302 STEEL HELMET, THE
Steel Helmet, The (1951)
Synopsis
The Steel Helmet is an American war film produced, written, and directed by Sam-
uel Fuller. An examination of racial bigotry set during the Korean War, the film is
about U.S. Army Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans), the sole survivor of a prisoner of war
(POW) massacre, who forms a survival pact with a Korean orphan (William Chun).Background
The Steel Helmet was writer- producer- director Sam Fuller’s third movie, the last
installment in a three- picture deal with in de pen dent producer Robert Lippert (the
first two were I Shot Jesse James, 1949, and The Baron of Arizona, 1950). In the sum-
mer of 1950, just after the outbreak of the Korean War, Fuller wrote The Steel Hel-
met script in a week, setting it in Korea for topicality but largely basing it on his own
WWII war diaries. As he recounts in his autobiography, A Third Face, Fuller was
determined to challenge racial prejudice and bring realism to a film genre rife with
jingoistic clichés: “What ever the confrontation and wherever it’s happening, the
under lying story [of war] is one of destruction and hatred. I wanted an opportunity
to show that war was more complex than the front- page newspaper articles. You
never saw the genuine hardship of soldiers, not ours nor the enemy’s, in movies.
The confusion and brutality of war, not phony heroism, needed to be depicted.
The people who chanted ‘We are right, they are wrong,’ needed to be debunked”
(Fuller, 2002, p. 256). A major studio expressed interest but wanted John Wayne
to star in the picture— casting that would have sabotaged Fuller’s vision of what a
realistic war movie should be. Fuller approached Mickey Knox to take the lead role
of Sgt. Zack but Knox turned him down. Eventually Fuller hired a gruff and burly
cigar- chomping WWII veteran named Gene Evans to play Sgt. Zack, a choice
affirmed by Bob Lippert but overruled during rehearsals by associate producer
William Berke, who tried to fire Evans and replace him with Larry Parks, then
a genuine movie star. It was widely rumored that Parks would be summoned to
testify at upcoming Hollywood House Un- American Activities Committee (HUAC)
hearings in 1951. Berke cynically reasoned they could now hire Parks on the cheap
and that he would, in Fuller’s words, “be worth a fortune in free publicity when
the s— hit the fan” (Fuller, 2002, p. 258). Fully committed to Evans and genu-
inely sympathetic to Parks’s plight, Fuller refused to hire Parks for purposes of
exploitation. He threatened to boycott his own movie unless Lippert promised that
there would be no more tampering with his cast. Lippert agreed and Evans kept
his job. The next day Fuller hung a sign on the sound stage door that read: “NO
ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS, CO- PRODUCERS, EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS OR
ANY PRODUCERS ADMITTED HEREIN.” Just before filming got underway, Fuller
sought cooperation from the U.S. military by submitting his script to Bernard
Baruch, chief of the newly established Motion Picture Production section of the
Public Affairs Office, Department of Defense (DOD). Baruch’s office initially refused
to cooperate with Fuller on the grounds that The Steel Helmet “contained no
informational value and had a number of objectionable sequences” (Chung, 2006,