Word: heartbreaking
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...Heartbreak Ridge. The infantryman's ordeal in Korea, as experienced by a green French lieutenant and sharply recorded by Director Jacques Dupont (TIME...
...Heartbreak Ridge (Tudor Pictures) is a rare piece of work by any standards. Filmed in color (with English narration) under the auspices of France's Ministry of Defense, Heartbreak tells the story of the famed French battalion in Korea. The soldiers of the battalion are the cast, the actual 1952 battleground is the setting. The director and a cameraman were wounded by Communist fire while filming it. Not since John Huston's San Pietro (1945) has a film shown in the U.S. come so close to capturing the painful reality of foxhole...
...this-is-how-it-really-was quality, Heartbreak is far more than a newsreel. It threads its story on the trial-by-fire of young Lieut. Gérard Garcet, a replacement starch-fresh from St. Cyr. At first Career Officer Garcet learns a basic lesson-war is mostly waiting...
...Heartbreak's strength comes partly from Director Jacques Dupont's almost matter-of-fact attention to reinforcing detail: a mustached machine-gunner tensely wetting his lips as he waits for his comrades to advance; the primitive clutter of a front-line trench. It flashes with moments of strange, sunlit beauty that almost belie the shocking truth of man diligently preoccupied with killing man. There are also lighter moments-with Gallic, wine-happy R & Rs (Rest and Recuperators) in Japan. But Director Dupont never strays far from the terrible business that carried him, the French battalion and the tens...
...deeper heartbreak, as Lieut. Garcet learns, lies not in the infantryman's Iliad of anguish and backbreaking toil at the bloody Korean ridge. It lies in the bitter knowledge that at home the sacrifice has largely gone unnoticed. For France's "les oubliés" (forgotten ones) and for all the others who went to Korea, Heartbreak Ridge is both a stirring reminder and an epitaph...