The Hook

George Seaton’s 1963 film adapts Vahé Katcha’s 1957 novel. During the Korean War three American soldiers take an enemy pilot prisoner and receive an unambiguous order: execute him. None of the three can do it. One forms a kind of bond with the man across a language neither shares, one pities him, one simply cannot find the nerve, and the hours aboard ship turn into an argument with conscience rather than with the enemy. Kirk Douglas plays the sergeant, with Robert Walker Jr. and Nick Adams alongside him, from a screenplay by Henry Denker. The harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler wrote and played the score, and the result works less as a war picture than as a chamber piece with no exit.