Sergeant Ryker [Blu-ray]

Director: Buzz Kulik Buzz Kulik

Overview

It's 1951 in Korea, a time that the United States Army doesn't like to remember. The Communists, led by Chinese forces, are tearing up the battlefield and overrunning American and South Korean positions, and in the midst of it, Sgt. Paul William Ryker (Lee Marvin), decorated World War II hero, with medals that would be the envy of any man in uniform, has been convicted of treason for allegedly deserting, going over to the enemy, and spending weeks behind enemy lines. He's scheduled to be executed, but Capt. David Young (Bradford Dillman), the prosecutor in the case, begins to worry that Ryker wasn't properly represented at trial -- he believes Ryker was guilty, but wants him to be convicted fairly. It hardly endears Young to the men around him when he starts pressing his doubts, and then he meets Ryker's wife, Ann (Vera Miles), who doesn't have the best of marriages but believes her husband is innocent. They start working together and, in the process, become attracted to each other. Ryker claims that a now-deceased counter-intelligence officer, Colonel Chambers, recruited him for a secret mission that would take him behind enemy lines, allegedly as an American turncoat, all to help plug a leak in his own command -- but Chambers was killed just 24 hours after Ryker's mission started, and nothing in his effects verifies Ryker's story. Young is ordered to lay off the case by his commanding officer, the new head of counter-intelligence, and General Bailey (Lloyd Nolan), commanding the sector, but Young risks his career to get Ryker a new trial. Now he's got to defend the man himself, against his own commanding officer as prosecutor, and prepare for his own court martial for conduct unbecoming an officer, for his affair with Ann Ryker.

Product Details

Release Date:	01/10/2023
UPC:	0738329261375
Original Release:	1968
Rating:	NR
Source:	Kl Studio Classics
Language:	English
Time:	1:25:00
Sales rank:	21,675

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Lee Marvin	Sgt. Ryker
Vera Miles	Ann Ryker
Bradford Dillman	Capt. David Young
Peter Graves	Maj. Whitaker
Lloyd Nolan	Gen. Amos Bailey
Murray Hamilton	Capt. Appleton
Norman Fell	Sgt. Max Winkler
Walter Brooke	Col. Arthur Merriam
Francis DeSales	President of Court Martial
Don Marshall	Cpl. Jenks
Charles Aidman	Maj. Kitchener
John Williams	Composer

Technical Credits

William D. Gordon

Seeleg Lester

Buzz Kulik	Director
William D. Gordon	Screenwriter
Seeleg Lester	Screenwriter
Frank Telford	Producer

Editorial Reviews

Universal Pictures got a lot of mileage out of the property known as Sergeant Ryker. The script was originally filmed as part of a two-part installment of Kraft Suspense Theatre on NBC in October of 1963, entitled "The Case Against Paul Ryker, and it also served, in that form, as the pilot for the series Court Martial (aka Counsellors-at-War), a short-lived Anglo-American co-production starring Peter Graves, Bradford Dillman, and Angela Browne, that ran from 1965 through 1966. Two years later, in the wake of Lee Marvin's Oscar win for Cat Ballou and his sudden box-office stardom coming off of The Dirty Dozen, Universal retrieved the television show and recut it while adding new footage, intending to show it as a TV movie. But the resulting movie, Sergeant Ryker, was so good that it was actually released to theaters domestically, with a heavy advertising campaign. The movie is filled with first-rate performances by everyone, most especially Marvin -- who, if he'd done this in a theatrical film, might have earned an Oscar nomination -- and Murray Hamilton, playing Dillman's cynically pragmatic fellow officer. Director Buzz Kulik, working within the confines of a television script, managed to make this movie into something so much better than Universal expected that it sent it out theatrically. This was no ordinary script, either -- contained in the midst of its examination of the limits of a soldier's dedication to duty and obedience to orders (and a brilliant study by Marvin of a man who admits that, hero though he may be, he's no mental acrobat) are echoes and resonances that recall the reality of the early '50s and the Red Scare, and even echoes of the blacklist (and the red-baiting that took place during that era) in the questioning to which Ryker is subjected. No ordinary Hollywood film of 1968 would broach such subjects in a wartime context, but this movie does it, precisely because it is a hybrid, combining the best elements of the finest television courtroom dramas (co-author Seeleg Lester was a veteran writer/producer from Perry Mason) and the best cinematic trial dramas, including Anatomy of a Murder and Twelve Angry Men. The film even offered just enough expansiveness in its plot and setting to make movie audiences feel they were getting their money's worth, as well, and not simply looking at some canned TV entertainment. Additionally, Sergeant Ryker was released just as public opinion was starting to swing against the Vietnam War, and the script questioned enough about the military and its sense of right and wrong, and commitment to truth, to find an audience among younger filmgoers as well as older viewers in search of good drama and an engrossing war film.

All Movie Guide - Bruce Eder