Rent Battle Hymn (1957)

Wings and Prayers - Battle Hymn review by CH

Mention the name Hess in any word-association challenge, and most likely a reply is the long-time inhabitant of Spandau rather than the subject of this film: Dean Hess. Dean was his Christian name but he was also a parson who, after the second world war and now married, was troubled to learn that his part in an Allied raid on Berlin had bombed out an orphanage.

Parson Hess sees a way of redeeming this by now joining the American air force as a training pilot in the war which has broken out in 1950 between north and south Korea. The symmetrical upshot of this was that he was able, just in time, to arrange for the rescue of four-hundred orphans who looked set to suffer a similar fate to those German children. Hess's memoir of this was a bestseller in its time and soon proved to be the unlikely basis of another in the varied catalogue of Douglas Sirk's films.

Although mostly taking place in what purports to be Korea, Battle Hymn has some echo of Sirk's Fifties films set in suburban America with the scenes that find Hess's wife at home (and, as she learns after his departure, pregnant). What's more, one might not be reading too much into it all by surmising that there is an unspoken passion between him and a Korean in charge of orphans.

Much of the film - in unashamed technicolor and cinemascope - takes place at the air-force base in Korea (where his clerical background is at first unknown) and in the many scenes in the sky which find these aircraft beset by the enemy. Some have scorned Sirk's depiction of this - feuds in the barracks, explosive blasts from all barrels, terse crackling exchanges between cockpits - as the stock in trade material of war films.

That is to rate it lower than it deserves. True, there are the sentimental deaths and dramatic appeals to reason familiar in such films but Sirk steers it an way that is sufficiently adroit to make it affecting - epilogue, stirring music and all.