Pretty Good

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Fresh and Exciting

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

**SPOILERS** Hard hitting war drama with future President of the United States Ronald Reagan as US Army Captain Webb Sloane going undercover-as as an American POW-to get the goods on the Reds in how they brutally and inhumanly threat, against the rules of warfare, their prisoners of war in that hell that was the Korean War.In order to throw off suspicion on himself Sloane becomes a Commie stooge, or collaborator, that makes his fellow GI's in the POW camp hate his very guts. Hard as he tries to be a Commie rat-fink Sloane can't help showing his true colors-Red White & Blue-instead of the ones-deep Commie Red-he masks himself with. That fact soon comes to light in Sloane coming to aid of his fellow American POW's when the chips are down. This has Sloane saving one of of the POW's lives when he came down with a near-fatal attack of appendicitis! In another heroic effort Sloane prevented another GI Cpl. Joe Stanton,Steve Forrest-who killed the camps brutal commissar Russian Col. Biroshilov played by Oskar Homolka-from being shot by hiding the evidence of what he did. This was after Cpl. Stanton killed Col.Biroshilov for having his cute little pet dog Eloise beaten to death, in order to make Stanton cooperate, in front of his very eyes!***SPOILER ALERT***In the end Sloane did get the evidence of what a bunch of vicious and sadistic swines the Commies were but to his surprises he wasn't sent to the Soviet Union as he planned, so he can be a mole inside the Kremlin for the US. Sloane instead was shipped, after being released from prison, straight back home in the good old USA. That dubious honor, of being sent to the USSR, went to fellow US Commie collaborator and undercover agent Pvt. ???? who had less to lose in being that he's single and with no living family members back in the states, like Sloane has, for him to worry about.The movie shows how the rotten Commies used captured GI's, through both threats and persuasion, to confess to war crimes that they didn't commit in order to turn the free world against the USA back then in the early 1950's. It took brave and patriotic Americans like Webb Sloane, by risking their very lives, to set the record straight in who, the USA/UN forces or Red Chinese/North Korean Communists, were really committing major war crimes in the Korean War. But sadly enough, like in the movie, many many patriotic American soldiers broke under the unrelenting pressure, of Commie brainwashing or just plain old intimidation, and ended up helping the Commie cause if just only in being used for propagandist purposes. These brave but later broken US fighting men who were in many cases driven insane by the Commies around the clock brainwashing tactics have to live with what they did, in helping Americas sworn enemies, for the rest of their lives.

Ronald Reagan and a bunch of US soldiers in a North Korean POW camp. They are tortured... We learn North Korean Communists are bad people... We learn Americans' beards grow very slowly during days of torture...I tried to suppress it, but I finally burst out laughing at this movie. It was the scene when Mr. Reagan comes out from telling the Communists he wants to be on their side. Then, he asks for a bottle of brandy. Next, acting stone-cold sober, he takes a drunken companion, Dewey Martin, to get sulfur to cure Mr. Martin's hangover. Of course, the North Korean communist guard is as dumb as they come. So, the drunk distracts the guard while Reagan goes over to get something from a drawer, which is next to a bunch of empty boxes. I'm sure he boxes were supposed to contain something; but, of course, Reagan causes them to shake enough to reveal they are empty. Ya gotta laugh! I think "Prisoner of War" will appeal mainly to family and friends of those who worked on it - otherwise, it's wasteful. * Prisoner of War (1954) Andrew Marton ~ Ronald Reagan, Steve Forrest, Dewey Martin

I was able to hang in for only the first twenty minutes of this low-budget movie. The most glaring absurdity was that while the American inmates in a North Korean POW camp are all supposedly suffering from severe deprivation of food and medicine, going without bathing, shivering in flimsy and filthy parkas, and sleeping on bare floors, and - let's not forget enduring torture - they always manage to sport impeccably coiffed hair. With the exception of a suitably austere-looking Harry Morgan as an army Major, the casting and acting are simply awful. Ronald Regan cannot seem to stick to portraying a single character and instead creates a rather schizophrenic amalgam of past roles. A mostly Caucasian cast portraying the North Korean camp officers might have been forgivable, but when supposedly Russian officers acting as advisors to the Koreans strut around wearing re-badged Nazi uniforms complete with jodhpurs and jackboots (obvious costume-department recycles from WWII flicks) and speaking with accents like General Burkhalter from Hogan's Heroes, well, that's just six kinds of silly. Don't waste your time on this one.

It's hard to imagine much of a paying audience for this movie which was rushed into production early in 1954 to capitalize on news stories about ill-treatment of American POWs inside North Korea. Many of these stories dealt with the disturbingly high number of POWs who seem to have collaborated with the enemy in various ways and there was ominous talk that something called "brainwashing" might be responsible for this sorry state of affairs. MGM's problem was to work this material into a commercial property which would patriotically support "our boys" while, at the same time, acknowledge those troubling charges of collaboration. The movie tries to solve this dilemma by showing American POWs indeed confessing to "war crimes" but stressing the fact that this occurred only after they'd been subjected to prolonged, unrelenting torture of both a physical and psychological nature. To adequately make its case, the movie presents scenes of torture intended to be persuasive and yet acceptable to a general audience. These scenes probably remained in the viewers' memory long after the movie's more routine and predictable moments had been forgotten. Three scenes in particular stand out. (1) John Lupton, later of TV's "Broken Arrow" series, is shown kneeling with his arms pulled back and over a horizontal pole passing behind him. Heavy rocks are tied to his hands, painfully stressing his wrists, elbows, and shoulders. Each time the pole is lifted and then dropped, Lupton groans in torment. (2) Steve Forrest and a dozen or so other POWs are forced to lie face-up in open graves for several days and nights. They're exposed to the elements, given no food or water, and become increasingly filthy. Eventually they're taken from their graves and lined up before a firing squad for what proves to be a mock execution. (3) Steve Forrest, Robert Horton, later of TV's "Wagon Train," and six other POWs are crucified with ropes to wooden frameworks at the top of a hill and left to suffer long, slow agonies. All these tortures were attested to as being authentic but their impact is somewhat diminished by casting as their victims only young, handsome actors with virile physiques which are shown off by having the actors wearing nothing but dogtags, undershorts, and a gleaming coating of studio sweat. The result is a parade of homoerotic "beefcake in bondage" usually found only in sadomasochistic magazines! In other respects, the movie benefits from MGM's film-making professionalism and there are just enough crowd pleasing moments of dialog and characterization to take the edge off some of the movie's grimness.(May 2010) Revisiting this movie after more than 10 years have passed, one can't help but be struck by its competency as a piece of film-making. We used to take this nuts-and-bolts stuff for granted but compare the big-studio professionalism of "Prisoner of War" with the sloppy work done, especially in the script department, with "The Hanoi Hilton" -- a 1987 film which tells a similar story about the Vietnam War. Both films are failures but at least "Prisoner of War" isn't an embarrassment.