[Editor’s note: Starting today, Mandy’s Raspberry Picking series arrives at its permanent home on the schedule. Look for for future essays on the second Tuesday of every month!]
Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re looking at Inchon, winner of four Razzies (including Worst Picture) and loser of more than $40 million.
Many winners of the Razzie Award for Worst Picture came into the world in rather sordid ways, but few of them have quite as bizarre an origin story as Inchon, the incestuous lovechild of Japanese news tycoon Ishii Mitsuharu and Korean Unification Church founder/owner of Ishii’s publishing firm/alleged Second Coming of Christ Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
It’s a simple story, really: God, like he does, told Ishii and Moon to make a movie. They considered making a biopic of Jesus, or a biopic of Elvis, before God specified that he wanted a movie about General Douglas MacArthur, hero of World War II and the early part of the Korean War. Just to confirm that they were on the right path, Ishii and Moon consulted psychic Jeanne Dixon, who secured them MacArthur’s endorsement from the spirit realm.
Ishii and Moon then set about assembling an all-star team to help them bring God’s plan to fruition. Dixon helped them choose Terence Young, acclaimed director of early Bond films and Audrey Hepburn vehicles, to direct the film. Robin Moore, hyperpatriotic author of The Green Berets and The French Connection, was commissioned to write the screenplay. Ten-time Best Original Score Oscar nominee Jerry Goldsmith was brought onboard for music. Richard “Shaft” Roundtree and Jacqueline “Murder on the Orient Express” Bisset signed on in supporting roles. And finally, as the biggest plume in a very feathery cap, they coaxed Sir Laurence Olivier Himself into the lead role of General MacArthur with the promise of, to borrow Olivier’s own famous words, “money, dear boy.”
So, an overlong rah-rah-America war epic, directed by Very Prestigious Director, starring Extremely Prestigious Actor, playing Much Admired Historical Figure, with music by World Renowned Film Composer to the tune of A Whole Heckuva Lot of Dollars. It won forty-seven Oscars, right?
Wrong. Ishii and Moon went to extraordinary lengths to hide Moon’s involvement in the film, including paying people in literal briefcases full of cash. But one can only hide the source of millions of dollars for so long, especially when that source insists on leading the promotional campaign for the film, and when said promotional campaign hinges on the ghostly endorsement from Douglas MacArthur. Yes, they actually promoted the movie by telling people that Douglas MacArthur had given it his blessing from beyond the grave.
Ishii and Moon also exercised increasing creative control over the film as production dragged on, with Moon insisting on multiple costly rewrites, re-shoots, and additional scenes. As the truth trickled out, the backlash against the film began even before it hit theaters, with much of the creative team and cast already expressing open disgust at the final product. Post-release, protestors descended upon theaters and scathing reviews descended upon the film, denouncing it as thinly veiled South Korean and Moonie propaganda. Despite getting a screening at the White House courtesy of President Reagan, Inchon’s fate was already sealed. It ended up grossing about $5 million against its breathtakingly wasteful $46 million price tag, setting a record for box office losses that stayed in place until Cutthroat Island came along fifteen years later.
Inchon then promptly dropped off the face of the earth. It was never released on any form of home video. For years, the only way to see it was if you happened to be watching the Good Life TV Network, television home of the Unification Church, at the right time. Now, in our era of glorious abundance, it’s free in crappy bootleg form on YouTube, and thus ripe for raspberry picking.
So, does Inchon deserve its wretched reputation as expensive and artless cult propaganda?
THE BAD
Kind of. The “expensive and artless” part, anyway.
Inchon begins with an amusing disclaimer that “[t]his is not a documentary about the War in Korea, but a dramatized story of the effect of the war on a group of people” (read: don’t expect a lick of historical accuracy) and a melodramatic voiceover explaining how the Korean War started, with an extremely pro-South Korean and pro-interventionist bent. Beyond that promising start, its reputation as blatant marketing for the Unification Church is pretty overblown. Its agenda appears much more pro-Douglas MacArthur (or at least, this weird version of Douglas MacArthur) and anti-North Korea than anything else.
Besides, it commits a much worse sin than being cult propaganda: it’s dull. The story of how Inchon came to be is much, much more exciting than Inchon itself.
Inchon is actually three movies sloppily pasted together that have very little to do with each other. Movie #1 is the Douglas MacArthur Show, and tells the story of MacArthur’s conception and execution of the dangerous amphibious assault on the Port of Inchon, about thirty miles from Seoul, one of the last major victories in the war for South Korea and its Western allies. Major Frank Hallsworth (Ben Garazza) assists MacArthur; he is supposed to be our everysoldier hero through whom the audience can gaze in awe and admiration at MacArthur’s greatness, and he achieves this purpose by having no identifiable character traits of his own He loves South Korea and is having an affair with a South Korean woman (Karen Kahn), but when the Red Army crosses the border, he must travel north towards the 38th Parallel and, with the help of Sergeant Gus Henderson (Roundtree), reunite with his commanding officer and his actual wife Barbara (Bisset). Said wife Barbara is the star of Movie #2; as she evacuates from the lonely military outpost where she lives and waits for Frank, she picks up a gaggle of displaced South Korean orphans, and must usher them to safety as she fights for her life and her marriage.
Neither of the first two movies fares well. Movie #1 is merely boring; Movie #2 is boring and pointless. Most of Movie #1 consists of repetitions of the following sequence of events: MacArthur comes slowly into a room, looking ponderous. MacArthur announces his intention to do something (e.g. invade the Port of Incheon). If his wife or friends are in the room, they assure him that he should do the thing; if people from the government or the United Nations are in the room, they tell him he should not do the thing. MacArthur explains slowly and with William Shatner-like emphasis on every word why he will, in fact, do the thing, then he slowly leaves the room. I admit that after the 2-hour mark, I started fast-forwarding through parts where it looked like people might be talking too much. None of this is helped by the hatchet job the makeup crew performed on Laurence Olivier in a disastrous attempt to make him look more like Douglas MacArthur, whom he did not resemble. His face looks pinched and zombified; his wig appears to be made of vinyl and pasted to his head with Gorilla Glue.
Movie #2 would have potential if its story had been the entire story of the film. Barbara Hallsworth as written is as devoid of personality as everyone else, but her quest to save the South Korean children gives her a sense of purpose and lends a personal dimension to the backdrop of the invasion. Yet so little attention is given to their journey that it feels like a series of teleportations rather than a dangerous cross-country trek. Bisset also gives the worst major performance by far; I would describe it as phoned in, but she doesn’t care enough to make it to the phone. She makes no attempt at an American accent, and she wears the same flat, lifeless expression whether she’s haggling with a shopkeeper, driving off the end of a destroyed bridge, or shooting a North Korean soldier in the face.
Movie #3, on the other hand, is about tanks. And explosions.
There are a lot of tanks.
And a lot of explosions.
I don’t know what percentage of the $46 million spent on Inchon went to tanks and explosions, but it cannot have been small. Movie #3 is the only part of the film that legitimately counts as propaganda; the only reason it’s here is to make darn sure we understand that the North Koreans and the Communists were Very Bad. While Movies #1 and #2 were largely the work of the credited creative team, Movie #3 is all Reverend Moon. And here’s the thing: Movie #3 is incompetently put together and grossly propagandistic, but it’s by far the most watchable part of Inchon. The wretched special effects and sloppy scene construction have a certain try-hard charm to them that the parts of the movie with story in them lack entirely. Somewhere buried in here a glorious Z-grade stinker called KILLER KOMMIES FROM KIM KOUNTRY!!! is fighting to get out, if only everyone hadn’t taken Inchon so deathly seriously.
Then again, “taking it seriously” might not be accurate either, because that implies putting in some effort. One of the biggest obstacles to the film’s success is its talent-to-effort ratio: the people who care don’t have the foggiest idea how to make a movie, and the people who do know, don’t care. Take, for example, the editing. The credited editor on Inchon is Gene Milford, an Oscar-wining film editor who had worked on the superbly constructed Wait Until Dark with Terence Young, so I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that most of what happened wasn’t his doing. But my goodness, the editing in this thing is just bonkers. Some of it obviously comes from the only available copies being crappy TV bootlegs, but at several points, the movie just flat interrupts itself. Cutaways to MORE TANKS happen in the middle of domestic conversations. At one point, we see MacArthur having dinner with his wife (Dorothy James). Then we cut abruptly to MacArthur on the phone with Hallsworth. Then we cut from Hallsworth to tanks and explosions. And then we cut back to the MacArthurs enjoying a moment of domestic tranquility. All of this happens within the space of about four minutes. That Milford apparently threw up his hands and just let all this happen tells you just about all you need to know about how much the people paid to work on Inchon gave a rat’s behind about it.
Oh, also, at least one extra died during filming after being run over by a car. Gross negligence is bad too.
THE GOOD
So Inchon is not a great war movie, or a good war movie, or a good movie of any sort, and it has an enormous American flagpole up its butt. What Inchon is, is very earnest. The movie chokes on its earnestness. The closing scene, in which MacArthur dramatically recites the Lord’s Prayer, is goofy as hell, but it’s also sincere and heartfelt to the point where it becomes disarming and left me with a smile on my face. Whatever shady stuff was going on behind the scenes – and Lord knows Sun Myung Moon spent his entire career up to his eyeballs in shady stuff – the impression you get from the movie is that Moon and Ishii just thought General Douglas MacArthur was one swell guy, just a real stand-up spiffy American mensch, and needed the rest of the world to know that they felt that way. If they did indeed secure the endorsement of MacArthur’s disembodied soul, it’s easy to see why.
Of course, I’m not sure why they felt so urgently about that project. Sure, he doesn’t have the mythic stature of Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King, Jr., but the American verdict on MacArthur is that he was a war hero and one of the good guys. Yes, Harry Truman relieved him of command following the retreat from North Korea, but given MacArthur’s popularity, Truman won no friends with that decision. Whatever the case, Moon and Ishii did feel urgently about this project, and the film is generally successful in its portrayal of MacArthur as a man hellbent on doing the right thing, even when all the other people in charge were telling him not to.
Olivier’s performance of MacArthur is difficult to nail down, hair and makeup butchery aside. It’s definitely interesting, moreso than it ought to be given what surrounds it, a rare blessing given the stakes-free slog of a movie it’s carrying. He does not seem to be playing Douglas MacArthur as much as he is playing An Old Movie Star Who’s Still Got It, Dammit. His faux-W.C. Fields accent and twitchy wide-eyed emoting as he argues with the Truman administration higher-ups do not exactly evoke Douglas MacArthur, but they do evoke “leading man determined to lead this movie somewhere if it kills him.” Perhaps that’s why Olivier ultimately feels so out of place here, and why he got smacked with the Razzie for Worst Actor: he’s acting in a different movie, one with dramatic tension and a sense of gravity.
Performing in this alternate movie alongside Olivier are Won Namkoong (credited as Nam Goong Won) as Park (no first name given) and Lydia Lei as his fiancée Mila, who are separated during the invasion, after which Mila helps Barbara get the children to a safehouse. Their relationship, for the two minutes of screentime it gets, is sweet and romantic. Won sells Park’s terror and rage following his capture and involuntary conscription by the Red Army, and his death is the only truly affecting one in the film. Later on, following one round of Exploding Tanks, a badly injured Mila tears up her wedding dress to make bandages for the wounded before collapsing herself, and the camera slowly zooms in on her ruined dress. It’s a small scene, but it’s one of the only ones that comes close to making the viewer feel something about the senseless losses suffered during the Korean War. In a better world, Inchon would have been about Park and Mila.
Richard Roundtree also comes off pretty well, bringing warmth and good humor to a movie largely devoid of either. Like Bisset, he is stuck in a role that gives him nothing to work with; unlike Bisset, he does his very best to make something substantial out of it. The only real laugh line in the whole movie comes from Henderson, whom Roundtree plays as an anchor of stability in a time of unprecedented chaos for both Frank and Barbara.
Oh, and the music, while nothing to shout about from rooftops, is pretty good. It’s Jerry Goldsmith, after all. Those tanks get to crush South Korean villages to some tense, brass-heavy arrangements, with themes reminiscent of his work on Star Trek: The Motion Picture (another glacial movie with a great score).
A common – and extremely valid – criticism of the Razzies is that they do not require their voters to watch the movies that they nominate and vote for. That means the Razzies are heavily weighted towards movies that already come with an aura of infamy (see also this year’s winner, the OAN-funded “documentary” Absolute Proof). Knowing this, I was ready for Inchon to be a misunderstood masterpiece that just couldn’t overcome its baggage. Alas, Inchon is the film equivalent of the Ford Pinto: ugly, slow, clunky, and might blow up at any second. If you’re looking for some giggles at the expense of a costly cult-financed train wreck, you’ll have better luck with Battlefield Earth.
Quality of Movie: 2/5.
Quality of Experience: 1.5/5. The tanks and explosions get a full star by themselves. The rest of Inchon, despite its hilarious origin story, is just too big a snooze to be worth your time.