Battle Hymn (1957) on Netflix
Passed19571h 48mBiographyDramaHistory
Guilt from a wartime bombing drives Dean Hess out of the ministry and back into uniform. He volunteers to train South Korean pilots, and orphaned children begin gathering at his base.
- Netflix3.2/5
- IMDb6.3/101,496 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
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Plot summary
Dean Hess has spent two years as a minister in a small Ohio town when North Korea invades the South in the summer of 1950. The guilt he carries from a bomb he dropped on an orphanage in World War II has convinced him he cannot keep preaching. He returns to the Air Force to instruct South Korean pilots, promising his wife, Mary, that he will teach and fly F-51D Mustangs rather than fight. Orphaned Korean children begin gathering at the base, a few at first and then dozens. Hess orders them fed, and with En Soon Yang and Lun Wa he opens a shelter for them in an abandoned Buddhist temple.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Battle Hymn (1957)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The gold United Nations flying helmet Rock Hudson wears in Battle Hymn was Dean Hess's own; Hess had scrounged it from a Navy pilot who crash-landed at his Korean airfield. It is now on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force in Dayton, Ohio.
- Real-life technical advisor Lieutenant Colonel Dean Hess helped veto Universal's first choice to play him in Battle Hymn, Robert Mitchum, because he had reservations about the actor's character.
- On Soon Whang, director of the Orphans Home of Korea, came to the United States with 25 orphans who re-enacted their own lives on film in Battle Hymn.
- The USAF enlisted 12 F-51D Mustangs of the 182nd Fighter Squadron, 149th Fighter Group of the Texas Air National Guard to stand in for the South Korean unit, and a surplus F-51 was acquired so it could be deliberately destroyed in an accident scene.
SPOILER
Anna Kashfi's En Soon Yang is based on On Soon Hwang, a social worker who ran the Cheju orphanage and later chaperoned the Korean orphans who took part in the film; the real On Soon was twenty years Hess's senior and did not die in a bombing raid.- In South Korea the film is known for its depiction of Colonel Hess, called the "Father of the Korean War Orphans", and is aired every year on Memorial Day.
- Unable to film in Korea, the production moved to Nogales, Arizona, which provided at least a modicum of a similar landscape.
- Hess's autobiography was published at the same time as the film, and he donated his profits from both the book and the film to a network of orphanages he helped to establish.
