The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954) Reviews

(OK) Michener has everything for Hollywood: war, drama and strong characters. He even put the bridges in Holden and Kelly's bed. Robson dramatizes brilliantly the action in ground and air, specially with Mickey and his green hat and scarf...

Grace Kelly only made eleven films before becoming Her Serene Highness, Princess Grace, and in a handful of them the films would have been better if the stuff concerning her character was removed. The Bridges at Toko-Ri is the perfect example of this. A Korean War film about a soldier’s fatigue over military service could have been much better if the women had been stricken from the plot.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri hovers near greatness whenever we examine William Holden’s combat pilot and the small group of men we meet that he serves with in the Navy. Holden’s character is hovering at the cross-section of furious over having to be in more combat after serving in WWII and anemically going through the motions. Fredric March’s admiral views him as a prodigal/replacement son for the one he lost on a battlefield, Mickey Rooney is all-business as a proudly Irish helicopter jockey, and Robert Strauss has a few scenes which endear our sympathies as a comic-relief sailor.

The intrusion of an extended sequence away from the naval carrier is where the problems begin. A protracted storyline involving Rooney’s love for a Korean woman and her abandoning him for a different American sailor serves no function for the film’s wider (if muddled) message of futility in war and the lack of true reasoning for the conflict in Korea.

It is here that Kelly appears as Holden’s bourgeoisie wife, and she gives us what can only be described as her soggiest performance ever. As the wife of the main character, you’d think she’d serve a larger purpose in the story, but she’s a vacantly written sketch. She does nothing but cry, have a high society freak-out when a communal bath must be shared with a Korean family, and leave the film after two or three scenes. These stories, I guess, are supposed to show us what these men are fighting for, what drives them to eventually return, but it breaks up the tension and needlessly leads us away from the main thrust of the story.

While Toko-Ri can never come directly out and state the loudly sub-textual question on its mind, “What the hell were we doing in Korea anyway?,” it does pay a lot of generic lip-service to issues of containment and spreading democracy. Yet this is undercut by the ending, which (spoilers) sees both Holden and Rooney die in the dirt from a flood of bullets. While it attempts to keep an even keeled approach to the subject, Holden’s warrior fatigue and the violent ending tip it into anti-war ideology and empathizing with those on the ground, in air and sea fighting abroad as they dream of returning home and trying to get back to a normalized life.