The Steel Helmet

The Steel Helmet (1951) is a Samuel Fuller war film you can watch online on iFILM. Sergeant Zack, played by Gene Evans, survived a mass execution — a bullet punched through his helmet but missed his skull. He wakes up alone, his unit gone, and very reluctant to trust anyone new.

A Korean boy he nicknames Short Round leads him out, and Zack ends up attached to a ragtag squad assigned to hold a Buddhist temple as a forward artillery post. Fuller shot the film in ten days while the Korean War was actually in progress — which makes The Steel Helmet one of the first American pictures to address the conflict at all. Unlike the upbeat combat films of the era, it runs on anger: the racism Black soldier Corporal Thompson faces from within his own ranks, the fog of orders that make no sense, the indifference to survival as a concept. Stream The Steel Helmet (1951) online on iFILM.