Target Zero (1955)

Excellent but underrated film

A waste of 90 minutes of my life

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Target Zero is your typical war film, this one set in Korea and it gave some due to one other nation present on the peninsula. Richard Conte leading an American squad finds themselves a 3 man British tank crew headed by Richard Stapley. That tank prove to be essential though there is one rather unreal scene where the tank should have been blown up.Shapley doesn't like Americans he saw his sister ravaged by one during the last war. You know that British saying about the Yanks, "overpaid, oversexed, and over here". Words he lives by.And there is a woman in the mix. Peggie Castle and Angela Loo UN health workers also stuck behind the lines. Loo is killed and Castle gets both Conte and Shapley's mojo going.They're trying to reach the rest of Conte's company. What happens when they do is one nasty climatic battle.One scene I thought rather stupid. The group uses the protection of the tank to clear a path through a mine field. I have to think in real life the tank would have been crippled and useless trying it. Could not buy that at all.The film is rich in character players though. Charles Bronson is Conte's sergeant and he's got such people as L.Q. Jones, Strother Martin and Chuck Connors among the troops.An average war film, nothing special.

****SPOILERS**** Stuck behind enemy lines Korean War movie with Richard Conte as the happy go lucky without a care in the world Let. Tom Flagler winning the war almost all by himself. It's Let. Flagler who loses his innocence in the war swirling all around him when the love of his life US Army infantry unit Easy Company gets wiped out by a human wave assault of North Korean troops. Up until then noting bothered Let. Flagler thinking the separated from the main battalion Easy Company was safe and out of harms way. It's then that Let.Flagler becomes suicidal and lets his and his men down by getting so depressed that that they can't relay on him with a major North Korean assault on his position is just about to materializer!Up until then Let. Flagler could do nothing wrong in being focus on his mission to get his men together with a British tank crew back across enemy lines. So focused that her didn't even realize that US Army nurse Ann Galloway, Peggie Castle,was just crazy about him and his macho-like attitude towards war as well as everything else. It's the in house armature psychiatrist of his unit Sgt. Vince Gaspari played by a young, age 34, and clean shaven, it's hard to recognize him without his famous mustache, Charles Bronson who gives us in the audience as well as Peggie an insight to Let. Flagler's mine-set. His only love is his company and no one or nothing else and when it was wiped out by the North Koreans he just flipped out!****SPOILERS**** With the North Koreans now ready to charge up the hill and annihilate Let. Flagler and his men as well as nurse Galloway he finally comes to his senses as well as survival instincts and uses, by land line telephone, the entire US Army Air Force and Navy to do them in. It strange to see hundreds if not thousands of North Korean soldiers just march like lemmings to their death as a deadly combination of US jet fighters as well as massive US navel bombardment chops them to pieces! Even the few North Koreans that make it to Lt. Flagler's forward positions are just blasted by the few US as well as British defenders as if they were harmless bowling pins! As for the North Korean soldiers all they had to fight with against the ultra modern US and British military were what looked like turn of the century bolt action rifles that in most case didn't seem to work!

It's Korea and the Chinese have just overrun the Allied lines. A disparate group of men (and one babe) find themselves flung together, struggling across plains and knolls, hoping to reach the safety of Easy Company on a hill top called "the muscle." Richard Conte is the ranking officer, a lieutenant, who organizes the few Brits with their tank, and gathers up an errant mortar couple, and woos the babe (Peggie Castle) who, through thick and thin, never gets her hair mussed or loses her false eyelashes.Conte and Castle fall in love after twelve hours together, which runs about normal for these routine flicks. This is highly resented by the British sergeant who commands the tank. Why? Well, during the war, England was overflowing with Americans who were resented by some of the English gentlemen because they were "overpaid, oversexed, and over here." (Kids, that's World War II, the one that came after World War I.) The sergeant is particularly annoyed because, well, one of the Yanks began dating his sister and, well, "it didn't end pleasantly." However, have no fear. By the end, when they finally reach "the muscle" and find all of Easy Company dead and then they have to fight off innumerable bandy legged, inscrutable Chinese troops -- do they make friends with one another? Does Conte smile and pat the sergeant on the back, and does the sergeant smile back? You're kidding.Conte is an interesting actor. He has two expressions: one is a smirk and the other isn't. Not to laugh. It carried Gary Cooper through several generations of movie-goers. As for his apparent power over the good-looking, hypermastic Peggie Castle, well, so what? A few men have that ability to win attractive women over with a glance. I know I do. Just the other day in the supermarket, a blond who could have doubled for Scarlett Johhanson, threw herself at my feet and begged to be my slave. I sent her packing. These importunings get tiresome after a while.But back to the movie. It contains of one of those -- "FREEZE! We're in the middle of a mine field" scenes. Very tense.The whole affair comes across as one of those television programs that were being made wholesale during the period. No soldier ever really gets dirty or dusty. Lots of action. The lighting is flat, as it would be on, say, "I Love Lucy." Why go on? You want to watch a movie that's almost as ritualized and predictable as a church service, this is it? If you want a genuine attempt at vernacular poetry, try "A Walk in The Sun." If you want realism, pre special fx, try "The Story of G.I. Joe."

Usually Leonard Maltin and I agree on movies....Not this one. I have seen it perhaps four or five times. An American unit, sitting astride a strategic hilltop, plugging the Main Line of Resistance, is over-run and wiped out. Only a patrol and some stragglers picked up along the way are able to reach the now-undefended hilltop in time.I found this story to ring true....with good characterizations and plot developments. Sure, the enemy is the two-dimensional Yellow Menace....that's standard with fifties-era movies.....but the mix of up-and-coming young actors is in itself worth the time to view this film.A good story, well-acted, worthy of a look. And quite useful to someone trying to get a real look at war in Korea after the conflict settled into a stalemate. I recommend it.