One Minute to Zero (1952)

I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much

the audience applauded

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

ONE MINUTE TO ZERO (1952) is a hokey Korean War movie filled with tired war movie clichés, but it's easy enough to digest and Ann Blyth is soooooo pretty that you don't mind sitting through it.The initial conflict between Army colonel Robert Mitchum and United Nations worker Ann Blyth soon blossoms into romance, but can Blyth let herself get involved with a soldier during wartime, knowing he's always in harm's way? Meanwhile, Mitchum and company have tough decisions to make trying to hold back the guerrilla fighters, who hide among the swarms of refugees.Made while our boys were over there fighting the commies, the film has an understandable propagandistic slant, but it's interesting to see a movie of the era set during the Korean War, rather than WWII. And the drama does touch upon some interesting moral gray areas.Robert Mitchum is always good, but Charles McGraw nearly steals the show in a solid supporting performance as Mitchum's gruff sidekick in the field. Also look for Alfred, the husky young janitor from MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET (1947), as one of the soldiers.The film's romantic theme seems to be the song "When I Fall in Love", as popularized by Nat King Cole.

How someone as workmanlike as director Tay Garnett could take talents the like of Robert Mitchum and Charles McGraw and crank out this piece of sausage is pretty hard to fathom. It's not that the story is so bad for its time (early 1950s), but that the execution is so poor. Mitchum manages to be good insofar as the worst dialog of his career allows him, and McGraw is loaded down with even worse talk. The chemistry between Mitchum and love interest Ann Blyth is nil, the story veers from sickeningly sweet to nauseatingly real (courtesy of some actual combat footage of various people during or just after being roasted alive, etc.), and the majority of the supporting performances are amazingly amateurish for a studio picture of its time. Mitchum plays an infantry officer in Korea at the beginning of the war there. He has a bit of a queasy stomach after slaughtering a bunch of civilian refugees because a few Communist infiltrators were hiding among them, but even his initially outraged girlfriend comes to see that "even a doctor amputating a leg has to cut off some good flesh with the bad," and pretty soon, this mini-My Lai is forgotten (without anyone apparently considering whether a wiser choice than massacre might have existed). But it's the amateurishness of the direction, the high-school-play sort of staging and dialog that make "One Minute to Zero" (a title without meaning or explanation in the film) an anomaly: how could these people, whose talent is undeniable, have made such a silly and childish little home movie. The philosophy of war, the details of combat and life in a war zone in general, even the romance, all are done with the sophistication and expertise of the average seven-year-old boy. This is the kind of movie Robert Mitchum was often accused of sleepwalking through, but in reality, were it not for him, it would be utterly unbearable.

"Pork Chop Hill" with Gregory Peck, "The Men" with Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray "Fix Bayonets" with Richard Basehart and "The Steel Helmet" with Gene Evans who also starred in "Fix Bayonets", are the top Korean War dramas. This one seems like a second bill WWII git them Nazis and Jap films. The romance angle: the reluctant widow/woman trying to fight off her addiction to gunslingers can be seen played out in westerns and gangster flicks. Robert Mitchum is not as human as he was in "The Story of GI JOE" instead this "Mustang" ( Old Army-ese for a ranker who made it to the officer class without a West Point, VMI, or a well placed political connection) just is Ares gift to the warrior class. Charles McGraw and William Talman two of the best sinister looking and sounding actors of their era, become bland nonentities in this flick. There are some grim moments: Talman's descent into a flaming hutch after his recon plane is shot down, the North Korean infiltrated refugee column being blasted apart,and the gradual attrition on Mitchum and McGraw's outfit ( the film is set right at the beginning of the Korean "ShootOut" before MacArthur's Inchon Landing temporarily turned the tide) but overall there is a lack of tension and good action set pieces to make this film a contender as a Good war movie/Action Film. Perhap's director Tay Garnett suffered from MGM-itis every thing must be pretty because this movie ain't hard or gritty enough. Now if Aldrich,Siegal, Fuller,or Milestone had directed it...

Robert Mitchum is at his masculine best (what other way has he ever been?) in this movie. Boy, do those shoulders seem massive when crushing little Ann Blyth with his kisses. Study her face. She's just exquisite. Who cares about the War. The Romance is the thing.