Piagol: In War, Everything Is Justified

YouTube's Korean Classic Film channel is the Korean film fan's beloved online version of Turner Classic Movies, a treasure trove of restored classics, cult curiosities, and other cinematic wonders from the celluloid vault. Piagol, one of the channel's older black-and-white movies, is a gritty 1955 war pic about a dwindling squadron of North Korean soldiers struggling for relevance and survival at the tail end of the Korean War. As portraits of the military go, it's anything but flattering yet the critiques leveled by writer-director Lee Kang-cheon have a despairingly universal quality: Ranking officers rape female officers with little consequence; villages are pillaged for food then violence is justified for dubious political reasons; discipline is extreme and inconsistent and often pointless; the enemy often comes from within. (P.S. Don't expect the Soviet Union to rescue your ass!)

And it's not just one bad red apple in khaki here. The icy-hot Ae-ran (No Kyeong-hie) backstabs her rival female enlistee Soju (Kim Yeong-hui) for no good reason while both the lead officer (Lee Ye-chun) and that snake of a G.I. Man-su (Heo Jang-kang) pull out knives to literally stab others, with even lower motives on their mind. With WWI poet laureate Wilfred Owen likely staring down at him from the heavens, all the duplicity and detonating bombs in the world cannot and will not kill the Byronesque tendencies of Piagol's impossibly romantic Cheol-su (Kim Jin-kyu), the dashing serviceman who gazes wistfully at the clouds as if posing for a paperback cover of Wuthering Heights. So who surrenders and who dies? Well, the one to ultimately survive the nasty infighting amidst periodic enemy gunfire may surprise you. It sure did me.