This is one of my very favourite war films. I count this movie in the same company as "All Quiet On The Western Front" (1930)"The Cruel Sea" (1953) "The Dam Busters" (1955)"Saving Private Ryan" (1998)And "The Thin Red Line" (Also 1998).These for me are all seriously esteemed and important films and i put "Pork Chop" (1959) right up there with the best.It has mood (Black & White photography) deep in shadows and drenched with the fear of the darkness, it has the fog and muddle of war, the random nature of death, where luck is as vital as the will to survive. The value of self, the nature of courage, the call of duty, and more than a fair semblance of authentic action and historical place time and location.Maybe "Pork Chop" is perhaps a simple justification of the cold war (then Raging)and the assertion of the American WAY superior to all others. The American civil war and the war of Independence is referenced early in case some in the audience might just be a communist sympathizer. Gregory Peck plays the authentically real Lt Joe Clemons, with the honest sincerity of American values only he could ever portray to such a degree of believability. Is this a film only of its time. Off coarse it is, but that is the very reason i find it so captivating.

I gave this movie a rave review when I previewed it at a trade screening in 1959, commenting that director Lewis Milestone was still the master of action battle sequences and that the movie was brilliantly photographed by Sam Leavitt, an expert in difficult location cinematography. On a second viewing, however, the movie is not as impressive. The characters are ciphers. Although we critics often complain about the stereotyped characters and the all-too-cozy flashbacks of the typical war picture, that doesn't mean that they should be replaced by shadows. The Gregory Peck character is just too tight-lipped and we know little about him. Similarly, Woody Strode's cowardice and malignity are merely taken for granted and never explained. Ditto Robert Blake's confusion and heroism – an interesting blend and doubtless realistic, but still a shadow. Yet incorporated within all this enthusiastic realism, we get the unlikely coincidence of the brother-in-law! Milestone's gritty direction with its sweeping tracking shots over craters of dead, becomes the film's justification, but the script's overall anti-Chinese philosophy now seems more dated than the anti-German stance of All Quiet on the Western Front. For all its gritty realism, locations, black-and-white photography, lack of background music (enemy records are used very effectively), this movie is more a pro-American tract for the times, whereas All Quiet delivers a message for all time.

A war film that doesn't pull any punches in it's depiction of the inherent futility of war. It's a "lions led by donkeys" affair with Gregory Peck and his men sent on a propaganda mission to secure a strategically irrelevant mound of rock and dirt in the last days of the Korean war.The ensuing slog and mindless carnage, along with the screaming ineptitude of the brass coordinating the debacle from the relative safety of command posts, make for gripping and affecting viewing. Filmed in grainy black and white, it's a tough and stark depiction of a type of warfare the pointlessness of which the world continues to fail to learn by to this day. Most everyone gets blown away. For no good reason.

***SPOILERS*** Non stop action war movie that never lets up for a moment as the US Army and Chinese Communists square off on hill 255 also known as Pork Chop Hill in the spring of 1953. With peace or cease fire negotiations going nowhere at Panmujeom the Red Chinese open up a full scale attack, using ear splitting bugles and human wave assaults, on Pork Chop Hill trying to dislodge the US Army company, Company K, that's holding it. With the battered and pot marked, from artillery shelling, hill being of no real strategic significance to either sides it turns out to be a battle of wills between the two side with the Chinese Communists more then willing to sacrifice their men in order to win!With Lt. Joe Celmons', Gregory Peck, company trying to hold off the fanatical and suicidal Red Chinese attacks it's decided by his superiors safely behind the lines not to reinforce him and thus let him and his men, now down from 135 to just 25 men, to twist in the wind with the Red Chinese planning to launch a final do or die attack on his positions at dusk April 17, 1953. Digging in and waiting for the final curtain to fall Let. Clemons feels that he and his men have been deserted or sacrificed for political expediency in the name of "peace" in order to get the stalled cease fire talks re-started! Where at least with the Communist Chinese their losses will be rewarded with taking the hill, Pork Chop Hill, and using it as a bargaining chip in the Panmunjeom cease fire negations!One of he best movies about the Korean War ever made "Pork Chop Hill" shows the frustration that the GI's suffered in fighting in it. Like in the film there was no hope of winning on the part of the US with the war being fought mostly along the 38th Parallel with the front lines moving no more then ten miles on either direction for more then, From May 1951 to July 1953, two years! Gregory Peck who made only two war movies up until then as a Russian guerrilla fighter in "Days of Glory" in 1943 and a US Army Air Force General in "12 O'Clock high" in 1949 fits right in the part as a grunt down in the mud GI in the film who's sense of loyalty to is country made him forget that it was deserting him and his men at their most argent time of need. Happily the ending of the movie like the battle of "Pork Chop Hill" in real life restored Lt. Clemons' faith in his country even though most of the men under his command didn't live long enough to see or realize it! P.S One of the oddest as well as poignant scenes in the film was just before the final assault on the hill by the Red Chinese. That's when their radio propagandist commentator started playing the song "Autumn in New York", this in the spring in Korea, just in order to fry the GI's brains in order to get them to surrender.