The Young and the Brave
August. 01,1963 NRA drama of the Korean War. Four American Army POWs escape behind enemy lines and try to make their way back to their units in the South. Along the way they are aided by a young Korean boy and his adopted dog, a US trained German Shepherd named Lobo.
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Reviews
You won't be disappointed!
Powerful
Great Film overall
Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
Movie isn't anything fantastic but it does contain many many scenes of Rory Calhoun standing and walking as if his life depends on it--and given that he's being chased by North Koreans who are ready and eager to kill him at the drop of a hat--it certainly does.I can't really fault anything that happens in the film--its literally something that came on TCM when i wasn't really paying attention, looked up the synopsis of the film and who was in it and ended up watching it mainly because it looked like it was Rory Calhoun Standing and Walking The Motion Picture--which it kind of was.Would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to see Rory Calhoun in all his standing and walking glory. (but to be honest with you i'm positive he's stood and walked in better films then this before..he must have right?)
A.C. Lyles who is primarily known as a producer of B westerns utilizing players past their prime years decided to go in for B Korean War film which combines escaping GI POWS with a good old fashioned boy and his dog story in The Young And The Brave. The results are less than gratifying.The trio of escaping GIs are Rory Calhoun, William Bendix and Robert Ivers. Bendix is really looking way too old to be a convincing combat soldier and in fact he was in his middle Fifties. A friendly Korean farmer and wife help them out which causes their deaths, but their son played by Manuel Padilla and his adopted German Shepherd dog escape with the soldiers. The kid and the dog prove most useful like Rusty and Rin Tin Tin.The location for the film looks a whole lot like many a western was shot there and I suspect A.C. Lyles went to familiar turf to shoot this film. All the players look like they've really got no conviction in this project. Maybe A.C. should have stuck to westerns.
I didn't think this movie was that bad. The Korean War is largely forgotten so the proud vets of that war can have pride in watching this. The set and some of the script is a bit tired and worn looking but it adds to the almost camp like atmosphere, which makes this almost a late night B movie classic. Is it a sanitized version of war? Well yea but what wasn't back then? War is awful and senseless, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't pay homage to the brave men who fought for us, even in a war as unpopular as this one, or was this a "police action"? Either way 54,000 men, mostly from the US, gave their lives, knowing that and realizing this was made in a simpler time when Presidents had their sexual dalliances covered up, baseball players hit 61 homers, cleanly, and we were all glued to watching a single Astronaut go into space 15 minutes and thought that was incredible ( and it was in 1961)well then that makes this a good ole B rated memory flick to watch.
What can you say about a movie that has a Mexican playing a Korean kid, that looks as if it were shot on somebody's farm somewhere, and that dredges up every cliche out of every mediocre war movie ever made. Amazingly, this cheap junk has a pretty good cast (Rory Calhoun, William Bendix, Richard Jaekal, Richard Arlen and John Agar). However, a movie that has Calhoun yelling, "Our planes are coming in," and diving to the ground, without ever LOOKING at the sky, is pretty bad, by just about anybody's standards.