Moon's Phase

By R.S.

INCHON

Directed by Terence Young

Screenplay by Robin Moore and Laird Koenig

More bad news for the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Not only has the religious cult leader lost his case to the IRS but he must now face the fact that Inchon, his first, $46 million venture as a movie financier, is unlikely to contribute so much as a dollar to defraying his legal fees.

Intended to celebrate the famous victory of General Douglas MacArthur at the title harbor during the Korean War, when he sneaked an army in behind his enemy, cutting them off from home and supplies, Inchon is, as military spectacles go, one of the sorriest in movie history. Behind the sunglasses and corncob, underneath the plastered-down hair, is Laurence Olivier as the general, unable to cut loose either with an approximation of MacArthur's grand manner or the satire of it he seems sometimes to want to try. On the ground in Korea, caught in a withering enfilade of cliches, is Ben Gazzara as an officer with no unit, no fixed duties and an inexplicable relationship to the general that permits him to witness all sorts of unedifying carnage. He has an estranged wife (rather gamely played by Jacqueline Bisset), whose function it is to become a refugee so that we can see what havoc was wreaked on the civilian population by the Communist invaders. One has not seen a heroine's hairdo stay so splendidly in place, no matter what her travail, since the 1940s. The $46 million did not go into the battle sequences; they look cheap, have neither scale nor point, and many of them are merely discussed rather than shown. But then, the entire film is so disjointed that it seems to have been cut from epic to program-feature length. If so, the editorial surgeons have performed an act of mercy. --R.S.

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