Inchon (1981)

Beautiful, moving film.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

I will say that Inchon did have some nicely filmed battle sequences, but one of the greatest surprise military maneuvers of all time got a short shrift with the rest of the film. A nice documentary type film like The Longest Day would have been ideal. The back story certainly wasn't needed.And that horrible makeup job that Laurence Olivier was given must have been done by Tammy Faye Bakker's people. He looks like a refugee from Madame Tussaud's. He sounds nothing like Douglas MacArthur. Olivier had the further misfortune to have his role come so soon after Gregory Peck portrayed MacArthur in MacArthur.The story is that Olivier at some point in the early Seventies feeling he had nothing to prove any more to be at the pinnacle of his profession. So he began taking parts strictly for the cash. As this film was produced by the Reverend Sun Yung Moon no one ever said the Moonies lacked cash. Olivier uses the same American type accent he did in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof and in another of his for the money only projects The Betsy.The rest of the cast Ben Gazzara, Jacqueline Bisset, David Janssen, Toshiro Mifune etc. act with the smug confidence that they're Moonie checks just cleared the bank. The landing at Inchon, done at the dawn hours within a narrow framework of time determined by the tides and on the western side of the Korean peninsula was militarily drawing to an inside straight. No doubt Douglas MacArthur deserves all kinds of kudos for what he did, even his sternest detractors have said it was brilliant. Said it did not get a film worthy of the achievement.Inchon may have done one thing though. Laurence Olivier if not the only actor to win both an Oscar and a Razzie in his life certainly became the first to do it.

I wonder where the people who say they've seen this recently did so? It has never officially been released on VHS or DVD. Clearly there are bootlegs kicking around.The reviewers here are being way too hard on Laurence Olivier. Come on, MacArthur was a bad role for him, and he would have had trouble with it in his prime, and in 1980, he was NOT in his prime. The last time Lord Olivier looked and sounded good in a movie was in 1977's THE SEVEN PER CENT SOLUTION. By the time THE BETSY (1978) came along, his admirers were shocked at how frail he had become; his once powerful voice weak and high-pitched from his rapidly declining health. INCHON came after that yet, and in his condition, Olivier never had a chance with a role that was wrong for him in the first place. So, instead of denigrating his entire career (as some have done on this page) for his poor performance here, cut him some slack. His positive achievements far outweigh INCHON or anything else from his final period.

I am one of the few people on this Earth who actually saw "Inchon" during its brief theatrical run in 1982, and did not see it again until a cable recording came my way very recently. It was fascinating to revisit this train wreck of a movie that took what should have been a fascinating event in history, and instead with a bloated budget of $40 million and the interference of the Moonies, turned it into something that ultimately isn't the worst thing ever produced for the screen, but at the same time is something that could have been made cheaply for TV at a fraction of the cost.The thing "Inchon" most resembles is the godawful 1979 ABC miniseries "Pearl" which took the events of another famous event in history, and gave us a soapy, silly melodrama about a bunch of boring fictional characters. In "Inchon", the goings on of Ben Gazzara, Jacqueline Bisset (who looks stunning), Richard Roundtree and the wasted David Janssen could just as easily have been at home in some made for TV potboiler that utilized stock footage for the big moments. It's because "Inchon" had an A-level budget, and an inordinance of expensive set design and extras etc. that in the end made its flaws magnified in ways that a cheap TV miniseries like "Pearl" could keep obscured.The acting...sheesh, Olivier does get the look of MacArthur right but Terence Young was clearly asleep when giving him instruction on how to deliver his lines, and the script he was given didn't help matters either. As for the rest, they're okay in a TV movie kind of way, but that's largely damning with faint praise. Jerry Goldsmith's score is great, as is the cinemtaography.I will say one thing though to a couple reviewers though who think the greatest sin of this movie is its anti-communism. That is really about the ONLY thing you can give this movie a plus for, because the North Koreans of Kim Il Sung were a brutal thug regime and their invasion of the South was not a case of as one reviewer falsely implied one where atrocities were equally committed by both sides. The prologue to the movie that summarizes how Kim Il Sung flew to Moscow to receive permission from Stalin to go ahead with the invasion is dead accurate in its description of the real history and it sadly offers the initial hope that we're going to get a movie more in the mold of "The Longest Day" or "Tora! Tora! Tora!". Instead we got a movie that was as noted in the mold of "Pearl" and almost exclusively utilizing the bad fictional subplots that nearly wrecked "Midway." So yes, "Inchon" is bad, but not necessarily for the reasons that some people would like to have us think. It was ultimately more the fault of the scriptwriters, the actors and the director that "Inchon" turned out to be as bad as it was, than the heavy-hand of the Moonie cult (though their PR for the movie certainly dragged it down further).

i just watched the 140 minute version of Inchon which i bought on DVD. while its list of shortcomings is long, it was reasonably entertaining. Olivier's performance seemed OK to me, it was believable. MacArthur was something of a prima donna and manly enough not to be shy about his belief in God. as mentioned by other reviewers here, the venom drizzled on Inchon comes in large part from people's animosity toward any mention of God in general and the Unification Church in particular. the version i saw included scenes with Rex Reed and David Janssen (who delivered the story about the death of Arthur MacArthur, not the Gazzara character). Olivier and MacArthur are both fascinating men, and Inchon in worth seeing.