General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

March of Fools (바보들의 행진)

March of Fools (바보들의 행진) is a 1975 South Korean comedy-drama directed by Ha Gil-jong, adapted from Choi In-ho's newspaper novel of the same name, which follows two philosophy students drifting through university life under the Yushin (South Korea's 1972 authoritarian constitution enabling Park Chung-hee's dictatorship) dictatorship of the mid-1970s.¹^•² Produced by Hwacheon Films, it opened in May 1975 and became a box-office success and a generational touchstone, despite losing roughly 20 to more than 30 minutes of footage to state censorship before release, depending on the source.³^•⁴^•² In a 2013 poll by the Korean Film Archive (KOFA) of the top 100 Korean films, it placed in a three-way tie for first with The Housemaid (1960) and The Aimless Bullet (1961).⁵

Key fact	Detail
Director / source	Ha Gil-jong; adapted from Choi In-ho's serialized newspaper novel of the same title¹
Release	May 1975 (May 31, 1975 per KOFIC); produced by Hwacheon Films⁴^•³
Cast	Yun Mun-seop as Byeong-tae, Ha Jae-young as Yeong-cheol, Lee Young-ok as Yeong-ja⁶
Censorship	Scenario review ordered a full revision with 22 items on December 10, 1974; sources differ on the total cut, and the film opened at roughly 99 minutes³^•²
Box office	153,780 admissions in South Korea⁷
Banned music	Song Chang-sik's "Why Are You Calling" (왜 불러) and "Whale Hunting" (고래사냥), from the soundtrack, were banned for their association with student protest²
Canonical status	Three-way tie for first in KOFA's 2013 poll of the top 100 Korean films⁵

Spoilers

Story and characters

The film follows Byeong-tae (Yun Mun-seop), a philosophy student, and his friend Yeong-cheol (Ha Jae-young), an aimless young man who dreams of catching a pretty whale, through blind dates, drinking contests, hair inspections, and brushes with the police.⁶^•⁸ Byeong-tae meets Yeong-ja (Lee Young-ok), a French literature student, through a group meeting; their relationship stays at the level of meeting and talking, with no promise of love.⁴

The opening sequence has the two young men fleeing a policeman who is trying to apprehend them for their long hair, ending with them caught and taken to a police box, from which they escape.⁸^•⁹ The tone starts as a bawdy college comedy and shifts toward melancholy as the characters confront a society with no bright future for their generation.¹⁰^•⁸ It closes with two of the most-remembered scenes in Korean cinema: Yeong-cheol cycling off a cliff into the East Sea, and the shorn Byeong-tae departing for military service on a troop train while Yeong-ja runs alongside and kisses him through the window.⁸^•¹¹

Censorship under the Yushin regime

The film was shaped by censorship at every stage. Hwacheon Films submitted the scenario to the Korean Arts and Culture Ethics Committee, a body under the Ministry of Culture and Information, on November 28, 1974. On December 10 it received notice that, because the flagged problems were too numerous, a full revision was required; the deletion and modification instructions covered 22 items across three pages, including a scene of Yeong-cheol striking the same pose as the Yi Sun-sin statue at Gwanghwamun on the ground that it might give the impression of insulting a revered figure. A revised script submitted on December 13 drew nine more deletion and modification orders on December 18. After the production registration moved to the ministry's film division, a further notice on December 30 objected that the subject itself, depicting the listless youth of university districts, had many problems, and ordered 11 or more cuts and revisions. Production was approved on January 23, 1975.³

The finished film fared no better. The trailer passed on April 14, 1975 only with two screen deletions and one dialogue deletion; the main feature, submitted on April 30, received its verdict on May 13 with five screen deletions, three dialogue deletions, and four screen shortenings, along with an adults-only rating.³ Sources differ on the scale of the losses: the film scholar Jeong Jong-hwa, a senior researcher at KOFA, writes that the film was completed at 117 minutes and released at 99 after close to 20 minutes of cuts,³ while the Film Society of Lincoln Center states that more than 30 minutes were lost at the script and print stages.² Among the excised material were a scene of Byeong-tae fighting a Japanese man in a bar, a scene of the two protagonists stripping a woman's clothes at a police station, and a demonstration scene.⁷

Rather than hiding the damage, Ha chose to leave the traces of censorship exposed on screen, which is why the film's rhythm collapses in its later episodes; the critic Jeong Jong-hwa treats this decision as the reason a compromised film became a landmark problem work of Korean film history.³ The film scholar Jeon Woo-hyung argues that the film devised a cinematic language responding to censorship, and that passing through the state's layers of review made it, paradoxically, a better film and a break with Korean cinema's earlier conventions.¹²

Youth culture of the 1970s

The film is regarded as the representative youth film of 1970s Korea, built on draft beer, blue jeans, acoustic guitars, folk songs, and university students, along with resistance to and gloom about the times.⁶^•¹³ Its long-hair crackdown scenes reflect real policy: an October 1, 1971 newspaper report described the start of the "scissors" campaign against "decadent trends," in which 1,164 people had their heads forcibly shaved and were released with a warning, under a standard targeting hair covering the ears or longer than a woman's bob.⁹ The film treats such controls, along with curfews and slogans, as the disciplinary texture of everyday life under the regime, and its protagonists' "march" reads as a refusal to serve as docile bodies.²^•¹⁴

Song Chang-sik's songs on the soundtrack, "Why Are You Calling" and "Whale Hunting," carried the emotional energy of this youth culture and were themselves banned after release for their association with student protest.²^•¹⁵

Reception and legacy

The film was a commercial and critical success, drawing 153,780 admissions and praise from the press, and it established Ha Gil-jong as a director of standing in Chungmuro after the box-office failures of The Flower Pot (1972) and Fidelity (1973).⁷^•³ Its success produced a "Byeong-tae syndrome" among audiences and led to a sequel, Byung-tae and Young-ja (1979), which became Ha's final film; he directed seven features in the mid to late 1970s and died young.¹⁶^•¹⁰^•¹⁷ Ha had studied film at UCLA, where he was a classmate of Francis Ford Coppola, and on returning to Korea co-founded the Yeongsang Sidae (The Era of the Image) movement, which brought New Wave restlessness and American New Cinema energy into Korean commercial filmmaking.²^•¹¹

Preservation and reevaluation have kept the film in circulation. KOFA digitally remastered it in 2013 and in 2014 released it, together with The Housemaid, as one of the first two titles of its Blu-ray Collection; the release includes the censorship documents, a compilation of the excised footage, and two audio commentaries, by the critic Jung Sung-il in Korean and Darcy Paquet in English.⁵ The film has since screened in international retrospectives, including a Ha Gil-jong series at the Harvard Film Archive in 2017 and a 2K remaster premiere at the Walter Reade Theater.⁴^•² Scholars also credit it with influence on 1980s filmmakers who smuggled political statements past the censors under the guise of genre pictures.¹⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026