After everything I've read or heard about "Inchon" - including the marvelously loopy account of its making in Harry and Michael Medved's book "The Hollywood Hall of Shame: - I was startled when I finally got a copy of the movie on DVD (bootlegged from the "Good Life TV Program" cable channel back when Sun Myung Moon's organization still owned the network) and found it not a bad movie, just a mediocre one. Like Michael Cimino's "Heaven's Gate" (which when I watched it I could see it was aspiring to greatness and also how and why it was falling short), it's a considerably better movie than its reputation. It's got two genuinely good, authoritative performances (by Ben Gazzara and David Janssen) and a great musical score by Jerry Goldsmith rivaling his Academy Award-winning work on "Patton" (a credit that probably got him this job). What's wrong with "Inchon" - aside from the bizarre interference by Sun Myung Moon, who when he was shown the first version insisted on more gore and bigger crowd scenes, leaving the director clueless about how to match his original footage with the additions Moon demanded - is the writers' seeming determination to cram EVERY stupid war-movie cliché into their script. It also doesn't help that to prep for his role as Douglas MacArthur, Laurence Olivier interviewed MacArthur's aide Alexander Haig (who went on to become Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff and Ronald Reagan's first Secretary of State). Haig told Olivier that MacArthur's voice sounded "just like W. C. Fields," and Olivier took that to heart and spoke his lines in the legendary drawl of the great comedian. And after two hours of buildup the final battle takes about 20 minutes and is virtually incomprehensible on screen. But there is enough professional competence behind "Inchon" it doesn't deserve a place on worst-movies-of-all-time lists, even though Sam Fuller's "The Steel Helmet" (a tight-knit, coherent and chilling drama) remains, to my mind, the best film ever made about the Korean War.
Review of Inchon
