Samuel Fuller directed many struggle movies all through his lengthy profession, calling upon his personal experiences throughout WWII to dramatize fight as realistically as doable. Though lots of his subsequent struggle films had been extra technically polished, few had the uncooked energy of his first one: The Steel Helmet. Shot on a shoestring funds and reduce along with inventory footage, it was the first American feature centered on the Korean Battle, which had began in 1950. It might have simply light into obscurity after hitting theaters in 1951, as extra expensively mounted depictions of the battle had been launched by main studios. But, The Metal Helmet stays a gritty, brutal portrayal of warfare that is additionally a surprisingly ahead-of-its-time exploration of racism.
‘The Metal Helmet’ Makes the Most of Its Finances Limitations
Gene Evans performs Sergeant Zack, the only survivor of a army unit that is been worn out in fight. He befriends an orphaned Korean boy who he nicknames Short Round (William Chun), and collectively they encounter Colonel Thompson (James Edwards), a Black military medic whose complete unit has additionally been slaughtered. The three be part of an built-in platoon led by Lieutenant Driscoll (Steve Brodie), who took cost after the rating officers had been killed. The platoon makes its solution to a abandoned Buddhist temple, the place a North Korean soldier (Harold Fong) can be hiding out. After killing one in every of their males, the enemy solider, nicknamed The Purple, tries to transform Thompson and Asian American Sergeant Tanaka (Richard Lavatory) to his aspect, questioning how both man can battle on behalf of the US. Their philosophical dialogue is disrupted by an assault on the temple, throughout which Quick Spherical and Lieutenant Driscoll are killed.
The Metal Helmet was Fuller’s third movie as a director, following the low-budget Westerns I Shot Jesse James and The Baron of Arizona. It could be a equally small-scale affair regardless of its grand ambitions. Somewhat than journey to location, Fuller and his crew shot The Metal Helmet in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park, dwelling to the well-known observatory showcased in La La Land and Rebel Without a Cause. He labored shortly and cheaply, finishing filming in simply 10 days on a funds of $104,000 (lower than the catering price for many films). Missing the funds to recreate the climactic battle sequence, Fuller and his editors used inventory footage as an alternative.
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Somewhat than being hindered by these budgetary restraints, Fuller performs into them. A former photojournalist and newspaperman, Fuller shoots The Metal Helmet with a you-are-there verisimilitude that stands in stark distinction to extra Hollywood-ized dramatizations. His pseudo-documentary strategy would quickly change into the norm for struggle films like Saving Private Ryan and The Hurt Locker, which equally attempt to place audiences within the struggle zone. But not like these movies, The Metal Helmet is not anchored by any recognizable stars like Tom Hanks or Jeremy Renner. Fuller’s cadets are all performed by lesser-known character actors, including to the sensation that you just’re watching actual troopers versus faux ones.
‘The Metal Helmet’ Was Means Forward of Its Time
Whether or not he was making a western, a noir, or a struggle movie, Fuller by no means shied away from then-taboo matters his extra revered contemporaries had been too afraid to the touch. He was notably drawn to the difficulty of race, as seen in films as diversified as The Crimson Kimono, Shock Corridor, and White Dog. Made at a time when massive parts of the US had been nonetheless segregated, The Steel Helmet faces the difficulty of American racism head-on in methods which are shockingly frank and up to date. Sergeant Zack repeatedly refers to Quick Spherical by a racial slur, solely to see his humanity as their journey progresses. The North Korean soldier brings up Japanese Internment Camps and Jim Crow when asking how Black and Asian troopers can defend a rustic that treats them as second-class residents. The very nature of warfare itself is questioned, as a distinction of ethnicity appears to be the one factor that distinguishes an enemy from an ally.
From his first struggle film via his final, The Big Red One, Fuller views an Military platoon as the final word equalizer. It doesn’t matter what the colour of our pores and skin, he argues, all of us bleed the identical shade of pink. Maybe if we understood that to start with, we would not must battle wars in any respect.
The Metal Helmet
- Launch Date
- February 2, 1951
- Director
- Samuel Fuller
- Solid
- Gene Evans , Robert Hutton , Steve Brodie , James Edwards , Richard Lavatory , Sid Melton , Richard Monahan , William Chun
- Runtime
- 85 Minutes
- Foremost Style
- Battle
- Writers
- Samuel Fuller
- Producers
- Robert L. Lippert , William Berke
The Metal Helmet is presently obtainable to stream on The Criterion Channel within the U.S.
