Wow! Such a good movie.

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

It's one of the most original films you'll likely see all year, which, depending on your threshold for certifiably crazy storylines, could be a rewarding experience or one that frustrates you.

I found this older movie in an unusual way, I was looking for Martha Hyer movies. In this one her role is somewhat brief as the wife of the main character but in her early 30s was as beautiful as ever.Rock Hudson is very good as Colonel Dean E. Hess, who in real life was an American minister and United States Air Force colonel who was involved in the so-called "Kiddy Car Airlift," the documented rescue of 950 orphans and 80 orphanage staff from the path of the Chinese advance during the Korean War on December 20, 1950.As the movie opens we see Hess as a minister but still feels guilt from an accidental bombing of a church and orphanage in Germany during WW2. He isn't sure he is genuine as a minister and goes back into active duty, training Koreans to fly fighter planes. But his soft spot for orphans gets him involved in providing care for them, an activity that he continued in future years. He died, aged 97 in 2015.Good movie.

Rock Hudson is a fighter pilot who mistakenly destroys a German church and orphanage during World War II. Haunted by guilt he becomes a minister but finds he's not very inspiring, so he signs up as an Air Force colonel whose duty is to train fighter pilots for the Republic of Korea. Leaving his pregnant wife (Martha Hyer) behind, he takes charge of a small airfield near a Korean village. An old war buddy, another pilot (DeFore) discovers that Hudson has become a "preacher" and angrily ridicules him for it. Hudson befriends one of those archetypal "wise old men" (Philip Ahn) and a pretty Korean/Indian woman (Anna Kashfi). Together they establish an orphanage for hundreds of Korean children and when the settlement is threatened, Hudson arranges for their escape to safety. When he visits them much later, they sing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" in his honor. (Whew.) Around the turn of the century, the Harvard Psychologist William James distinguished between tender-minded and tough-minded individuals. The tough-minded don't want to fail to face up to the physical world. They always strive for objectivity. Consequently, they are often not only irreligious themselves but tend to be insensitive toward more tender-minded people. They constantly step on other people's toes, give offense, and have the tendency to talk as if all tender-minded people did not have a mind at all. That's Hudson's old buddy, Don Defore., A truck filled with innocent children is strafed by mistake. "That's war," says DeFore. That's also the camp's cook. "These kids are a nuisance." Let's tend to the job at hand and get her done.The tender-minded are the system builders who become depressed if they do not have a definite cosmic world view in which they can place the particulars of their everyday life. They need a sense of the spiritual, of the transcendent. That's Rock Hudson and the others who help build the orphanage, idealists striving for a perfect world order.Usually, in war movies of the traditional (ie., older) sort, the emphasis would be placed on life in the Army or Air Force, on battle, on getting the job done. This appeals to the tough minded. But the producers usually found it advisable to include some romantic interludes -- either a foreign woman encountered in the field or flashbacks to love life at home. And sometimes the movies about the war were the other way around, with the families back home trying to cope with the absence of their loved ones or, just as bad, their temporary presence, praying, hoping, caring, worrying, and very tender minded. (Egs., "Since You Went Away", "Until They Sail," "Mrs. Miniver.") It's not impossible to blend the two sets of attitudes effectively. Herman Woulk did it in "The Caine Mutiny" -- the novel, not the movie.In "Battle Hymn" there are some marvelous scenes of airplanes in flight. The later versions of the P-51s were models of grace and pugnacity. And they're well photographed by Russell Metty. But we don't see much of them because Rock Hudson has brought tender-mindedness to the Korean war. It's all about love, responsibility, charity, and guilt -- and it's not well done either.Those little Korean kids are terrible, especially Chu, the two-year old ward of Hudson, who swallows his gum instead of chewing it. He's so cute he's revolting. I adopted a Korean orphan of that age too, but when it became clear after a week or two that he had no interest in a career in medicine or law, I tried to send him back, only to find the arrangement was permanent. If anyone wants to see him in a movie, dig up "Traxx." He's the Oriental kid who looks startled when the star bursts through a door. (I was a drunken cowboy in the downstairs cat house.) But, all seriousness aside, too much time is given over to those orphans. They sing, they play, they eat garbage, they swallow gum. It wouldn't be bad if there had been something original in the treatment but it's all old hat. The colonel's top sergeant is the scrounger who poses as a sailor to steal candy for the kids. (Cf., "Flying Leathernecks," "Operation Petticoat," et al.) Hudson doesn't do a bad job, considering his relative inexperience compared to some of the other players. He gets to pray over two dying bodies and one dead. And he gets to stare with chagrin at a fourth, an enemy pilot he's just killed. Martha Hyer -- her presence in movies is something I could never understand. She's attractive without being staggeringly beautiful or physically interesting. She has the Donna Reed role but can't act very well. Reed at least could bring that mellow Mid-western voice to the part, nasal and throaty at the same time.Both tendencies -- tender and tough -- have extremes. At one end, we can look for title like "Kill 'Em All And Let God Sort 'Em Out!" At the other end? "Please Don't Take My Baby." This one errs on the side of sentimentality and cheapens the effect by making it all so terribly easy.

In 1954,Rock Hudson,who was Douglas Sirk's favorite actor,(they made 8 movies together)starred in the remake of John Stahl's "magnificent obsession".It was a tale of redemption.A playboy trying to redeem himself by giving back eyesight to a blind woman (whose disability was his fault).In "Battle hymn" ,Rock Hudson portrays an air force officer who destroyed an orphanage with thirty-seven children in WW2 and tries to redeem his soul.But it is not as convincing.As users have already pointed out,the true story was altered .The ideology is not clear; the old man's words are not so wise :war is necessary and that is the way God planned it ....Sirk's pacifism was better applied on "A time to love and a time to die" based on EM Remarque's novel which is much superior to this preachy effort.Colonel Hess deserved a better movie.Like this ?try these.....The inn of the sixth happiness (Robson)55 days at Peking (Ray)The keys of the kingdom (Stahl)

Douglas Sirk's career at Universal throughout the fifties was a constant battle. It was a battle to make quality movies despite the often dire screenplays and less than talented casts he often had to put up with. Miraculously he most often was victorious despite the odds. "Battle Hymn" was one of his defeats. It remains his least likable film.In his book "Sirk on Sirk" Michael Halliday sheds some light on this. Sirk had broken his leg badly and had to direct from a wheelchair which severely limited him. But the main reason for this somewhat heavy handed film was the presence of Dean Hess on the set and his overseeing each scene.The film is a biography of Dean Hess himself. A man who turns to the church after the trauma of bombing a German orphanage and killing 37 children, Hess leaves his position of preacher in small town Ohio and volunteers for service in Korea. It's an odd choice for a man of his past, but "Killer Hess" as he was known, gets the opportunity to save Korean orphans in the process, putting to sleep his inner demons and putting things right in the world.Sirk was very put off by Hess' presence on the set and more so by his input. He was clearly a man of much ambiguity, something that fascinated Sirk. Yet Sirk was unable to really express this in meaningful way on the screen. He wanted to give Hess a drinking problem as a way of expressing his pain, but Hess would hear nothing of it. He clearly wanted to be portrayed as a holier than though hero. The result is that the film has an awful self congratulatory feel about it.Sirk was fascinated by characters who conceal within themselves a deep conflict. To him these were the most interesting of all. In all the movies Sirk made with Rock Hudson, he always cast him as the stabling influence and a foil to those unstable characters around him. Robert Stack in both "Written on the Wind" and "Tarnished Angels" is a perfect example of a split character playing against Hudson as the basically good, well grounded opposite. It's of course extremely ironic since in real life Rock Hudson was surely terribly conflicted by his concealed homosexuality while idolised by the masses as a model of masculine heterosexuality. Perhaps that is part of Sirk's affinity for him. Yet Sirk felt that Hudson's simplicity and basic goodness were suited to playing uncomplicated characters. "Battle Hymn" is the only film in which Sirk cast Hudson as a conflicted character. Had his character been better written there may have been a chance to pull it off. But as it stands, it's a competent and respectable performance, but something of a missed opportunity for Hudson.The rest of the cast acquit themselves well. Anna Kashfi is particularly effective with her ethereal presence. James Edwards deserves a mention, since his role as a black fighter pilot was certainly ground breaking for its time.There are however some really cringe inducing moments such as the aforementioned James Edwards breaking into "Swing Low" after an air raid and the final scene of the Korean orphans singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic" for Hess as he returns to Korea with his wife. These moments are meant to be uplifting, but seem now to be in somewhat poor taste.The Korean children in the film were actually Korean orphans and they are a delight. Sirk had great affinity with young children who in turn gave memorable performances in his movies.But when all is said and done, "Battle Hymn" is a film best forgotten, unlike his other war film, the remarkable "A Time to Love and a Time to Die" which he would soon make.