Inchon

For the most part no one has watched this film in the twenty plus years since it was released to theaters. Considering that almost no one saw it when it was released I think the producers certainly know what they are doing.

While the film, which tells of the turning point in the Korean War, isn't good, or even fair, its not the worst war film ever made.Granted its close, but its not in the top ten or even top 25.

As bad as it is it should be watched by anyone in film school as examples of what not to do for money. First and foremost is Olivier's performance as Mac Arthur which IS simply so bad that that every award he ever received should have had to have been given back. Its one of the screens worst moments, and a warning of what happens when wax figures are left too long in the sun. Olivier's make up makes him look like the left over at fire sale in a wax museum.

The film is indifferently directed while the writing is bad TV soap opera. Its cleared no one cared about this film other than its producer who threw scads of money but to no avail.

An example of how and why not to make a movie.

You know a movie is gonna be bad when it warns that the events depicted in this fictional movie are fictional, but that's the least of the problems with the over-budget, over-directed, and overly long wet blanket war epic Inchon. The movie takes place during the Communist overthrow in Korea and the Battle of Inchon in 1950. It also throws in stories involving Barbara (Jacqueline Bassett) driving through South Korea with orphan children to meet her ex-husband Lt. Hallsworth (Ben Gazzara) and Douglas MacArthur (Laurence Olivier) setting up plans for battle and raiding a lighthouse to signal the battleships. I guess Terence Young was trying to channel David Lean with a giant cast of extras in grand sets and landscapes, but in Inchon, the story and subplots connect so little it feels more like a pilot for a 1950's TV show than a movie. However, the cornball melodrama, overabundance on pyrotechnic effects, and horrendous writing makes it more on par with the material for B-movies. More problems: the Korean invasion scenes tie very little to what's going on in the story, the battle sequences seem randomly scattered for no coherent reason, every extra overacts when blown up, and the love story is meaningless. Worst of all, when MacArthur showed up thirty minutes in, the movie seemed to jump ship on one story and steer focus to another, almost as if the screenwriter forgot who the main characters were and wanted to mimic Patton. Well to my knowledge, Laurence Olivier is no George C. Scott and Robin Moore and Laird Koenig are no Francis Ford Coppola and Edmund H. North, either. To compare Inchon to Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor would be an extraordinary insult, as Mr. Bay has more respect for explosions and knows how to keep his schlocky storylines consistently. Inchon, on the other hand, is a complete messy disaster from start to finish. (1 Corn Cob Pipe out of 5)

I will say that Inchon did have some nicely filmed battle sequences, but one of the greatest surprise military maneuvers of all time got a short shrift with the rest of the film. A nice documentary type film like The Longest Day would have been ideal. The back story certainly wasn't needed.

And that horrible makeup job that Laurence Olivier was given must have been done by Tammy Faye Bakker's people. He looks like a refugee from Madame Tussaud's. He sounds nothing like Douglas MacArthur. Olivier had the further misfortune to have his role come so soon after Gregory Peck portrayed MacArthur in MacArthur.

The story is that Olivier at some point in the early Seventies feeling he had nothing to prove any more to be at the pinnacle of his profession. So he began taking parts strictly for the cash. As this film was produced by the Reverend Sun Yung Moon no one ever said the Moonies lacked cash. Olivier uses the same American type accent he did in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and in another of his for the money only projects The Betsy.

The rest of the cast Ben Gazzara, Jacqueline Bisset, David Janssen, Toshiro Mifune etc. act with the smug confidence that they're Moonie checks just cleared the bank.

The landing at Inchon, done at the dawn hours within a narrow framework of time determined by the tides and on the western side of the Korean peninsula was militarily drawing to an inside straight. No doubt Douglas MacArthur deserves all kinds of kudos for what he did, even his sternest detractors have said it was brilliant. Said it did not get a film worthy of the achievement.

Inchon may have done one thing though. Laurence Olivier if not the only actor to win both an Oscar and a Razzie in his life certainly became the first to do it.

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.

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.