Gregory Peck – The Stoic Wardaddy

Directed by Lewis Milestone, Pork Chop Hill tells the story of a company of US infantry sent to occupy an outpost on the frontlines of the Korean war in the last days of the conflict. Released in 1959 it was made with the support of the U.S. military and loosely adheres to a factual account of the battle compiled by U.S. military historian S.L.A Marshall.

In terms of its message and tone Pork Chop Hill is a somewhat schizophrenic film that veers between depicting U.S. troops as unsung heroes in a crusade against communism and as a expendable pawns in a pointless conflict orchestrated by absentee commanders.

I don’t go much into Milestone’s backstory in this video but he was an interesting director. Lewis Milestone was born Lev Milstein in 1895 in Moldova and his family emigrated to the U.S. in 1913. In the latter stages of WWI Private Milstein recorded training films for the Army Signal Corps. After the war he became a naturalised U.S. citizen and changed his name.

Early in his film career he made one of Hollywood’s few legitimately anti-war films when he adapted Erich Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front (a book that was briefly banned for its pacifism by the Returned Services League here in Australia). He also adapted John Steinbeck’s novel, Of Mice and Men – although he somewhat skirted around Steinbeck’s critique of capitalism.

During the Second World War he made a bunch of propaganda films – including The Purple Heart (1944) which features some dizzyingly racist caricatures of Japanese officials. He also made one of the few pro-Russian war movies that was released to the American public- The North Star (1943). Ten years later that sympathetic depiction of the Russian/Soviet people ended up putting Milestone in the spotlight of Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee and Pork Chop Hill’s thematic confusion is probably due, in part, to the pressure on Milestone to prove his loyalty to the state.

More information about Joe Clemons can be found in his obituary in the Washington post from 2018.