In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

Or possibly We Were Soldiers? Surely this must be one of the movies that made a deep impression on Randall Wallace when he was a kid. An early 50's war movie from the slobbering right. The UN didn't fare any better in their minds in 1952 than it does now. Mitchum takes on The North Koreans with two pumped up right arms, demonstrating one minute to zero patience for the dovish views of UN worker, Ann Blyth, but falling in love with her and converting her all the same. In fact, all it takes for her to see the light in mitchum's soul is to see him shell civilian refugees into kibble then justify it because 'half' of them were communist infiltrators anyway.what a ridiculous piece of propaganda. Sure, wars need to be fought, that is indisputable, but not in every case, and war movies should never be so blindingly simpleminded and stupid, pandering on behalf of the Pentagon to the lowest brow audience for support. This is strictly the kind of post WW2 arrogance movie that made right wing war lovers what they are today. Let's just kick ass and shut up the pansy eggheads with a kiss, because we're the real men and war is necessary everywhere all the time. Kicking ass is what God made America for, talk is for lovers, and a machine gun and a box of ammo is the ONLY solution always.Interesting that it was a war entered into by a left wing President. The Right Wing no doubt loved him for it, taking on those commie gook cousins of Uncle Joe.Until he canned MacArthur.Brash American machismo doesn't begin to sum up this film. Fetish porn for freeps and muscleheads. It stars three of my favorite actors too. Robert Mitchum, Charles McGraw and Richard Egan I would watch in anything. This just proved not everything they made is worth a damn.

Unlike a great many films dealing with the Korean war ONE MINUTE TO ZERO does try to bring a sense of time and place to the proceedings . We see planes from Australia strafing North Korean troops while another scene scene shows British troops marching off to war behind a Scottish pipe band , and the most memorable sequence features North Korean infiltrators using refugees as human shields which did happen fairly often during that exceptionally cruel conflict. Compare this to most other films about the Korean war which could have been set in Asia or Europe during the second world war .It does have a few flaws , for example there`s some painfully obvious real life film footage used and some of the battle scenes , especially the sequence with a soldier being killed by a flame thrower , could have been more graphic but I suppose that`s down to what you could show on screen in 1952 so perhaps that`s not a valid criticism . What is however is the inclusion of a love story which drags the story down some what . Women won`t want to watch ONE MINUTE TO ZERO because of the large number of combat scenes while fans of war films ( Who I guess are exclusively male ) will find the love story intrusive . But it`s a lot better than PEARL HARBOR

The one good thing about this so-so Korean war film is the music score by Victor Young. It features the great romantic song "When I Fall in Love" Although not sung in the film (therefore not Academy Award nominated) it was recorded by Nat "King" Cole and others. Cole's is the best and is featured on many of his albums.

Love and war are a favored show theme in a number of films... Love often brings people of completely different backgrounds together, as in Huston's "The African Queen," Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms," Arthur Hill's "The Americanization of Emily," Douglas Sirk's "A Time to Love and a Time to Die." Also Anatole Litvak's "Act of Love" explores the relationship between an embittered GI (Kirk Douglas), and a lonely, helpless French girl (Dany Robin) fearful of becoming an outright tramp..."One Minute to Zero" uses love to make the Korean War acceptable... Ann Blyth is a nurse who has already lost a lover to the war... She is deeply hurt and cannot bear the though of falling in love with a soldier... However, she does, with a fighter pilot played by Robert Mitchum... In the end she becomes convinced that he is doing the right thing...One interesting point about the film is the scene where Mitchum (evacuating American civilians) strafes a column of refugees because it was feared that some guerrillas had infiltrated among them...