The American film in question is that rarest of creatures, an entirely original work that has not been duplicated, and has no predecessor. In very nearly every way--tone, technique, execution--it resembles other films from its period. But the role that it was created to fill is quite singular, one that has since been filled largely by documentary films, not scripted ones. At the end of the great war, America experienced something that was not entirely alien, the return of large numbers of men who found themselves and their country other than as they remembered. Each of the three men whose return and readjustment director William Wyler chronicles need to remember what it is to love, and each does so in his own way. For Fredric March, this means loving a wife (stunningly portrayed by Myrna Loy) who is not exactly the woman he left behind, and children who are children no longer. The ostensible protagonist of the film, Dana Andrews, must find love in the more Hollywood sense, and his story taken individually is basically indistinguishable from a generic romance. The most difficult love, that of oneself, must be found by Harold Russell. It is this role that takes the movie to another level, filled necessarily and without flourish by real life amputee Harold Russell. Taken individually, each story would serve for a pretty decent movie. Seen simultaneously, they transform the movie from one America wanted, to one it needed.
As destabilizing as WWII was for America, the Korean War was unfathomably more so for Korea. Imagine that the Civil War had not only been lost, but that the North and South remained in that conflict for over 50 years. As South Korea moved through--not to say recovered from--this period, Director Kim Kiyoung (notably born in the North) took a wildly different approach to filmmaking than Wyler had. There is no talk of love. No talk of recovery. No mention even of the war, which might make the parallel rather forced in some eyes. But the very fact that these themes, so craved in America at the time of her recovery, are not even considered in this film, which tops all lists of the best Korean films ever made, makes the contrast that much more remarkable. What Korea needed after the armistice was not healing. Such a thing was impossible. The country would never recover, and to even dream of it would be to surrender to despair. What it needed was to muddle through somehow with the horrors that were now reality. And that is the idea of the film. Man is not noble and redemmable, as in The Best Years. He is a savage, of whom the best we can hope is that he be controlled. As is observed in a jarringly didactic final scene,
--그게 남자의 약점이야. 높은 산을 보면 올라가고 싶구, 깊은 물을 보면 돌을 던지고 싶구, 여자를 보면 원시로 돌아가고 싶어
--원시가 뭐예요, 솔직히 남자란 야비한 동물이라고 하세요. 이 집에 젊은 하녀를 둔것이 아마, 범의 입에 날고긴가부다.
For Kim, in a way that Wyler could not have conceived, man cannot see a mountain without climbing it, a lake without throwing a stone into it, or a woman without wanting to have his way with her. And women fare little better in the film. The title character is, of course, a beast of pure desire, but the seemingly innocent wife is just as lustful--for wealth and status. It is this lesson that Kim wished to impart to the post war audiences of Korea, interestingly with no admonition to overcome it. Simply a darkly frank admission that it was inescapable.
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