Director – Lee Man-hee – 1963 – South Korea – 110m
***1/2
A small unit of Korean soldiers pushing North in the Korean War adopt an orphaned girl as a mascot before being all but wiped out – plays in Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank
This opens impressively with what looks like stock footage of armoured cars and infantry coming up a beach. Soldiers race across open ground to a safe shooting position, briefly going back a couple of dozen or so feet to drag two of their wounded comrades forward into comparative safety.
They move on to a derelict, war-torn town. Burning buildings, half-collapsed sections of walls (one of which partially topples as they wait momentarily beside it). One soldier advances across a patch of open ground, gun in hands, grenade at the ready, watched by his expectant comrades from their positions of cover. Time seems to stand still. Eventually he lobs the grenade and the others move up behind him. He drops into a ditch. Ahead of him, a civilian woman comes onto the waste ground with her small daughter. The mother gets shot. The soldiers stop shooting and rescue the understandably confused little girl.
They continue through the town, contending with several enemy soldiers who appear to be positioned alone on upper storeys. “What were they thinking, going up to the top?” asks one of our soldiers. “Faster route to Heaven”, comes the reply. Two of the unit pass ovens with a door open at either end, helmet balanced on upright rifle as a decoy to attract enemy fire, reveal his position, and allow them to safely shoot him dead.
They find a room of corpses of men strung from the ceiling, and bodies of men and women strewn unceremoniously across the floor. Geung-ik recognises one of them as his younger sister and is stricken both with grief and thoughts of revenge against her killer.
The army moves on across country, North of Seoul (which must have been the town they were in), with the unit transporting the little girl Young-hui (Chon Youngson) in a hammock-like hanging rigged on a horizontal pole. Later, in the units quarters in a break from fighting, she tells Geung-ik that the person his sister was killed by was Geung-ja. This causes tension later on when Geung-ja’s older brother is posted to the unit, a difficult situation which both men have to live with. The older brother acknowledges that his younger sibling was responsible for the atrocity, which suggests that some families have been torn apart by the conflict, as some family members are fighting on one side and some on the other.
Geung-ik takes the little girl under his wing, to the extent that he stays behind to look after Young-hui when the squad leader (Jang Dong-hui) organises a night out at The Lucky Club – a local brothel set up to service US Marines and UN forces which the leader manages to talk (by way of smashing windows and paying for the damage) into servicing Koreans on this particular evening
The squad get sent further North, with Young-hui staying put awaiting their return, to defend an impossible position from Chinese troops. They are unable to radio for reinforcements because to do so would give away their position to the enemy, so the radio operator, hitherto regarded as a sissy by his comrades, resolves to take the message back to HQ by going there himself, a perilous route since Chinese troops are everywhere.
With a title that pretty much gives away the plot before the film has started, this is a deft portrayal of the pointlessness of war. The enemy soldiers in the North are all Chinese, as if the film doesn’t wish to acknowledge that the enemy in the North, although backed by the Chinese, were also Korean, although the nationality of the opposition in Seoul are never really specified (presumably Korean?) and the man the girl identifies as the killer of the soldier’s sister has a Korean name, so all this seems a little muddled in terms of the film’s messaging. It was made with the co-operation of the military, so perhaps there is a propagandist message in here about the Chinese struggling with more personal concerns about the division of the Korean people into two factions, North and South.
If you’re looking for a detailed, which soldiers are where and how does this fit into the overall picture of the Korean War, this film isn’t the place to come, as it never really explains any of that. The opening landing is presumably Incheon, and the besieged city is almost certainly Seoul, although it’s only named as such as an afterthought.
The whole thing is much more interested in the bravery and camaraderie of the men, something it shows very well, and their looking after the little girl. Young-hui, for her part, seems surprisingly unfazed by the fact the unit accidentally shot her mother dead and only slightly more upset at the end by the news that most of the men aren’t coming back. Her reaction is not terribly convincing, as if the film, having brought up the subject in the first place, can’t quite bring itself to fully confront the trauma of being orphaned in war.
Mixed messages, then; a film full of contradictions. Lee later made the far more focused A Day Out (1968, unreleased until 2005, and now widely considered his masterpiece) which painted such a grim picture of life in urban, post-war South Korea that the authorities refused it a release for over thirty years when he wouldn’t implement their suggested changes.
Additional cast: Lee Dae-yob, Ku Bong-seo.
Note: The film’s IMDb page also lists (and has several stills featuring) Jock Mahoney and Pat Yi among the cast, plus an additional US cinematographer and other technicians. Reading between the lines of the user review entitled The Mascot on IMDb, there would appear to be a US version called Marine Battleground which features a frame story in which reporter Nick Rawlins (Jock Mahoney) talks to the adult nurse Young-hui (Pat Yi) about her being adopted as a mascot by a Korean army unit after her family was killed in the Korean War. This sequence was presumably shot and added for the US and Canadian 1966 releases, since no such scene exists in the Korean Film Archive’s 2010 restoration of the film, watched for this review.
The Marines Who Never Returned plays in Echoes in Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema which runs from Monday, October 28th until the end of 2024 at BFI Southbank.
Trailer (Echoes In Time | Korean Films of the Golden Age and New Cinema):
LKFF, The London Korean Film Festival 2024 ran from Friday, November 1st to Wednesday, November 13th at BFI Southbank and other venues.
Trailer (LKFF 2024):