BrianDanaCamp

TARGET ZERO (1955) is a solid Korean War film that focuses on an American patrol trying to find its way back to their own lines with enemy soldiers all around them. They pick up a civilian American woman, a biochemist with nursing training named Ann Galloway (Peggie Castle), and she has no choice but to tend the wounded patrol members and join the group on their slog across hostile terrain. It's tough going for her, experiencing combat conditions she isn't trained for, but she bears up in the long run. In the course of the film, she has long talks with at least three members of the patrol, asking about their feelings, wondering about their loyalty to the unit and how that affects their emotions, and finally trying to understand how they withstand the constant danger and uncertainty. Actress Castle has great chemistry with each of the actors, especially Richard Conte and Charles Bronson, and reveals the human layers underneath an otherwise standard war mission and gives the film an emotional core that other films in the genre might have avoided. The romance that develops between her and Conte builds gradually and plausibly, with one long dialogue exchange where she explains her feelings to Conte. Such exchanges in the script by James Warner Bellah and Sam Rolfe may have seemed melodramatic to me during my first viewing, but I've come to appreciate expressions of the undercurrents that generally go unsaid in films like this. I was very moved by Castle's performance, and this screening comes after years of appreciating her more and more, especially after watching her as series regular Lily in the Warner Bros. TV western, "Lawman," in which she plays alongside John Russell, a program shown regularly on the Encore Western Channel.

Conte, as the senior officer in the patrol, plays an older, wearier version of the combat-hardened infantrymen with studied unflappability he made famous in movies made during WWII like GUADALCANAL DIARY and A WALK IN THE SUN. His trademark line in the latter, "Everybody dies," is transformed here into the more understanding "Every man has his own war."

Although there are closeup scenes shot with rear screen projection back at the studio, most of the film was shot on location in Arizona and Colorado, which gives the action a rugged authenticity that might have been harder to achieve on sets built on studio soundstages. The climactic action was shot on the grounds of Fort Carson, a U. S. Army base in Colorado, and made use of the Colorado Air National Guard in the film's most impressive combat sequence, in which we see a team of four fighter jets attack the oncoming Reds as our heroes defend a hill called "Sullivan's Muscle." The jets do some stunning maneuvers and are seen in shots with the actors, including one startling bit where a jet appears from below and flies right over Conte's head. That must've required some heavy-duty persuasion.

For the record, this is a completely new review replacing an earlier one I posted about this film on April 2, 2010. It was a mixed-to-negative review with a 5/10 rating. I've since revisited the film when it aired on TCM on August 16, 2025, 15 years later, and I've changed my tune entirely, as you can see.

The great Japanese film actor Toshiro Mifune made his first foray into TV acting in this 1968 black-and-white miniseries, co-produced by Toho Pictures, but he would move to TV in a big way in the 1970s. Here he plays Jiro Funayama, a swordsman during the Warring States period of 1560, whose family was killed by a corrupt warlord and he seeks revenge, picking up random unemployed swordsmen, and one ninja, along the way. There's a lot of location photography and a steady pace of swordfighting action against some formidable opponents in the two 48-minute episodes I've seen, in both of which Mifune has to also rescue a damsel-in-distress. The actor is his usual staunch, grim self, beautifully played as always, complemented by comic relief provided by some of the other characters. There's not much info about this series in English on the web nor is there an entry for it under its Japanese or English titles in "The Dorama Encyclopedia: A Guide to Japanese TV Drama Since 1953," the only reference book I've seen in English covering Japanese TV shows. Toho star Akira Takarada (GOJIRA) leads the guest cast in the second episode but I don't know if he appears in any later segments.

TOO LATE FOR LOVE (1967) is a romantic melodrama with tragic elements from Hong Kong's Shaw Bros. Studio. Like the previous year's THE BLUE AND THE BLACK (also reviewed here by me), this one is set during China's war with Japan during World War II. The director, Lo Chen, is aiming for a tearjerker on the same scale, but it's told way too simplistically and merely checks off the boxes needed for the formula without giving the audience any reason to engage emotionally with the story. When Sufen, played by Ivy Ling Po, begins coughing early in the film, we immediately get a good idea of this movie's direction--and it never veers from it. While her husband (Kwan Shan) goes off to war, Sufen is left in his mother's house and bends over backwards to try to appease the overbearing woman who shows her displeasure with Sufen at any opportunity, going so far as to turn away a doctor who has been called to treat Sufen's condition. "It's just a cold," the mother insists. Eventually, the mother, played by Ouyang Shafei, sends Sufen back to her father, who gruffly rebuffs the husband when he comes to get his wife back. The mother's behavior is so unreasonable with no discernible motive other than to pump up the melodrama that we are unable to suspend disbelief as the story progresses.

The battle scenes between the Chinese army and Japanese soldiers are pretty extensive and involve dozens of extras and lots of weaponry, ammunition and explosions. Sufen's husband, Guoliang Li, a Lieutenant, is much more courageous in battle than he is at home with his controlling mother and acquits himself heroically in the course of the action. Curiously, word of his exploits never reach his mother, his wife or his father-in-law. He would have been hailed as a brave patriot and heroic defender of his country, yet no one acknowledges this. Sufen's father, played by Ching Miao, is a high-ranking military officer, frequently seen in uniform and accompanied by an aide-de-camp, yet he's always home and never leaves for the front. Nor does he ever discuss the war with Guoliang. This struck me as very odd and I could never take the film seriously as a result.

There are five songs in the film. Ivy sings three of them, two being heard on the soundtrack and one sung on-camera to her husband during an idyllic nature walk. The soldiers sing a marching song on their way to battle and a group of schoolgirls sing a choral song as Guoliang passes them on his long way home with crutches after a crippling injury from his war service. (You'd think a grateful Chinese military would have at least driven him home with an official escort.)