Edgar Allan Pooh . . . shot during the third year of the now 75-year-long Korean War. (I've heard of The Hundred Years War, but this Korean Conflict is on track to break that record by the time members of the Millennial Generation become great-grandparents.) BATTLE CIRCUS star Humphrey Bogart's "Major Jed" character says something about War and Futility. Maybe the Korean War being on target to out-live "Bogie" by a century illustrates this point. Therefore, it's another triumph of American Ingenuity that the U.S. decided to make these endless wars more fun, starting with Korea. BATTLE CIRCUS documents how the M*A*S*H units were set up as a three-ring circus version of The Dating Game, with six hot nurses vying for each available surgeon. The losing nurses are shown spending most of their time lighting cigarettes for wounded G.I.s, though they occasionally disarm grenade-wielding P.O.W.s for excitement. Soon the TV follow-up to BATTLE CIRCUS came along. Then TOP GUN, the high stakes video game of the air, hit the big screens. After which BATTLESHIP brought board game authenticity to the high seas. And who can forget AMER1CAN SNIPER (still playing in theaters), showing us how "Legends" are born? Since 1950, in the Carnival of Life, America has replaced Germany as the host of one big BATTLE CIRCUS!

secondtake Battle Circus (1953)An awkward movie with really uneven acting and some routine (or worse) dialog. Even the battle actions scenes, which have along history of success in Hollywood, are sometimes clumsy. You have to accept all this up front to get anywhere further here and appreciate the sincere shreds of insight into a little known aspect of war, and of the Korean War in particular at the time—the mobile hospitals that followed the front line fighting.Of course MASH the movie and then MASH the t.v. show took the idea and made it everyday material (with a not-so-hidden commentary on the Vietnam war). "Battle Circus" is unusual in coming right as the "Korean Conflict" was ending (the war ended in 1953), and a decade before Vietnam grew into an actual war for the U.S. And so it is very interesting—if you are a student of war, and war movies, that is. It's a bit of a slog as a drama, however, even watching the kinds of vehicles in use or the hardships of weather and war. The methods of setting up these hospitals so quickly is quite accurate and the army cooperated with some of the filming.There is also Humphrey Bogart. When an actor reaches his kind of fame, even his lesser movies take on meaning. He has a central role as a leading officer in the group, and of course he has near-misses and a few near-kisses with the women—nurses—who are the center of activities. He's portrayed as a womanizing, practical man, not especially nice but eventually very admirable—like many of his characters, in fact. Some of the scenes are quite serious and strong, taken by themselves. But they get beaten down by the stiff romance that is forced on Bogart and his counterpart, June Allyson. She has to play a naive, smart, well-meaning "girl next door" and while that might be the truth sometimes, it makes for a kind of false set-up, and she's a lightweight presence. So the movie stumbles along in a weird zone. The decision of Altman making MASH to turn it truly comic was essential (the humor here is rare and flat, like falling in the mud). So tune out in the love scenes and get absorbed in the genuine intensity of the best of the staged war scenes and the hospital dynamics. The title, by the way, is suggested very early when Allyson cheerfully says that moving the tents every few days is just like a real circus on the move.

classicsoncall Humprey Bogart is a doctor with the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, MASH Unit #8666, in a non comedy preview of the more notable TV Series of the early 1970's. The early going in the film really left me disoriented when the unit's encampment undergoes strafing fire, while more than once and clearly visible, a warplane bearing USAF markings is shown flying by. Seems to me like someone should have caught that.Besides some interesting scenes portraying the daily life and death struggles of a Korean War medical team, the story follows Major Jed Webbe's (Bogey) romancing of a newly assigned nurse, Lt. Ruth McGara (June Allyson). However there's nothing subtle about Webbe's approach, and it's surprising that McGara allows this affair to blossom considering how much of a chauvinist the Major turns out to be. In fact, he's a genuine creep when you get right down to it.Keenan Wynn is fairly effective as Sgt. Orvil Statt, competently running the basic mechanics of the unit, with impressive views of breaking down and setting up camp. Robert Keith is the no nonsense Lt. Col. Walters, who takes Webbe down a peg for getting drunk on his own time, and later offers him a drink after a particularly hairy operation. War is hell.You'll have to really pay attention to the only attempt at comic relief here, since it's a visual - the sign underneath the camp cook's serving table states "This Mess Recommended by Romanoff".Humphrey Bogart made a number of war films, but much like the Westerns in which he appeared, this just doesn't appear to be his element. He was much better suited for the gangster and noir dramas that made him famous, and "Casablanca" didn't hurt either. Here, with his age showing through, he seemed entirely mismatched with the younger June Allyson, whose clout as a leading lady here is much subdued.With only one tense scene involving a Korean prisoner (Philip Ahn) threatening to blow up a grenade in an operating room, the film offers no defining moments and very little battle action. In fact, the movie doesn't really even have an ending. As the MASH Unit detours it's way around an active battle zone, all you have left is Bogey and Allyson walking off into the sunset as it were, perhaps wondering what might have happened if the grenade went off.

Nazi_Fighter_David "Battle Circus" is another vehicle written and directed by Richard Brooks, with less satisfying results… Very likely the major fault was in teaming Bogart with June Allyson, an actress of extremely limited range whose perpetually simpering attitude and breathy whining of lines must surely have kept Bogart's nerves on edge… The idea of the film was a sound one, a semi-documentary approach at portraying the day-by-day activities of a mobile field hospital behind the front lines during the Korean War… The film fell apart, however, when an almost juvenile love plot interceded… One laughable scene found Allyson disarming a partially crazed prisoner who was threatening to blow everyone up with a hand grenade, thereby proving her courage under fire to a rather uninterested Bogart, who finally falls in love with her