Fixed Bayonets!
With Richard Basehart, Gene Evans, Michael O'Shea.
US, 1951, 35mm, black & white, 92 min.
Print source: Academy Film Archive
For his debut at Fox and follow-up to The Steel Helmet, Fuller returned again to the Korean War with an even bleaker and different perspective on the then-ongoing conflict, now seen from the vantage of an exhausted US Army platoon left behind on a frigid snowy mountainside to hold back the inevitable enemy advance. Although shot entirely on the studio lot, Fixed Bayonets! delivers a startlingly realistic and harrowing depiction of combat colored by Fuller's ace typecasting of weathered tough guy character actors—Skip Homeier and Gene Evans among them—as war-worn "grunts.” More unusual, however, is the film's frequent subjective turn, with interior voiceovers speaking of the fear, gnawing boredom and moral dilemmas gripping the men, most critically the singularly anxious solider subtly played by Richard Basehart. As in The Steel Helmet, Fuller again challenges Hollywood's all-too-often one-dimensional definition of war heroism by revealing the fear and frightful indecision that is the everyday reality of the battlefield. Look carefully for a young James Dean in his first, very brief, screen appearance towards the end of the film.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Pickup on South Street
The Crimson Kimono
The Naked Kiss
Underworld U.S.A.
The Baron of Arizona
Merrill's Marauders
House of Bamboo
Fixed Bayonets!
Forty Guns
Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street
A Fuller Life
Run of the Arrow
Street of No Return
The Steel Helmet
The Big Red One
Shock Corridor
Tigrero: A Film That Was Never Made
