Fixed Bayonets: Sam Fuller's 1951 Movie About a US Platoon

For being a writer-director who did things his own way, with minimal budgets and production values... and for being quite personally flamboyant, Samuel Fuller (1912-1997) has long been a favorite of auterist film critics. Although I think major defects in his work have been ignored by those mesmerized by Fuller's personality, I also think that there are almost always some things of interest in his movies.

I also think that, in 1951, while the Korean War was still raging, Fuller made one of the very best movies set in that conflict, "Steel Helmet"* with Gene Evans as a crusty sergeant. Later that same year, fuller wrote and directed "Fixed Bayonets," which also has Gene Evans as a crusty WWII-veteran sergeant. In both movies, the lieutenants are killed and command devolves down. In both movies, very small detachments of US soldiers are holding off the communist Chinese hordes. In "Fixed Bayonets," a platoon is left to hold a pass while the division retreats and is supposed to "sound like a division."

The situation is pretty much a replay of Thermopylae in the snows of the Sierra Nevadas (standing in for nothern North Korea). The movie begins with fulsome thanks for cooperation from the US Army, and the first line spoken is that "it takes more than brains to be a general in the United States Army, it takes guts." This is not a view expressed with much frequency by those on the front lines, and I felt that I had been given notice that Fuller (a WWII infantryman) was producing propaganda.

Much of the rest of the movie involves a corporal who had been in Officer Training School and is unable to shoot enemy soldiers or give commands being turned into a killer and leader of men. There is one private, Jonesy (Pat Hogan), who saw Corporal.Denno (Richard Basehart) not fire at an oncoming Chinese soldier and who expresses contempt openly for Denno. Sergeant Rock (Gene Evans) is aware that Denno is terrified of taking command and prepares him as well as he can, recognizing that Denno has brains and guts along with crippling self-doubt.