A Film Canon

The first film set during the Korean War, The Steel Helmet provides a new vision of disorientation from those of its WWI and WWII forbears, diffusing the enemy into the snipers standing between a U.S. outfit and the observation-point that they attempt to capture; that is, into the jungle and elevated temple that circumscribe the action, forcing a collapse of thought and action into a preternatural awareness that anticipates the crazed spirituality of later Vietnam protagonists, and produces a pervasive, poetic identification of mind and head. Not only is the narrative replete with abstracted heads (watermelons, helmets, the statues of Buddha that crowd the Temple), but they tend to be the object of the most gruesome acts of violence (such as the complications arising from the discovery of a half-decapitated American soldier), while its quieter, more comic moments centre on Pvt Baldy's (Richard Monahan) attempts to think hair into existence. The result is an anticommunist film that nevertheless pathologises the peculiar prioritisation of hysterical instinct engendered by that position, as evinced in the hyperbolic, self-imploding patriotism of outfit leader Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans), as well as the eloquent criticisms posed to an African-American soldier by his Korean prisoner, including the question of Civil Rights, America's treatment of Japanese prisoners of war (previously unavailable for filmic reference), and its general conduct during WWII, all of which contributes to a subtle, yet radical, relocation of the 'American' from the racial, to the political, and even personal, such that young 'Short Round' (William Chun) eventually proves himself worthy of inclusion in the outfit; or, alternatively, a hypothetical vision of American values that many of its proponents are yet to fulfil, and its opponents are frequently more incisive in anatomising.