The Young and the Brave (1963)
A drama of the Korean War. Four American Army POWs escape behind enemy lines and try to make their way back to their units in the South. Along the way they are aided by a young Korean boy and his adopted dog, a US trained German Shepherd named Lobo.
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Don't listen to the negative reviews
As Good As It Gets
A Major Disappointment
This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.
Did this film come out in 1963? I would guess the year is wrong. Bill Bendix looked just like he did in his films of the late 1940s and 1950s. True that Rory Calhoun looked somewhat older, but something is terribly amiss here, and I'm not even talking about the film just yet.Whoever thought that a war film with such a cast could be that dull? It dealt with 3 American soldiers fleeing from a North Korean prisoner camp. They meet up with a little boy who joins forces with them after his parents are killed.Bendix plays his usual role as a tough guy with a heart of gold. Richard Jaeckel's role as a collaborator just didn't make much sense, but neither did this movie. It's 84 minutes of tedious boredom.O Rory, allowing a kid age 7 to puff away on cigarette was nauseating. Your line that it wouldn't hurt him must have had the American Cancer Society up in arms. No wonder you succumbed to kidney failure, emphysema and diabetes years later. Bendix is also smoking away in this 1963 film, but by 1964 he was dead of stomach cancer. Suspicious of the year of this miserable film.
20 years after Guadalcanal Diary, Bendix and Jaeckel are reunited for one of the most tired and cliched war movie scripts I've ever been unfortunate enough to have to sit through, The pacing is glacial. The cliches are ridiculous and the three main footsoldiers range between about 42 and 55 years in age -- in Korea! Why even make a Korean War movie in 1963 if you have nothing new to say? If this film had anything to say, it would be hard to find it amidst all the cliches. Manuel Padilla Jr. does a decent enough job keeping Han from being too syrupy. And, Bendix, Calhoun, and Jaeckel are all certainly earnest enough. The production values are shoddy, and Jaeckel looks embarrasses in every scene in which he appears. I nominate this hideous fiasco for the IMDB bottom 100.
Actually, I didn't find this movie as terrible as you might think. Yes, it has numerous flaws, and moves slow (even for an 84-minute movie). It doesn't compare favorably to other war / action movies of the time. Still, it's one of a comparatively few movies made about the Korean War, and the plot contains several twists to keep it interesting and keep you wondering about the final outcome. I would only suggest that THE YOUNG AND THE BRAVE is more appropriate for children (7-14 years old), who will enjoy and understand the relatively simple and understandable plot, not be confused by too many characters, and possibly identify with the young Han. Adults, on the other hand, will be easily distracted by the movie's flaws and find its "sanitized" story perhaps less enjoyable. Overall, through, it's not a bad movie on the scale of some supposed "classics." A good family movie for a cold Friday night around the VCR. Then put the kids to bed and watch SAVING PRIVATE RYAN.
What can you say about a movie that has a Mexican playing a Korean kid, that looks as if it were shot on somebody's farm somewhere, and that dredges up every cliche out of every mediocre war movie ever made. Amazingly, this cheap junk has a pretty good cast (Rory Calhoun, William Bendix, Richard Jaekal, Richard Arlen and John Agar). However, a movie that has Calhoun yelling, "Our planes are coming in," and diving to the ground, without ever LOOKING at the sky, is pretty bad, by just about anybody's standards.