Diagonaldi Very well executed

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

HottWwjdIam There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

agabustony One reviewer found this movie quite hilarious. The film does have an unbelievable premise, that the military would actually send some one to investigate the POW camps. In fact in the opening scene, Harry Morgan (of MASH fame) tells Reagan that they have heard of atrocities but have no proof. but how did they hear? And why do they need proof? As if the Communists would actually be forced to behave humanely. That first scene was funny because Morgan comes off like he did as Gannon on Dragnet, the same stilted manner of speaking. Anyway, the film does portray the atrocities in a rather sobering way. And one neat thing is you get to see all these new actors in early roles: Strother Martin, Dewey Martin, Steve Forrest, Darrly Hickman, Dick Sargent and even Stewart Whitman. And One of the guards was Wesley Levy who played the communist leader on Satan Never Sleeps with William Holden. But it was a propaganda movie and so a bit forced and wooden except for Reagan. He was good.

sol1218 **SPOILERS** Hard hitting war drama with future President of the United States Ronald Reagan as US Army Captain Webb Sloane going undercover-as as an American POW-to get the goods on the Reds in how they brutally and inhumanly threat, against the rules of warfare, their prisoners of war in that hell that was the Korean War.In order to throw off suspicion on himself Sloane becomes a Commie stooge, or collaborator, that makes his fellow GI's in the POW camp hate his very guts. Hard as he tries to be a Commie rat-fink Sloane can't help showing his true colors-Red White & Blue-instead of the ones-deep Commie Red-he masks himself with. That fact soon comes to light in Sloane coming to aid of his fellow American POW's when the chips are down. This has Sloane saving one of of the POW's lives when he came down with a near-fatal attack of appendicitis! In another heroic effort Sloane prevented another GI Cpl. Joe Stanton,Steve Forrest-who killed the camps brutal commissar Russian Col. Biroshilov played by Oskar Homolka-from being shot by hiding the evidence of what he did. This was after Cpl. Stanton killed Col.Biroshilov for having his cute little pet dog Eloise beaten to death, in order to make Stanton cooperate, in front of his very eyes!***SPOILER ALERT***In the end Sloane did get the evidence of what a bunch of vicious and sadistic swines the Commies were but to his surprises he wasn't sent to the Soviet Union as he planned, so he can be a mole inside the Kremlin for the US. Sloane instead was shipped, after being released from prison, straight back home in the good old USA. That dubious honor, of being sent to the USSR, went to fellow US Commie collaborator and undercover agent Pvt. ???? who had less to lose in being that he's single and with no living family members back in the states, like Sloane has, for him to worry about.The movie shows how the rotten Commies used captured GI's, through both threats and persuasion, to confess to war crimes that they didn't commit in order to turn the free world against the USA back then in the early 1950's. It took brave and patriotic Americans like Webb Sloane, by risking their very lives, to set the record straight in who, the USA/UN forces or Red Chinese/North Korean Communists, were really committing major war crimes in the Korean War. But sadly enough, like in the movie, many many patriotic American soldiers broke under the unrelenting pressure, of Commie brainwashing or just plain old intimidation, and ended up helping the Commie cause if just only in being used for propagandist purposes. These brave but later broken US fighting men who were in many cases driven insane by the Commies around the clock brainwashing tactics have to live with what they did, in helping Americas sworn enemies, for the rest of their lives.

wes-connors Ronald Reagan and a bunch of US soldiers in a North Korean POW camp. They are tortured... We learn North Korean Communists are bad people... We learn Americans' beards grow very slowly during days of torture...I tried to suppress it, but I finally burst out laughing at this movie. It was the scene when Mr. Reagan comes out from telling the Communists he wants to be on their side. Then, he asks for a bottle of brandy. Next, acting stone-cold sober, he takes a drunken companion, Dewey Martin, to get sulfur to cure Mr. Martin's hangover. Of course, the North Korean communist guard is as dumb as they come. So, the drunk distracts the guard while Reagan goes over to get something from a drawer, which is next to a bunch of empty boxes. I'm sure he boxes were supposed to contain something; but, of course, Reagan causes them to shake enough to reveal they are empty. Ya gotta laugh! I think "Prisoner of War" will appeal mainly to family and friends of those who worked on it - otherwise, it's wasteful. * Prisoner of War (1954) Andrew Marton ~ Ronald Reagan, Steve Forrest, Dewey Martin

aerovian I was able to hang in for only the first twenty minutes of this low-budget movie. The most glaring absurdity was that while the American inmates in a North Korean POW camp are all supposedly suffering from severe deprivation of food and medicine, going without bathing, shivering in flimsy and filthy parkas, and sleeping on bare floors, and - let's not forget enduring torture - they always manage to sport impeccably coiffed hair. With the exception of a suitably austere-looking Harry Morgan as an army Major, the casting and acting are simply awful. Ronald Regan cannot seem to stick to portraying a single character and instead creates a rather schizophrenic amalgam of past roles. A mostly Caucasian cast portraying the North Korean camp officers might have been forgivable, but when supposedly Russian officers acting as advisors to the Koreans strut around wearing re-badged Nazi uniforms complete with jodhpurs and jackboots (obvious costume-department recycles from WWII flicks) and speaking with accents like General Burkhalter from Hogan's Heroes, well, that's just six kinds of silly. Don't waste your time on this one.