Men in War

Mann’s Korean War film depicts in stark close-up the tension and exhaustion—both physical and moral—of battle. Robert Ryan plays a 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 volatile sergeant shepherding a shell-shocked colonel. Their dwindling group creeps painstakingly through a landscape whose late-summer textures camouflage a constant enemy presence. Stopping to smell the flowers is fatal. For the resigned Ryan, “battalion doesn’t exist, regiment doesn’t exist, the USA doesn’t exist”—just these men and this nameless hill.