White and Black to the Brink: China Gate (1957), Pork Chop Hill (1959), All the Young Men (1960)

Abstract

The previous chapter argued that Tay Garnett’s 1943 WWII combat movie Bataan is a precursor to the Orientalist buddy film in that it represents race in a triangulated fashion, pitting white and black against a yellow enemy in the form of Japanese forces that have invaded the Philippines. Chapter 1 shows that the era’s emphasis on national racial unity prompted the film to include, for the first time in Hollywood history, a sympathetic black American figure, Private Wesley Epps, as part of its combat unit, even though the nation’s military did not abolish segregation until well after the war. The present chapter has two parts. The first establishes a historical pattern for the Orientalist buddy film by identifying three early examples of the type. Continuing the previous chapter’s focus on the war film genre, it shows how three period combat movies, Samuel Fuller’s China Gate (1957), Lewis Milestone’s Pork Chop Hill (1959), and Hall Bartlett’s All the Young Men (1960), try to build, at least cinematically, racial unity between white and black by repeating Bataan’s triangulation of race. Like Bataan, these three films feature a mostly white combat team, integrated with one or two black figures, battling an Asian threat. Unlike the WWII era Bataan, however, each of these Cold War era films elevates a black figure to play one side of the “white male” buddy duo, to use Ed Guerrero’s term again, found in Bataan, thereby putting tension between white and black, and eventually the transcendence of that tension, at the center of the plot.

The worse things get, the better they are.

—Winston Churchill on Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)