Inchon is an infamous film.

First released in 1982, this epic recreation of one key battles of the Korean War was an expensive film with a cast of well-known actors.  Jacqueline Bisset plays a wealthy army wife who tries to protect five South Korean children who have found themselves in the middle of the battle.  Ben Gazzara plays her husband, a major who is having an affair with the daughter of Toshiro Mifune.  David Janssen and real-life film critic Rex Reed wander through the film as journalist.  (Janssen growls like a man dealing with a serious hangover while Reed struggles to not look straight at the camera.)  Richard Roundtree plays a tough sergeant.  The great Italian actor Gabriele Ferzetti plays a Turkish officer.  And, finally, the role of legendary American general Douglas MacArthur — of “I will return” fame — is played by the very British Sir Laurence Olivier.  Olivier was apparently told that, in real life, MacArthur often sounded like the comedic actor W.C. Fields and Olivier often seems to be imitating Fields’s pinched style of speaking.  Olivier also wears almost as much makeup here as he did in his production of Othello.  MacArthur is portrayed as being almost a mystic warrior, a man who relies as much on his faith as his strategic genius to repel the communists.  (In victory, he recites The Lord’s Prayer.)  The film was directed by Terence Young, who previously brought James Bond to cinematic life.

Inchon is notorious for being a flop with both critics and audiences.  The film had a budget of $46,000,000 and reportedly made $5,000,000 at the box office before it was withdrawn.  The entirety of the budget was put up by the Unification Church, which is an organization that many people consider to be a cult.  (I like neither communists nor cultists so this film left me with no one to root for.)  The film proved to be such a flop at the box office that it has never been released on home video.  It did, however, air on television a few times and, in recent years, the television cut has been posted to YouTube.  That’s how I saw Inchon.

I watched Inchon because I’ve frequently seen it referred to as being one of the worst films ever made.  Watching the film, I have to say that I think the “worst film” label is a bit extreme.  For the most part, it’s just an extremely uneven and often rather boring film, one that mixed scenes of surprisingly brutal combat with dialogue-heavy scenes that just seem to drag on forever.  It’s a film that belongs as much in the disaster genre as the war genre as the film is full of rather shallowly-written characters who all have their own individual dramas to deal with.  Will Jacqueline Bisset save the children?  Who will sacrifice their lives to defeat the communists? Will Ben Gazzara, who often seems to be the sole member of the cast who is at least tying to give a credible performance, choose his wife or his mistress?  The film ultimately feels like a compressed miniseries.  Everyone has a story but hardly anyone makes an impression.

That said, Laurence Olivier’s performance as Douglas MacArthur …. agck!  Seriously, it’s hard to know where to even begin when it comes to talking about just how miscast Olivier is as the quintessential all-American general.  It’s been said that it takes a truly great actor to give a truly bad performance and Olivier certainly proves that to be true in this film.  Obviously frail and trying to sound like W.C. Fields, Olivier’s MacArthur is a general who would inspire zero confidence.  The film doesn’t help by portraying MacArthur as being an almost holy figure, one who is often framed to look like almost an angel descending from Heaven to lead the battle against America’s enemies.  The film is full of scenes of people discussing MacArthur’s genius just to be followed by a scene of Olivier looking old, tired, and rather grumpy.  There were a few times when I thought I could see Olivier’s hair dye running down the side of his face.  It may have been my imagination or just the graininess of the upload on YouTube but, given the quality of the film, I can’t really dismiss the possibility that it happened and no one felt like doing a second take.

As I said, Inchon can be found on YouTube.  It’s not the worst film ever made but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.