War Hunt is a 1962 film directed by Denis Sanders.
It is set in the closing weeks of the Korean War. Private Roy Loomis (Robert Redford) is a replacement who has been sent out to the front lines. Those front lines have barely budged in two years, and most of the soldiers, who are acutely aware of the peace talks in Panmunjom, are just trying to stay alive.
One exception however is Private Raymond Endore (John Saxon). Pvt. Loomis is unsettled by Pvt. Endore, a creepily intense young man who is extremely good at infiltrating enemy lines and killing Chinese, but has a disturbing manner and is barely able to carry on a casual conversation. Endore has adopted "Charlie", a Korean war orphan who serves as an errand boy for the platoon, but Endore is even creepy about that, being violently possessive of Charlie and becoming angry when Loomis tries to make friends with the boy.
The squad is kicking around on July 27, 1953, when they get word that the two sides have agreed on a ceasefire and the war is over. Everyone is happy, except for Endore. Loomis eventually realizes that Endore doesn't want his own war to be over.
Film debuts of Redford, Sydney Pollack who played Sgt. Van Horn (Pollack would not act again for 20 years as he instead became a director), and Tom Skerritt, who played Sgt. Showalter. Gavin MacLeod played Pvt. Crotty.
Tropes:
- And Starring: Robert Redford gets an "& Introducing" credit. Technically this was not Redford's film debut as he'd been an extra in the 1960 Anthony Perkins comedy Tall Story.
- Artistic License – Military:
- There is a whole spiel about how when the soldiers see flares, they are supposed to freeze in place. This is exactly wrong, as combat doctrine is for soldiers to hit the ground.
- Loomis is wounded in the leg, has to crawl back to the American lines, and is walking with a severe limp for sometime thereafter. A soldier limping that badly would not be left in the front line.
- Asian Hooker Stereotype: The Hays Code was dying in 1962 but wasn't quite dead. So this movie gets the idea across by having a very pretty Korean woman on the other side of the barbed wire say hello to Loomis then, out of the blue, say "I love you." She follows this up by saying "You got trouble, GI? Come on, I fix!" Loomis takes a pass.
- Blade-of-Grass Cut: The opening credits play out over a series of extreme closeups of wheat and tall grass, emphasizing the pastoral beauty of the country that war is despoiling.
- Blood Knight: Endore, who doesn't seem to like war so much as he seems addicted to war. When a colonel observes Endore's strange manner and says that he needs some R&R, Endore is horrified. On a scouting mission, Loomis sees Endore do a bizarre little dance around the corpse of a Chinese soldier that he has killed. And at the end, Endore is still sneaking around and knifing Chinese soldiers to death on the 28th of July, after the war is over.
- Deer in the Headlights: Loomis freezes up during the Chinese attack, sitting back and not firing his rifle even as the others are banging away. He freezes up so badly that he doesn't even respond when the company gets the order to retreat, not getting up to move until the Chinese are actually in the trench.
- Downer Ending: Endore lunges at Capt. Pratt with a knife, and Pratt shoots and kills him, despite Loomis's scream to "WAIT!" Little Charlie sees this and abandons the rest of the squad, running off to an uncertain fate.
- It's Quiet… Too Quiet: The pop music being played by the Tokyo Rose woman briefly stops, everyone freezes up, and then it starts again. Van Horn explains to Loomis that "It's when she stops playing. That's when we screw in our belly buttons." Sure enough, later the music stops again, and this time it doesn't start back up, instead followed by a bombardment.
- Naïve Newcomer: Loomis the newbie, who has to have a lot of things explained to him after joining all the veteran soldiers in the platoon.
- Old Soldier: Crotty and Van Horn, unlike the wet-behind-the-ears Loomis. Crotty says he's been in the army since 1937, he doesn't understand why they aren't trying harder to win the war, and that he's thinking about leaving the army. Challenged about what he'd do after the army, Crotty can't think of anything. Van Horn says towards the end, when the captain is saying they will have to cross the lines to look for Endore, that he is a 20-year-man without a black mark and so he's hesitant to go.
- Shell-Shocked Veteran: Endore has been driven insane by the war. He seemingly can barely function as a human being when he's not fighting. When Captain Pratt tries to coax him back by saying the war is over, Loomis screams "There'll be another!"
- Stock Footage: Some obvious stock footage of wounded being carried away to the helicopters.
- Thousand-Yard Stare:
- Endore is given to these when he's not actively engaged on a mission, showing how badly he has been damaged by the war.
- His first exposure to enemy bombardment leaves Loomis in a sort of trance, staring emptily. His buddies have to shake him out of it.
- Tokyo Rose:
- The gang is sitting around camp listening to a radio, carrying a broadcast by a man who says in perfect, unaccented English that the Chinese army wants peace but greedy American capitalists are forcing the GIs to fight.
- When they're in the frontline trenches they hear over the enemy loudspeakers the pleasant tones of a woman who shows unnerving knowledge of their names, before she plays pop music. When Beijing Rose is interrupted by a man screaming something in Chinese, the Americans are annoyed.
- Voiceover Letter: There's voiceover letter from Loomis to his parents, heard as he's typing it (he's gotten a job as a clerk for the captain).
- War Is Hell: One soldier has been driven into Blood Knight insanity. The others are either terrified newbies or terrified vets who are just hoping to survive until the end. A traumatized child recounts how an American firebombing killed his whole family. And, as one officer baldly informs the new replacements, the soldiers aren't trying to win the war; their only purpose is to kill Chinese until the Chinese agree to a cease-fire.
