The Steel Helmet: The Yanks are coming

Maybe it’s projection, but the title card that ends The Steel Helmet (1951) strikes me as one of the bleakest in war flick history: “There is no end to this story.” Tell me about it. It’s Samuel Fuller’s first war film, and his first great film, but above all, it’s an even if manipulated confrontation: this is what military intervention looks like, the pocket hand of the West in the 20th century and beyond. All aboard?


It’s not exactly anti-war, but neither is it propaganda. It soft-peddles America’s domestic failures, anticipating Rosa Parks and Brown v. Board, but at least it addresses them. Acknowledging the irony that black Corporal Thompson’s true equality comes on the battlefield not the homefront, Fuller is free to focus on his primary mission, a song of the soldier. It lives with the troops, embracing imperfection, and forges our attachments in the fire of battle. We come to respect Buddha-Head because 1) our protagonist Sergeant Zack trusts him and 2) he proves his excellence in a gripping sniper sequence.


Better still is Private Bronte, or Consci, as in conscientious objector. Zack has a good time ragging on him, but when push comes to shove Zack depends on Bronte who in turn proves courageous. That said, it’s hard not to pick up on the thread of trampled peace. From Consci, who inherited a portable organ from the squad’s chaplain who died before we joined them, to the gigantic, watchful Buddha standing silently for peace as his temple rains down upon him, Fuller suggests that nonviolent resistance will always submit to aggression. In the shot of Buddha’s hand holding up an IV you can practically hear the soldiers shouting, “Make yourself useful!” Which not only do I disagree with but is something of a stacked deck in an otherwise carefully complex film. On the other hand, it reflects the film’s American GI perspective without entirely rejecting our men of peace.


What really makes it sing is the film's unpredictability. We first see Zack lying on the ground in a sea of bodies, and soon enough he’s crawled right into a gunpoint. It’s not what you think. Then he finds more Americans. He doesn’t join up. When the atmosphere gets racially charged, the squad remains united. Wait till you see what happens with his ticket to R/R, a North Korean prisoner. The film culminates in a frenetic, chaotic siege which leaves the survivors in a depressed haze (and, by the way, it features a war film death nearly as wrenching as the out-of-nowhere heroic loss at the end of The Boys in Company C).  The Steel Helmet is exciting and fearless, imperfect and brutal, a penetrating celebration of and lamentation for the American soldier. Fuller was just getting started. So was America.