A Brilliant Conflict

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Did this film come out in 1963? I would guess the year is wrong. Bill Bendix looked just like he did in his films of the late 1940s and 1950s. True that Rory Calhoun looked somewhat older, but something is terribly amiss here, and I'm not even talking about the film just yet.Whoever thought that a war film with such a cast could be that dull? It dealt with 3 American soldiers fleeing from a North Korean prisoner camp. They meet up with a little boy who joins forces with them after his parents are killed.Bendix plays his usual role as a tough guy with a heart of gold. Richard Jaeckel's role as a collaborator just didn't make much sense, but neither did this movie. It's 84 minutes of tedious boredom.O Rory, allowing a kid age 7 to puff away on cigarette was nauseating. Your line that it wouldn't hurt him must have had the American Cancer Society up in arms. No wonder you succumbed to kidney failure, emphysema and diabetes years later. Bendix is also smoking away in this 1963 film, but by 1964 he was dead of stomach cancer. Suspicious of the year of this miserable film.

A.C. Lyles who is primarily known as a producer of B westerns utilizing players past their prime years decided to go in for B Korean War film which combines escaping GI POWS with a good old fashioned boy and his dog story in The Young And The Brave. The results are less than gratifying.The trio of escaping GIs are Rory Calhoun, William Bendix and Robert Ivers. Bendix is really looking way too old to be a convincing combat soldier and in fact he was in his middle Fifties. A friendly Korean farmer and wife help them out which causes their deaths, but their son played by Manuel Padilla and his adopted German Shepherd dog escape with the soldiers. The kid and the dog prove most useful like Rusty and Rin Tin Tin.The location for the film looks a whole lot like many a western was shot there and I suspect A.C. Lyles went to familiar turf to shoot this film. All the players look like they've really got no conviction in this project. Maybe A.C. should have stuck to westerns.

I didn't think this movie was that bad. The Korean War is largely forgotten so the proud vets of that war can have pride in watching this. The set and some of the script is a bit tired and worn looking but it adds to the almost camp like atmosphere, which makes this almost a late night B movie classic. Is it a sanitized version of war? Well yea but what wasn't back then? War is awful and senseless, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't pay homage to the brave men who fought for us, even in a war as unpopular as this one, or was this a "police action"? Either way 54,000 men, mostly from the US, gave their lives, knowing that and realizing this was made in a simpler time when Presidents had their sexual dalliances covered up, baseball players hit 61 homers, cleanly, and we were all glued to watching a single Astronaut go into space 15 minutes and thought that was incredible ( and it was in 1961)well then that makes this a good ole B rated memory flick to watch.

What can you say about a movie that has a Mexican playing a Korean kid, that looks as if it were shot on somebody's farm somewhere, and that dredges up every cliche out of every mediocre war movie ever made. Amazingly, this cheap junk has a pretty good cast (Rory Calhoun, William Bendix, Richard Jaekal, Richard Arlen and John Agar). However, a movie that has Calhoun yelling, "Our planes are coming in," and diving to the ground, without ever LOOKING at the sky, is pretty bad, by just about anybody's standards.