ManiakJiggy This is How Movies Should Be Made

BroadcastChic Excellent, a Must See

Mabel Munoz Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?

Kayden This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

utgard14 Snoozer of a war picture about an Army surgeon (Humphrey Bogart) and a wide-eyed young nurse (June Allyson) falling in love on the battlefront. Notable (I suppose) for focusing on a MASH unit years before the film and TV series made that more widely known. But really it's not a very good picture. For a war movie, it's pretty dull and for a romance, it's nauseating. Bogart and Allyson have no chemistry. I've never been a big June Allyson fan to begin with, so that didn't help matters any. Poor Bogie, in his fifties at this point, plays a character that's supposed to be some kind of Romeo with the ladies. This movie has some of the most cringeworthy work I've ever seen from him. I had to look away at times because it was so awkward. It's actually kind of painful to watch the love scenes. Anyway, it's not something I would recommend unless you are a Bogart or Allyson completist. Best thing about it is the supporting work from Keenan Wynn and Robert Keith.

secondtake Battle Circus (1953)An awkward movie with really uneven acting and some routine (or worse) dialog. Even the battle actions scenes, which have along history of success in Hollywood, are sometimes clumsy. You have to accept all this up front to get anywhere further here and appreciate the sincere shreds of insight into a little known aspect of war, and of the Korean War in particular at the time—the mobile hospitals that followed the front line fighting.Of course MASH the movie and then MASH the t.v. show took the idea and made it everyday material (with a not-so-hidden commentary on the Vietnam war). "Battle Circus" is unusual in coming right as the "Korean Conflict" was ending (the war ended in 1953), and a decade before Vietnam grew into an actual war for the U.S. And so it is very interesting—if you are a student of war, and war movies, that is. It's a bit of a slog as a drama, however, even watching the kinds of vehicles in use or the hardships of weather and war. The methods of setting up these hospitals so quickly is quite accurate and the army cooperated with some of the filming.There is also Humphrey Bogart. When an actor reaches his kind of fame, even his lesser movies take on meaning. He has a central role as a leading officer in the group, and of course he has near-misses and a few near-kisses with the women—nurses—who are the center of activities. He's portrayed as a womanizing, practical man, not especially nice but eventually very admirable—like many of his characters, in fact. Some of the scenes are quite serious and strong, taken by themselves. But they get beaten down by the stiff romance that is forced on Bogart and his counterpart, June Allyson. She has to play a naive, smart, well-meaning "girl next door" and while that might be the truth sometimes, it makes for a kind of false set-up, and she's a lightweight presence. So the movie stumbles along in a weird zone. The decision of Altman making MASH to turn it truly comic was essential (the humor here is rare and flat, like falling in the mud). So tune out in the love scenes and get absorbed in the genuine intensity of the best of the staged war scenes and the hospital dynamics. The title, by the way, is suggested very early when Allyson cheerfully says that moving the tents every few days is just like a real circus on the move.

tieman64 A precursor to Robert Altman's "MASH", Richard Brooks' "Battle Circus" stars the inimitable Humphrey Bogart as a world-weary surgeon in the middle of war-torn Korea. Bogart is as watchable as always, but much of the film consists of a by-the-numbers romantic subplot in which he romances a new nurse (June Allyson, always miscast).As with most films set during the Korean War, "Battle Circus" entirely ignores politics. Elsewhere Brooks serves up a number of mildly tense sequences, like one in which nurses talk a wounded Korean soldier out of detonating a live grenade. Brooks would go on to direct a number of superior films, one of his best being "Elmer Gantry".Today, the US' bloody occupation of Korea has all but been erased from history. After WW2, the US hastily separated Korea (Roosevelt would suggest the separation to Stalin without even consulting the Koreans), essentially splitting it in two and giving the North to Russia whilst keeping the South for itself. This was meant to be a temporary division, but as was in the case in Vietnam (another country arbitrarily cut in half by the US), the US soon freaked out when it learnt that the Koreans wanted independence and were unanimously backing the Republican Party. Refusing to allow genuine self-determination to take root in Korea, and determined to destroy the majority supported Korean People's Republic party, the US hastily began scuttling all attempts at unifying the north and south, backed dictators in the south (some descendants of the old aristocracy), began supporting the local land-owning elite, outlawed the KPR and set about murdering "dissidents". On the Island of Cheju alone, as many as 60,000 of its 300,000 residents were murdered. South Korea, assisted by US forces, then conducted a ruthless campaign of cleansing the south of all dissidents, usually identifying them as "communists". Estimates of murdered civilians range anywhere from 400,000 to 800,000 by the time the hot war "officially" broke out in June 1950. The message was clear: you can have self-determination, but only if you do what we say.5/10 – For Bogart fans only. See "To Have and Have Not".

classicsoncall Humprey Bogart is a doctor with the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, MASH Unit #8666, in a non comedy preview of the more notable TV Series of the early 1970's. The early going in the film really left me disoriented when the unit's encampment undergoes strafing fire, while more than once and clearly visible, a warplane bearing USAF markings is shown flying by. Seems to me like someone should have caught that.Besides some interesting scenes portraying the daily life and death struggles of a Korean War medical team, the story follows Major Jed Webbe's (Bogey) romancing of a newly assigned nurse, Lt. Ruth McGara (June Allyson). However there's nothing subtle about Webbe's approach, and it's surprising that McGara allows this affair to blossom considering how much of a chauvinist the Major turns out to be. In fact, he's a genuine creep when you get right down to it.Keenan Wynn is fairly effective as Sgt. Orvil Statt, competently running the basic mechanics of the unit, with impressive views of breaking down and setting up camp. Robert Keith is the no nonsense Lt. Col. Walters, who takes Webbe down a peg for getting drunk on his own time, and later offers him a drink after a particularly hairy operation. War is hell.You'll have to really pay attention to the only attempt at comic relief here, since it's a visual - the sign underneath the camp cook's serving table states "This Mess Recommended by Romanoff".Humphrey Bogart made a number of war films, but much like the Westerns in which he appeared, this just doesn't appear to be his element. He was much better suited for the gangster and noir dramas that made him famous, and "Casablanca" didn't hurt either. Here, with his age showing through, he seemed entirely mismatched with the younger June Allyson, whose clout as a leading lady here is much subdued.With only one tense scene involving a Korean prisoner (Philip Ahn) threatening to blow up a grenade in an operating room, the film offers no defining moments and very little battle action. In fact, the movie doesn't really even have an ending. As the MASH Unit detours it's way around an active battle zone, all you have left is Bogey and Allyson walking off into the sunset as it were, perhaps wondering what might have happened if the grenade went off.