesn’t care much about any grand political or patriotic project and only wants to survive a terrible situation in a philosophical position known as ‘save-ass,’ facing off against a stern commander, but given a suggestive undercurrent by his ethnicity: armed with Strode’s powerful talent for projecting deep and aggrieved unease, Franklin is plainly an avatar for the angry and alienated Black American, lurking in the darkness and thrusting his face into the light with an angry declaration of a right to self-determination but also a plea for some reason to belong. One who is, pointedly invited by Franklin into a larger fellowship – the only price he has to pay for that is risk: “Chances are you’re gonna die like it or not,” Clemons tells him: “So am I whether you shoot me or not. At least we’ve got a chance to do it in pretty good company.”

This exchange feels like an important moment in the history of American cinema at a time when other filmmakers were similarly trying to encompass such concerns, and all the more so for not needing to more baldly state its subtext. Just a couple of years later John Ford would take up the thread by casting Strode in Sergeant Rutledge (1961) as the Black soldier now fully installed in the cultural pantheon of American heroism. Meanwhile, Clemons’ personal friend Lt Walter Russell (Torn), commander of ‘George’ Company, is sent in to augment King Company, but soon ordered to depart again as the High Command is under the impression Clemons is now only mopping up. When the haplessly beaming PR man turns up amidst the general carnage under the same impression and asks the lieutenants where he should go, Clemons and Russell stare in disbelief in the man: “Well Walt, do you have any suggestions where this man should go?”, to Russell’s drawled reply, “I’d better not – I’d hate to live through this just to be court-martialled.” Again, Pork Chop Hill here grazes motifs that would later become standard-issue stuff in war movies in analysing the increasingly cruel contrast between the reality of war and its warriors and the forces of rendering it all smoothly palatable for a nominal public, although the film avoids making the hapless PR man too ignorant. “I guess you must think that I’m a…” he starts to say sheepishly and trails off, and also volunteers to lend his hand to the defence, only for Clemons to tell him instead to take a good look around and communicate what he sees to the superiors.

In the story of the clash over what kind of movie Pork Chop Hill was supposed to be Peck is often cast as the villain trying to make a more conventional movie with a more conventional hero. Which might be true, particularly as Peck’s notion that the battle was less, as Milestone saw it, a pointless exercise and rather a contemporary equivalent in drawing lines in the Cold War sand to historical battles like “Bunker Hill and Gettysburg” emerges, especially at the end when Clemons muses in voiceover that “millions live in freedom today” thanks to the sacrifice on the hill. But his performance is far from one-dimensional: Peck plays Clemons as a fine and stalwart soldier, but also one who becomes increasingly like one giant, clenched fist as he’s forced to preside over the destruction of his command and the sacrifice of his men, his seething frustration plain but also carefully reined in and channelled when he appeals to the PR officer to help him. Finally Russell and his company depart, leaving the tattered remnant of King and Love Companies, all 25 of them or so, to face a big Red attack Clemons expects to fall on them at dusk. They earn, at least, the almost desperate respect of the propaganda commissar: after delivering a warning of the attack over the loudspeakers of a maliciously grinning superior, he makes a personal appeal to the GIs to flee or surrender, before regaling them with a record – a string instrumental version of “Moonlight In Vermont,” making an already inexplicable situation that much more surreal.

Clemons at least plugs into the same subterranean logic as his enemies as, after losing so many men that very sacrifice has supplied its own meaning to the fight, as he tells Suki, “I want to hold this hill – more than I ever wanted anything – stinking little garbage heap.” As night falls, Clemons and his men wait for the hammer to fall, only for Clemons to get a call from Trudeau telling him to hold out as the choice has been made to send a large force to reinforce them, leading to a mad scramble to weather the wait as the Reds attack: the GIs finished up besieged in the Hilton as the attackers turn a flamethrower on the shelter, trying to keep out billowing flames with frantically piled sandbags. Fortunately the cavalry arrives just in time to disperse the attackers. In the morning Clemons trudges down the hill with the other bedraggled survivors of the fight. “Victory is a fragile thing, and history does not linger long in our century,” Clemons’ concluding narration notes, as Milestone notes the survivors trudging their way toward the fog of that history. Much like its characters, Pork Chop Hill is rugged, efficient, lasting, and exemplary. A fitting swansong in a genre for a director who was so uneasy as its master – and also, vitally, a work that lays down tracks for the future of that genre.