General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Men in War

Men in War is a 1957 American black-and-white war film directed by Anthony Mann, in which an isolated American infantry platoon struggles to reach Hill 465 behind enemy lines during the opening months of the Korean War. It stars Robert Ryan as Lieutenant Benson and Aldo Ray as Sergeant Montana, and it was followed by another war film directed by Mann, The Heroes of Telemark (1965).¹^•²^•¹⁰

Key fact	Detail
Release	World premiere in Los Angeles on 25 January 1957; general release February 1957³
Director	Anthony Mann, known for 1940s film noirs and 1950s Westerns with James Stewart; he also directed the war film The Heroes of Telemark (1965)¹^•²^•¹⁰
Source	The novel Day Without End (Combat) by Van Van Praag (New York, 1949)¹
Screenplay	Credited to Philip Yordan; many film historians attribute it to the blacklisted writer Ben Maddow¹
Production	Security Pictures, Inc., produced by Sidney Harmon; distributed by United Artists; cinematography by Ernest Haller; music by Elmer Bernstein¹
Format	101–102 minutes, black and white, 1.85:1 widescreen³
Box office	Made for under $1,000,000; took in about $500,000 domestically and over $2,000,000 outside the United States¹

Spoilers

Plot

The film is set on September 6, 1950, early in the Korean War. Lieutenant Benson (Robert Ryan) and his platoon are stranded on a hillside, unable to reach division headquarters by radio and unable to advance because their vehicle is beyond repair. After a sniper quietly bayonets one of the men, Benson decides their one chance of survival is to march to Hill 465, where the division is located.³

A speeding jeep driven by Sergeant Montana (Aldo Ray) barrels through the platoon. Montana is ferrying his colonel (Robert Keith), who has been left unable to speak or walk by shell shock. Benson commandeers the vehicle to carry the platoon's gear, over Montana's fierce opposition, and orders Montana to carry the colonel along with the march.³ The two men cannot stand each other, but together they must get the survivors to Hill 465 through territory stalked by unseen snipers.⁴

Morris Dickstein, a Distinguished Professor of English and Theatre at the CUNY Graduate Center, calls the film's setting a moment when the war was at its nadir, with South Korea mostly overrun and United Nations troops confined to a small perimeter near Pusan; what matters to the soldiers is staying alive, rather than any war aims or victory.⁵

Production

Mann directed the film in 1956, with production beginning in early July of that year, as a military drama that "tells the story of everyday life in war on a small scale."³^•⁴ It was a low-budget film by Mann's standards, produced by the independent Security Pictures for about $1 million.² Unable to obtain tanks or military extras from the Pentagon, Mann and composer Elmer Bernstein concentrated on the landscape of Bronson Canyon, and enemy soldiers are rarely seen on screen.⁶ According to Hollywood Reporter news items, portions were shot at Bronson Canyon, Malibu Canyon, and the Hill Ranch in Thousand Oaks, all standing in for Korea.¹

The screenplay credit is a documented point of contention. Philip Yordan, a prolific screenwriter who served as a front for blacklisted writers throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, is the credited writer, but many contemporary film historians attribute the adaptation to Ben Maddow, the blacklisted writer of The Asphalt Jungle (1950).² According to Writers Guild information cited by the AFI Catalog, no change in the credits had been designated or requested as of 2005.¹

A distinctive production detail concerns the colonel: Robert Keith has no dialogue through nearly the entire film. His character tries to speak twice late in the film and cannot; his only word comes just before he dies, when he says "son" to Montana.¹

Style and themes

The film opens with the quotation "Tell me the story of the foot soldier and I will tell you the story of all wars."¹ TCM's essay describes it as combat in close-up, eschewing patriotism and sentimentality for a portrait of war from the grunt's-eye view, comparable to Sam Fuller's 1951 Korean War drama The Steel Helmet.² The tension between Benson, who clings to by-the-book command, and Montana, whose battlefield instincts keep the platoon alive but who refuses to acknowledge Benson's authority, drives the film in the way the dueling male rivalry drives most of Mann's Westerns.⁷^•⁵

A scholarly study of early Cold War combat films notes that Van Van Praag's 1949 novel was set during the Normandy invasion of World War II, so Mann's transference of the story to a Korean War setting enhances its decontextualized, "all-wars-are-the-same" quality; Mann's G.I.s do not know why they fight, and the battalion they are sent to join at Hill 465 has been overrun.⁸ The study also notes that the film's familiar southern California scenery, standing in for a sun-baked North Korea dotted with mesquite, fully severs the Korean War film from the World War II combat genre and its portrayal of national purpose.⁸

Reception

The film was a failure in the United States but a success in postwar Europe.⁷ According to a 6 August 1957 Hollywood Reporter item, it earned only $500,000 domestically against more than $2,000,000 outside the U.S.¹ The U.S. Army, whose cooperation the pressbook had advertised, objected to the film; a 21 February 1957 news item reported that the Army refused to participate in a planned premiere, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive records that the Army deemed it offensive to "the dignity of commissioned and non-commissioned officers."¹^•⁷

Later critical assessment has been favorable. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 88% Tomatometer rating from 8 reviews.⁹ Derek Adams of Time Out called it one of the best of the lost patrol movies, bleakly anti-heroic and prefiguring Lewis Milestone's Pork Chop Hill in the bitter irony of its climactic assault on a hill.⁹ Dickstein called it one of the most grim and depressing combat films ever made in the United States, noting that it eerily seems to anticipate the Vietnam War rather than the Korean conflict it depicts.⁵ The UCLA Archive, which restored the film from a 35mm acetate fine grain master and copyright print for its 2015 Festival of Preservation, writes that Mann's depiction of the harsh realities of the Korean War was ahead of its time and has been cited by the director as one of his best works.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › War and historical films (individual works) › War action and adventure › War action films released through 1999 › Released 1934 to 1962

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

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