The War Lover

War Hunt is about a war lover, a man for whom war is not hell but home. It is set in the bleak, blasted terrain of Korea a few months prior to the cease-fire at Panmunjom. Private Endore (John Saxon) is a broody loner. Each night he smudges up his face and like a blackface minstrel of death steals out behind the Chinese lines on a one-man patrol. With snakelike grace, he slithers up to an isolated and unwary outpost guard and slits his throat or plunges a knife into his heart. Then follows an infinitely more chilling ritual: the bent-over Endore circles round and round the enemy corpse in a silent, semihysterical Indian war dance.

Only one person loves the war lover, an orphaned Korean boy named Charlie (Tommy Matsuda). A bruising struggle to mold Charlie's developing personality begins between Endore and another private, Loomis (Robert Redford). Loomis is a rookie in the platoon, a man for whom war is a strange, unreal interlude to be borne with fortitude, but no elation.

Loomis tries to teach Charlie to catch a baseball. Endore intervenes, throws the ball back to Loomis with a contemptuous, "Charlie doesn't want it." Later, when Charlie slices the head off a wounded bird and throws it at Loomis in an unconscious mimicking of his killer idol, Loomis sadly senses that he is losing the battle to turn the boy into a humane being. When the cease-fire comes, Endore goes hopelessly psychopathic and heads for the hills with his knife, and Charlie. This jeopardizes the cease-fire agreement, and some of Endore's platoon mates volunteer to bring him back. When they track him down, he adamantly refuses to return. "Come back," coaxes the C.O., "the war is over." And Endore, speaking from the depths of his profoundly disturbed personality, answers "Which war?" In an ensuing scuffle Endore is cut down by a bullet from one of his fellow Americans. As Charlie scrambles away from the pursuing Loomis into the lonely distance, the boy personifies the most melancholy of war victims, an embryonic war lover of the future.

War Hunt is an astringent, understated film in which the subtle interplay of surface and substance produces an ambiguity of multiple meanings. The company commander, for example, regards Endore as "a valuable man," and deliberately blinds himself to the fearsome core of Endore's nature. The C.O. is the perfect portrait of the manipulator of means who forgets ends and comes to accept the terms of war as the norm of existence. When Loomis asks, "What do you feel when you kill a man?", Endore counterquestions, "What do you feel?"; and the cryptic answer establishes a bone-deep difference between the two men that totally belies a similarity of uniforms. John Saxon is excellent as the war lover, and Robert Redford digs beneath his own blond good looks to mine compellingly into the nature of goodness itself. While War Hunt is lean on frontline fighting, one head-punching artillery barrage that lasts perhaps three minutes of screen time stings with a combat reality few war movies achieve in hours.

In War Hunt, the producer-director team of Brothers Terry and Denis Sanders proves that a low budget is no bar to fine film-making if it is backed up with a high IQ, high art, and high purpose.

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