In his only combat film Mann, like Samuel Fuller, rejected conventional heroics, instead representing in stark detail the tension and exhaustion—both physical and moral—of battle. Robert Ryan plays a Korean War lieutenant, out of communication with headquarters, trying with his platoon to rejoin their division on a distant hill. He is forced into an uncomfortable alliance with Aldo Ray, a sergeant with violent instincts obsessively shepherding a mute, shell-shocked colonel, debris of another destroyed unit. They creep painstakingly through a closely observed landscape whose lovely late-summer textures camouflage a constant enemy presence. Stopping to smell the flowers is fatal. In the course of this long day's journey, the resigned Ryan declares, “Battalion doesn't exist, regiment doesn't exist, the U.S.A. doesn't exist”—just these men and this nameless hill.
—Juliet Clark