Why Korea? (1950)

Why Korea, indeed? This documentary actually has precious little to do with that peninsula. It’s purpose seems to be to use the Soviet backed North Korea and a whole load of other tangential communist advances throughout Europe to rattle a sabre at Moscow’s imperialist agenda. The Japanese occupation of Manchuria might have been a relevant place to start had we stayed in that part of the world, but that was just the start of a global assessment of ambitious politicians from Stalin, Mussolini and, of course, Hitler. The archive is impressive but the narration is repetitious in the extreme. Joe King must ask “Why Korea?” about thirty times during the first ten minutes without ever even beginning to answer the question. This entire film has a condescension about it that depicts plucky little Korea, or Finland, or Ethiopia where they all “look strange”! Apparently there were Kremlin puppet masters pulling strings in the UK, commie saboteurs destabilising France and even in the USA there were conspirators facing the judicial processes of a democracy. All the while, luckily, there’s President Harry Truman there to deliver an invigorating speech about the freedom fighting, peace loving, nations of the world and how aggression will only respond to, well, more aggression! I suppose this does what it was supposed to and perhaps one ought not to judge using eyes seventy five years older, but this is really only a film for the seriously uneducated flag-waiver.