Patrick McElroy on renegade director Sam Fuller's STEEL HELMET

“Film is a battleground. Love, hate, violence, action, death… In a word, emotion.”

Those words uttered by writer director Samuel Fuller, are words on filmmaking that could only be said by someone who’s experienced combat. His career consisted of many war films such as Fixed Bayonets!, China Gate, Verboten!, Merrill’s Marauders, and The Big Red One, but perhaps the greatest of them is his 1951 film, The Steel Helmet.

With a career that started in newspaper journalism, along with time served in the United States Army during World War II, Fuller approached the subject of war with the “grab by the lapels” quality of a newspaper tabloid, and the gritty realism of someone who saw the carnage of battle. The Steel Helmet would be the first film to deal with the Korean War, and most of the country was unaware of the reality of it. The film centers on a Sergeant (Gene Evans), who’s patrol has been ambushed, is joined by a South Korean orphan, a Japanese American, a black medic, and other outsiders as they seek refuge in an abandoned Buddhist temple. While reading the synopsis it might be surprising to see that much diversity in a Hollywood film at the time, but Fuller was an iconoclast. He approaches the racism of the typical white American, but never redeems them as Stanley Kramer would for the next two decades. Coming off of the previous war, America had a sentimental, and patriotic view of war. With this film, Fuller showed pain of it. The amount of violence he gets away with is shocking.

One of the great sequences in the film is when Evans character is in battle, and it goes in for a close up, and to capture the dazed feeling of a soldier Fuller put fire flares below the camera, giving it a hazy look. It would later influence Martin Scorsese when filming the failed fight in Raging Bull.

To watch The Steel Helmet 70 years later, is to experience a side of the war that’s become more common, as many have grown to question our countries place in the world, from a filmmaker who lived it. 

Patrick McElroy is a movie writer and movie lover based in Los Angeles. Check out his other writing at: https://www.facebook.com/patrick.mcelroy.3726 or his IG: @mcelroy.patrick