Inchon (One Way Productions, Unification Church, United Artists, 1981)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I watched a peculiar movie made in 1980-1981 and funded by the Korean Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his worldwide Unification Church. The film was called Inchon and was based on one of the biggest battles of the 1950-1953 Korean War – or, as it was officially called in the United Nations Security Council resolution authorizing it, a “police action.” The Korean War had its roots in May 1945, when instead of brokering a peace deal between the other allies and Japan – as the Japanese government had hoped they would – the Soviet Union declared war against Japan and sent an army to occupy the Korean Peninsula, which had previously been occupied by the Japanese. Like the Soviet strategy in Europe, which had basically been to send their armies as far as they could into the Nazi-occupied countries of eastern Europe and the eastern half of Germany itself, then claim rights over those territories and install friendly Soviet-style dictatorships in those countries, the Soviets sent an expeditionary force into Korea and essentially squatted in the north of the country. The final peace treaty between the Allies (the U.S., Britain and the Soviet Union) and Japan set an arbitrary line across the 38th parallel and divided Korea into Soviet and American occupation zones. By 1950 these had become two separate sovereign countries – the North becoming a Left-wing Communist dictatorship and the South becoming a Right-wing military dictatorship.

Then, just after the success of Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution in China in 1949, North Korea’s government under the leadership of Kim Il Sung (grandfather of current North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un) decided to invade South Korea and unify the country under their rule. The scattered U.S., forces did the best they could to aid what there was of a South Korean army to mobilize a resistance, but they were unable to do much until June 25, 1950, when the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorizing its member nations to intervene in Korea to block the military takeover of the South by the North. U.S. President Harry Truman appointed General Douglas MacArthur, who had been running the U.S. occupation of Japan since 1945 (and who kept a bust of Julius Caesar in his office that led to people calling him the “American Caesar”), as supreme commander of U.S. and allied forces in Korea. By the time the war began in earnest, North Korean forces, armed with Soviet weapons, had easily swept through most of the Korean peninsula and occupied most of the south except for a small territory around the southern city of Pusan. Rather than land an army in Pusan and try to push their way up the peninsula to the South Korean capital, Seoul, MacArthur hit on the idea of staging a landing at Inchon, a port city on the west coast of Korea within striking distance of Seoul. His idea was to mount a huge amphibious invasion using 175 to 250 ships, establish a beachhead at Inchon and use that as a base to recapture Seoul and as much South Korean territory as possible.

Inchon the movie is a dramatization of the preparations for this invasion as well as the actual battle and its immediate aftermath. Its long-term aftermath was that MacArthur’s forces pushed north almost to the Yalu River, the boundary between Korea and China – and China responded by sending its own army in to fight the Americans and recapture Korea to the 38th parallel. MacArthur responded by asking President Truman for permission to use nuclear weapons against China and to mine the border on the 38th parallel with radioactive material so no one could safely pass over it. Truman thought he was nuts and fired him, but never revealed just why – so a huge mythology got built up around MacArthur and his supposedly “unfair” removal from command of a war he’d been winning (more or less). Truman lost any chance of being re-elected and Republican Dwight Eisenhower, who’d commanded the overall Allied war effort in Europe in World War II, won the presidency with a pledge to go to Korea and negotiate an end to the war. He did so, with the uncomfortable result that all the lives lost and property destroyed in the conflict ended up having no effect at all: the two Koreas remained divided at the 38th parallel and North Korea has remained a Communist dictatorship while, after decades of rule by strongmen like Syngman Rhee, South Korea finally became a democratic republic in the early 1990’s.

My principal source for information about the movie Inchon had been the hilarious article about it in the book The Hollywood Hall of Shame by Harry and Michael Medved (before Michael switched from writing intentionally funny books about silly movies to unintentionally funny Right-wing criticism of Hollywood and its allegedly all-powerful “liberal elite”). I first heard of Sun Myung Moon in 1973, when he came seemingly out of nowhere to do lecture tours in the U.S. (he spoke in rapid-fire Korean and his English interpreter was Col. Bo Hi Pak, who was also an aide to Korean spy Tongsun Park, who cooked up a scheme to bribe leading U.S. politicians) to announce that God had appointed Richard Nixon to be the President of the U.S. and those pesky people investigating Watergate were therefore doing the work of Satan. He’d actually got his start in Korea 20 years earlier and made his debut on the world stage by sponsoring tours by a singing group called “The Little Angels.” They were presented as Korean orphan children organized to sing their hearts out and build worldwide awareness of the plight of their countrypeople – but in fact, at least according to the Medveds, most of the Little Angels’ parents were alive and well in Korea, regularly tithing their kids’ earnings to Moon’s organization, the Unification Church (so called because Moon’s proclaimed ambition was to unite all the world’s religions into one big church establishment under his direct control).

Throughout the 1970’s Moon’s minions expanded his operations in the U.S. and the Unification Church was frequently denounced as a cult who picked up impressionable young people, subjected them to indoctrination, forced them to break with their families and work hours on the street selling flowers and other items to raise money for the church, and generally breaking their will to resist whatever the church wanted from them. I remember attending the University of California in Berkeley in the mid-1970’s and constantly running into Moon’s followers – “Moonies,” as they were derisively called – on the street, importuning me to come to their public lectures, where the one time I went I was told about their wonderful conference center in Boonville where, I later found out, the indoctrination took place. Moon’s movement got enough bad publicity that he decided to whitewash his image by investing in American media, including starting a Right-wing newspaper in Washington, D.C. to compete with the Washington Post and buying other media properties. In the late 1970’s Moon and his followers at the top of the Unification Church leadership decided to make a big-budget movie; at first they considered doing a biopic of Jesus but eventually they hit on the idea of making the movie about the Korean War and in particular around the epic and all-important battle of Inchon.

They decided to open their coffers to recruit an all-star cast, including Lord Laurence Olivier to play Douglas MacArthur; Ben Gazzara as MacArthur’s assistant, Major Frank Hallsworth; Jacqueline Bisset as his estranged wife Barbara, who’s understandably put out that her husband has been having an affair with a Korean woman; Toshiro Mifune as Saito-San, a Korean friend of Major Hallsworth with a boat (we assume he’s a fisherman but the actual movie doesn’t make it clear just what he does for a living) who goes out on a dangerous mission before the invasion to de-mine the Inchon harbor so the U.N. ships can get through; Richard Roundtree (the token Black cast member) as a sergeant whose main function seems to be to drive the white cast members out of trouble; David Janssen (in his last film; he completed the visual part but some of his lines needed to be re-recorded after his death and the producers got impressionist Rich Little to do it) as a hard-bitten, skeptical war correspondent; and then-fashionable film critic Rex Reed as Janssen’s friend, who got stuck in the middle of the war when the North Korean attack occurred during a New York Philharmonic tour of South Korea (so Reed got to be in two of the most legendarily bad movies of all time, this one and Myra Breckinridge 10 years earlier).

The Medveds’ account of the making of Inchon is a comedy of errors in which Moon and his designated “producer,” Japanese media baron Mitsuharu Ishii (a well-to-do Unification Church member who had booked the Little Angels singing group on a tour of Japan), ran into trouble from South Korean authorities who held up the needed permits for filming (Moon was a highly controversial figure in his homeland and in his younger years, according to the Medveds, held the interesting distinction of having been imprisoned by both North and South Korea), tricky tide patterns that made the movie’s reconstruction of the Inchon invasion as risky as the real one had been, and a restive cast who were unused to working in as austere a capital as early-1980’s Seoul. Moon and Ishii first hired Andrew V. McLaglen – son of actor Victor McLaglen and an established action director best known for working with John Wayne – and when he quit the project they hired Terence Young, a British director best known for some of the early James Bond movies. To write the film they hired Robin Moore, best known at the time for having written the book The French Connection on which the hugely popular 1971 film had been based, and the Medveds quote an interview at the time in which he said he liked to work in the nude because “I feel clothing inhibits creativity.” Moore was co-credited with Paul Savage for the film’s story and with Laird Koenig for the script. Jacqueline Bisset brought along her own costume designer, Donfeld (his name was originally “Don Feld” but he apparently thought his credit would look classier if he mashed the two names together), who draped her in giant straw hats because he was worried that her face would swell up and get visibly burned in the hot Korean sun.

Laurence Olivier prepared for his role as MacArthur by interviewing Alexander Haig, who’d been an aide to MacArthur during the Korean War and later was Richard Nixon’s chief of staff after H. R. Haldeman was forced out by Watergate, and still later the secretary of state under Ronald Reagan who high-handedly tried to take over the U.S. government and push aside Reagan’s vice-president, George H. W., Bush, when Reagan was incapacitated by an assassination attempt in 1981. Haig reportedly told Olivier that MacArthur’s speaking voice sounded “just like W. C. Fields” – and Olivier took that to heart and uttered the grandiloquent lines Moore and Koenig crafted for him in the famously nasal tone and drawled-out intonations of the famous comedian. The film also went through some changes of title: it was originally supposed to be called Oh, Inchon!, then just Inchon! until it was finally stripped of its exclamation point (though the print we were watching included it). Sun Myung Moon screened a rough cut and demanded changes, including more scenes of gory attacks on innocent South Koreans by their evil, rapacious brethren to the North and a larger throng to greet the victorious MacArthur at Seoul’s Government House after the battle of Inchon and his subsequent reconquest of Seoul. This posed a problem as the shots of Olivier acting the scene at the real Government House no longer matched the crowd shots, and Olivier refused to make another trip to South Korea just for this retake. Instead they built a mockup of Government House in a studio in Dublin and filmed Olivier redoing the scene in front of a badly matted-in process screen shot of the cheering throngs. (The retakes reportedly brought the cost of filming this five-minute scene to $3 million.)

The film premiered in a 140-minute version at a gala event in Washington, D.C. – and got roasted by the critics. It had a general release in 1981 to virtually no business whatever and got cut down to a 107-minute version in 1984, which also bombed. Then in 2001 Moon’s minions put it on TV in a 4:3 aspect ratio version on a cable network they then owned, which had begun in 1985 as The Nostalgia Channel, showing mainly old movies – most of them in the public domain. In 1993 a Unification Church front group called Concept Communications joined two other companies to buy the channel, rework its programming format for faith-based “family entertainment,” and in 1998 Moon’s church bought out the other two companies, assumed sole ownership and changed its name to “Good Life TV Programs.” The church sold the channel in 2009 – it still exists but it now has the even sillier name “Youtoo America,” or “YTA” for short – but in 2001 Moon’s executives aired a 138-minute version of Inchon on Good Life TV, and that was the source of the grey-label DVD (obviously dubbed from a VHS recording off the air) we watched.

Inchon has a reputation as one of the worst films ever made, but it’s really not that bad – just mediocre. Charles suggested that director Young not only didn’t tell his cast not to overact but actually encouraged them to do so – and he got Olivier to give one of his legendary over-the-top performances rivaling other silly Olivier roles like the Mahdi (leading an anti-imperialist Muslim freedom fight) in Khartoum, the Nazi dentist and torturer in Marathon Man, the aging auto tycoon in The Betsy (the name is the super-car Olivier’s character brings to market) and Warner Oland’s old role as the cantor’s father in the Neil Diamond remake of The Jazz Singer. (I’ve never seen the latter two films but I’m going by reputation – and Charles actually did see the Neil Diamond Jazz Singer when it was new.) Olivier gave an interview that was devastatingly frank about why he did stupid movies like this: “People ask me why I'm playing in this picture. The answer is simple: money, dear boy. I‘m like a vintage wine. You have to drink me quickly before I turn sour. I'm almost used up now, and I can feel the end coming. That's why I’m taking money now. I’ve got nothing to leave my family but the money I can make from films. Nothing is beneath me if it pays well. I’ve earned the right to damn well grab whatever I can in the time I’ve got left.”

Inchon is the sort of movie that makes you feel like the writers had a checklist of war-movie clichés and they ticked each one off after they’d written it to ensure that all of them got into the film – the star-crossed local couple (the war interrupts their marriage, they get separated on a refugee march out of Seoul, the wife tears up her wedding dress to bandage wounded soldiers, and of course in the end they’re both dead); the war orphans taken in by Bisset’s character (she gets a group of orphaned refugee kids to a convent and tucks them all into one big bed – “Why do I expect her to start singing ‘The Lonely Goatherd?’” I joked. “Or maybe ‘My Favorite Things’?”); the bloody advance of the North Korean army against a batch of barely armed peasants that are sitting ducks; the strong-willed overall commander overcoming the petty objections of his immediate subordinates and ordering the attack; the scene of self-doubt as MacArthur is ready to scrub the mission because the lighthouse his commandos had to capture, take from the enemy and light so the ships could see where they were going hasn’t been re-lit yet – only, of course, just before he’s supposed to send that message the lighthouse does go on and the mission goes ahead. Lots of war movies employ some of the traditional clichés, but the makers of Inchon seem to have gone out of their way to include them all.

There are some good aspects of Inchon, including two genuinely authoritative performances by Ben Gazzara and David Janssen and a quite impressive musical score by Jerry Goldsmith (who obviously got the job on the strength of his Academy Award-winning score for Patton 10 years before) which would have made a good soundtrack album. Otherwise, though, it’s the sort of movie that goes wrong in a million subtle ways that add up to a story of real potential power being turned into mucilage – and the most reputable actor in the movie is ironically the most risible performer in it. Olivier’s acting is so ridiculous one imdb.com reviewer wrote that he was “simply so bad that every award he ever received should have had to have been given back.” (That seems decidedly unfair to the good movies and plays that won him those awards in the first place; they didn’t automatically become terrible simply because he acted so wretchedly in this.) Charles noted the continuity glitches – like MacArthur being referred to as supreme commander of the U.N. forces in Korea at a time when the U.S. servicemembers in Korea had no way of knowing that; or one scene in which he arrives in Pusan on a plane, is shown getting off it and then the next scene shows him back on the plane with no reason how or why he got there. (I briefly wondered if the scenes had been spliced together in reverse order.)

I’m glad to have seen Inchon and satisfied my curiosity about it, even though these weren’t under the very best auspices – Good Life TV showed the film in a 4:3 aspect ratio (the original theatrical version was 2.35:1) and blipped a lot of swear words from the soundtrack – though, oddly, they left “bitch” in while taking out “son-of-a-bitch.” It’s not that different from the big movies several U.S. studios, 20th Century-Fox and Universal, in particular, that had taken epic battles of World War II and dramatized them with big-budget production values and all-star casts (The Longest Day, about D-Day; the underrated Tora! Tora! Tora!, about Pearl Harbor; and Midway, as well as a MacArthur biopic starring Olivier’s co-star from The Boys from Brazil, Gregory Peck), though it’s not as good as most of its WW2 predecessors and Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet, which is everything this movie isn’t – tight-knit, gripping, simply constructed, and morally ambiguous – remains my favorite film about the Korean War.