The Hunters

The Hunters is a 1958 feature film adapted from the novel The Hunters by James Salter. Produced by Dick Powell, it stars Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner as two very different United States Air Force fighter pilots in the midst of the Korean War. Major Cleve "Iceman" Saville is a veteran World War... II fighter ace eager to fly an F-86 Sabre fighter in the Korean War. His commanding officer, Colonel "Dutch" Imil , assigns him command of a flight. Among his pilots is a new replacement, talented, but brash Lieutenant Ed Pell . After he abandons his element leader, Lieutenant Corona , during combat to down an enemy fighter, Corona's aircraft is shot up; he is killed while trying to land. As a result, Saville wants Pell assigned to someone else, but Imil overrules him; Pell was top of his class in flight school and Imil sees him as a younger version of Saville. If anyone can get Pell to grow up, it is the major. Another pilot under Saville's command, Lieutenant Carl Abbott , poses a different kind of problem. He lacks confidence in his abilities; his worried wife Kristina asks Saville to watch over him.
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A war novel is a novel in which the primary action takes place in a field of armed combat, or in a domestic setting where the characters are... preoccupied with the preparations for, or recovery from, war. It is sometimes referred to as military fiction. The war novel's main roots lie in the epic poetry of the classical and medieval periods, especially Homer's The Iliad, Virgil's The Aeneid, the Old English saga Beowulf, and different versions of the legends of King Arthur. All of these epics were concerned with preserving the history or mythology of conflicts between different societies, while providing an accessible narrative that could reinforce the collective memory of a people. Other important influences on the war novel included the tragedies of such dramatists as Euripides, Seneca the Younger, Christopher Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Shakespeare's Henry V provided a model for how the history, tactics, and ethics of war could be combined in an essentially fictional framework.
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