Inchon

Many years ago, before the existence of YouTube (where you can watch this movie if you really want to see it), I arranged for an Internet buddy of mine to watch my bootleg copy of it, since he really wanted to see it. After he saw it, his comment pretty much sums up my view of the movie: "Painfully dull and mediocre." Yes, you may have heard that the critical consensus at the time of the movie's release was that the movie was incredibly inept a la PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, but that's not the case. It's just boring for the most part, and unintentional laughs are hard to find. But there's more fault to be found than just that. It's frankly embarrassing at times to view Laurence Olivier, who was at this point far from his prime as well as being miscast. As a matter of fact, the rest of the cast doesn't do much better in giving compelling performances. And while an insane amount of money was spent on production, much of the movie has a made for television look and feel to it.

I have a feeling that my comments won't stop people who really want to watch this movie (which as of this date has still not been issued on VHS or DVD) after hearing so many bad things about it over the years. To a degree I can understand this. But all the same, after you watch it, don't say that you weren't warned.

I recall the one weekend that this movie was in theatrical release. I was on a first date and there were absolutely no date-worthy movies playing. A bunch of well-dressed students (whom I later guessed to be Moonies)were lined up to see this one. Upon investigation I saw the producers were raffling off a Rolls Royce to all who bought a ticket. "Ooohh," she said. "Wouldn't it be fun if we won a car by going to see a movie?" OK, so I relented.

In retrospect even if we had won the car it wouldn't have been worth it. It wasn't even laughably bad. It was just pathetic, watching Sir Laurence's career spiraling down the money pit. Just a few short months after watching him flounder in "The Jazz Singer," here he was with an inch of pancake makeup spouting religious homilies.

It was a time when MacArthur was out of favor and the Cold War was in full swing, so the Reverend Moon was determined to use the latter to rectify the former. I am certainly not an expert on the military history of the Korean War so make no claims as to its historical accuracy. But with the over the top moralizing here I sat there knowing I was being manipulated, brainwashed, whatever.

And, on cue, the proselytizing for the Unification Church began as soon as the final credits rolled.

Uck, what a sickening experience. I never went out with her again.

Fortunately Sir Laurence rebounded shortly after with Clash Of The Titans and a few other not-quite-so-bad performances on made-for-TV movies so we aren't stuck with this as the last impression of this great actor.

I never got to see this movie in a theatrical release; I got to see the first part of it cut up for cable TV -- on a cable channel not known for movies. I wanted, honestly, to see a reverential treatment of the UN side of the Korean War, a war whose importance is now greatly underrecognized, and especially of one of the key battles in history. The war was, after all, the first in which the commies did not succeed in turning over a domino, so to speak.

The movie got off to a bad start with one of the actors (Ben Gazzara) launching into a long narrative monologue about the father of General MacArthur while on an airline flight. First of all, General Douglas MacArthur is the key figure of the movie, and his father was already long dead and irrelevant to the plot. Second, the long-winded monologue is not ordinary conversation of the type that one would expect between airline passengers! With the possible exception of university professors who can't be fired and dictators who can't be criticized, nobody gets away with such long-winded, irrelevant, narrative monologues in normal life.

Absurdities pile upon absurdities, and irrelevancies pile upon irrelevancies. Soldiers synchronize watches whose second hands aren't moving, and one gets a closeup of such an action. If you are going to show a close-up of any action, then make it real. Maudlin events at an orphanage take up much footage. Well, the Korean War was a carnage for civilians of all types, wasn't it? Soldiers taking Inchon fail to show fear -- and I can't imagine anyone going behind enemy lines not being scared out of his wits unless a psycho. Taking the lighthouse at Inchon, soldiers notice that the lighting and lens assembly was made in France (anyone who knows anything about lighthouses == and I live in a state that has lots of them -- knows that the lighthouse mechanisms and lenses from about a century ago all came from France).

The best movie about the Korean War remains MASH, and it centers upon support units. The brilliant invasion of central Korea at Inchon deserves far better treatment than this quicksand.

It's inescapable that "Inchon" is a bad movie. I mean, look at its pedigree:

*Funded by Moonies (Reverend Sun Myung Moon dipped deep in his pockets for this one),

*A morbidly stupid script (originally authored by the screenwriter for "The Happy Hooker"? Please....),

*A director working under haphazard circumstances (Young did great with the James Bond films but language barriers ruined countless shots and drove the cost of the film sky high),

*A cast that is capable of greatness but not in this instance (Bisset, Gazzara, Roundtree, Janssen, Mifune, Olivier!!!!),

*And a budget that most frequently disappears from the screen (how can $48 million not show on the screen? This is the movie that answers that question).

I saw this many moons ago (get it? Ha ha....) at my local theater on a double bill with "The Last American Virgin" (yes, you read right) and I think "Virgin" suffered from the association.

And Laurence Olivier has been in great things ("Wuthering Heights", "Rebecca", "Henry V", "Richard III", "Spartacus", "Sleuth") but has also been in his share of very bad things ("The Betsy", "The Boys from Brazil", "Dracula"/1979, "The Jazz Singer", "The Jigsaw Man", "Wild Geese II"). But as a putty-faced, mascara-smeared, gravel-voiced variation of General Douglas McArthur (more like his Loren Hardeman character from "The Betsy"), Olivier washes away all he'd accomplished with his Shakespeare work and takes on the guise of a wax dummy (with almost as much expressiveness).

And the movie itself? Forget everything you thought you knew about the Korean War and all its planning, maneuvers and troop placements. It's just about soldiers running back and forth, explosions, ships sailing far out of camera range and Douglas McArthur reciting the Lord's Prayer. Oh, and Bissett bouncing around. That's entertainment (sort of)!

On top of all of this, there was always the fear in its first-run status that Moonies would be posted at every theater in America to recruit Moonies-to-be. I escaped that but not the movie itself.

In the end, I can see why this one isn't on video or TV or even bootlegged on Ebay. "Inchon" may have been an important battle but the only thing the movie is important for is showing that it can waste more money that "Heaven's Gate". Congratulations!

No stars for "Inchon" - it shall NOT return.

I am one of the few people on this Earth who actually saw "Inchon" during its brief theatrical run in 1982, and did not see it again until a cable recording came my way very recently. It was fascinating to revisit this train wreck of a movie that took what should have been a fascinating event in history, and instead with a bloated budget of $40 million and the interference of the Moonies, turned it into something that ultimately isn't the worst thing ever produced for the screen, but at the same time is something that could have been made cheaply for TV at a fraction of the cost.

The thing "Inchon" most resembles is the godawful 1979 ABC miniseries "Pearl" which took the events of another famous event in history, and gave us a soapy, silly melodrama about a bunch of boring fictional characters. In "Inchon", the goings on of Ben Gazzara, Jacqueline Bisset (who looks stunning), Richard Roundtree and the wasted David Janssen could just as easily have been at home in some made for TV potboiler that utilized stock footage for the big moments. It's because "Inchon" had an A-level budget, and an inordinance of expensive set design and extras etc. that in the end made its flaws magnified in ways that a cheap TV miniseries like "Pearl" could keep obscured.

The acting...sheesh, Olivier does get the look of MacArthur right but Terence Young was clearly asleep when giving him instruction on how to deliver his lines, and the script he was given didn't help matters either. As for the rest, they're okay in a TV movie kind of way, but that's largely damning with faint praise. Jerry Goldsmith's score is great, as is the cinemtaography.

I will say one thing though to a couple reviewers though who think the greatest sin of this movie is its anti-communism. That is really about the ONLY thing you can give this movie a plus for, because the North Koreans of Kim Il Sung were a brutal thug regime and their invasion of the South was not a case of as one reviewer falsely implied one where atrocities were equally committed by both sides. The prologue to the movie that summarizes how Kim Il Sung flew to Moscow to receive permission from Stalin to go ahead with the invasion is dead accurate in its description of the real history and it sadly offers the initial hope that we're going to get a movie more in the mold of "The Longest Day" or "Tora! Tora! Tora!". Instead we got a movie that was as noted in the mold of "Pearl" and almost exclusively utilizing the bad fictional subplots that nearly wrecked "Midway." So yes, "Inchon" is bad, but not necessarily for the reasons that some people would like to have us think. It was ultimately more the fault of the scriptwriters, the actors and the director that "Inchon" turned out to be as bad as it was, than the heavy-hand of the Moonie cult (though their PR for the movie certainly dragged it down further).