Fixed Bayonets! (1951)
** 1/2 (out of 4)
Well made Korean war film shares some similarities with Fuller's THE STEEL HELMET released the same year. In this film a group of American soldiers get held up along a mountain pass where they must try and stop advancing Korean soldiers. The main goal is to be smart and try to make the Koreans think they have a large group of people when in reality there's only forty-eight. This isn't the greatest war film ever made and I'd put it a few notches behind THE STEEL HELMET but fans of Fuller will still want to check this out as his style is all over this thing. I think the greatest thing about the film is certainly the direction as Fuller really makes a great atmosphere and a very claustrophobic one at that. The men are constantly being shown one on top of the other and the tight cinematography really makes you feel as if you're sitting along side the men and after a while you really begin to feel things getting tighter and tighter as the suspense builds up. One of the best sequences in the film is when a land mine, buried in the snow, traps one of the men and another soldier must walk to him, never knowing when he might step on one of the mines. This entire sequence is full of great suspense and it's doubtful you'll forget it once you see it. The cast includes good performances from Richard Basehart, Gene Evans and Michael O'Shea as well as a very brief appearance from an uncredited James Dean. I think the film's one major flaw is that some of the dialogue is extremely weak and many of the dialogue sequences just aren't strong enough to stand up to the action sequences. I think there were way too many short sentences and in the long run the dialogue just wasn't strong enough to carry the film.