I ran Charles the DVD of Tora! Tora! Tora! — another movie, like In the Heat of the Night, that I hadn’t seen since its original release (when my stepfather took me to see it at a drive-in). It got lousy reviews and was a box-office flop in 1970 — the New York Herald-Tribune, famous for its joking one-line reviews of films, called it “Torable! Torable! Torable!” — but I liked it then and I still do. Tora! Tora! Tora! was the story of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and what made it unique among war movies was it told the story from both U.S. and Japanese points of view — which had the ironic result of showing how similar the military mind-set and sense of ritual is regardless of what nation the military belongs to and which side they’re fighting on. Charles joked that the U.S. officers looked like “Keystone Commanders” and the Japanese ones looked like figures out an opéra-bouffe (which I suspect was simply because Japanese naval officer uniforms in 1941 were so much more ornate than U.S. ones), and I replied that Admiral Yamamoto, the Japanese naval commander who was the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, seemed like the only officer on either side who really knew what he was doing. (That’s an impression you get easily from reading the historical literature on Pearl Harbor as well.) The original plan was to use separate directors and crews for the two halves of the film — Akira Kurosawa for the Japanese sequences and Richard Fleischer for the U.S. ones — but for some reason Kurosawa was fired, no other reputable Japanese director would agree to replace him because of the great insult done to Japan and its culture by his firing from the film, so in the end two hacks did the Japanese sequences and Fleischer got credit for the overall film.
Tora! Tora! Tora! has
its defects — it’s very slowly
paced and not especially exciting, and the script sets up all too many
sequences where actions of the U.S. officers in particular seem incredibly
stupid in 20/20 hindsight but would have been defensible at the time (while
others — notably Army general Walter Short’s insistence on parking his entire
fighter-plane force wingtip-to-wingtip outside the hangars, and the decision to
shut down the Pearl Harbor radar capability at 7 a.m. every day — just seem
dumb, period) — but overall it’s a quite compelling tale even though its
interpretation of Pearl Harbor is, not surprisingly, an orthodox one that
ignores the long-standing accusation that President Roosevelt knew the attack
was going to occur and allowed it to take place to provide a casus
belli for U.S. entry into World War Two. A
special bonus on the DVD, a 20-minute pocket documentary called Day
of Infamy, briefly examines the
“revisionist” theory that Roosevelt knew about Pearl Harbor in advance and
rejects it on three grounds: 1) Roosevelt cared too deeply about the American
people to permit 3,000 of them to die in an attack if it could have been
prevented; 2) Roosevelt really didn’t care about Japan that much — to him the
main enemy in 1941 was Germany; and 3) Roosevelt wouldn’t have allowed an
attack that would have destroyed as much of the U.S. fleet (though elsewhere in
Day of Infamy the documentarians
noted that Pearl Harbor really didn’t destroy the fleet — only three battleships were permanently taken out
of commission that day; the others were either repaired or rebuilt and did see action later in the war) — to which John Toland,
who didn’t believe that Roosevelt knew in advance when he wrote The
Rising Sun (his book on overall Japanese
strategy during World War II) but did when he wrote his Pearl Harbor book Infamy a decade later, said that Roosevelt simply
underestimated how much damage the attack would do: he accepted the assurances
of his naval commanders that ships in Pearl Harbor would be invulnerable to
attack by torpedo bombs because the waters at Pearl were so shallow the
torpedoes would sink and hit bottom before they leveled out and homed in on
their targets. Tora! Tora! Tora!
mentions this but does not make
clear how the Japanese figured out how to make the attack work — by replacing
the metal stabilizing fins on the torpedoes with wooden ones, which kept the
torpedoes afloat long enough to level out in shallower water and make it to
their targets at Pearl.
Still, Tora! Tora! Tora!
manages to tell its story compellingly and engagingly. The official “fall guys”
for Pearl Harbor were the commanders on duty at the time, Admiral Husband C.
Kimmel (and where did this guy get a first name like “Husband” anyway?) and
General Walter C. Short; the film makes Kimmel look O.K. (aware of at least
some of the dangers of his position but denied the resources he needed to keep
tabs on the Japanese or to repel the attack once it came) — though the real
Kimmel was considerably taller and handsomer than Martin Balsam, who plays him
— but Short comes off as a total doofus. It’s also nice to see people like
Joseph Cotten (as Henry Stimson) and Leon Ames (as Frank Knox) even though
their appearances are over and done with in a flash. And while the special
effects of the attack are below modern standards, certainly the horror of the
attack itself comes through quite strongly — especially in the remarkable
scenes of planes on the ground being blown up by Japanese bombs and aerial
machine-gun fire either before their pilots can get to them or while their
pilots are desperately trying to get them off the ground to offer some defense.
(Interestingly, the story of the Black mess cook who manned an anti-aircraft
gun and fired at the attacking planes is depicted only in passing, and only
visually; this part of the story became far more important in Michael Bay’s
2001 Pearl Harbor film.) Of
course, it’s impossible to see Tora! Tora! Tora! or any other depiction of Pearl Harbor today without
making the inevitable comparisons between December 7, 1941 and September 11,
2001 — including the macabre coincidence that about the same number of people
(3,000) were killed on both those days of infamy — though the differences are
as obvious as the similarities: as I’ve pointed out in these pages before, for
all the surprise behind Pearl Harbor (more surprising in its execution than its
intent — the Japanese fully intended their declaration of war to reach
Washington before the attack began, but it didn’t because of their own set of
darkly humorous — in retrospect — communications glitches) at least it was an act of war by another country, executed by planes
clearly marked with insignia indicating where they were from and who was doing
this to us, whereas 9/11 came from a non-governmental organization of worldwide
reach and scope which has proved impervious to conventional retaliation, no
matter how much the Bush administration keeps trying (against Afghanistan and
now Iraq!). — 1/27/03
•••••
The film was Tora! Tora! Tora!, the 1970 war epic from 20th Century-Fox dealing with the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The movie was a flop in
the U.S. — though, oddly, it was a hit in Japan — and though it was one of the
cycle of big all-star movies about World War II battles Fox had kicked off
eight years earlier with The Longest Day it was innovative in that it sought to depict the battle from
both sides. The original plan by producers
Elmo Williams and Richard Fleischer was to hire separate directors for the
American and Japanese portions of the film, and Fox recruited the legendary
Akira Kurosawa to helm the Japanese parts — which would have been interesting.
Alas, Kurosawa departed the project early — apparently he actually shot some
footage, though less than one minute’s worth of his material made it to the
final cut (so he got treated even worse than George Cukor did on Gone
With the Wind!) — but I’ve seen three
different versions of his dismissal. In Steven Bach’s memoir Final
Cut he talks about interviewing David
Brown, Richard Zanuck’s producing partner in Zanuck fils’ post-Fox career, who said that the Japanese film
industry considered it such a collective insult when Kurosawa was fired from
the film that no other Japanese director would take the assignment. Two posts
on imdb.com’s “trivia” page for the film give contradictory accounts: one says
Kurosawa resigned because he had been told, or led to believe, that David Lean
would be handling the American portions, and he didn’t want to be associated with
a film in which his co-director would be a hack like Richard Fleischer instead
of an acknowledged master like Lean. Another account is that Kurosawa wanted to
pad the cast with wealthy Japanese investors so he could score brownie points
with them to get them to finance his future films, and Fox caught him doing
this and let him go. I’ve seen Tora! Tora! Tora! three times — the first at a drive-in showing to
which my stepfather took me (he and my mom ultimately broke up over the Viet
Nam War — he was for it, she against — and the overall political estrangement
it symbolized); the second with Charles when I first got the DVD; and the third
last night with our friend Garry. It seemed a bit slower this time than it had
before, since it was divided into two acts (like a lot of big movies at the
time) with an intermission in between, and the intermission was spotted so the
break would occur at dawn on December 7, 1941.
The first half of the film was
therefore about the planning for the attack — both on the Japanese side and on
the American; the Japanese were working out the details and doing practice runs
(one grimly amusing little scene shows the dive-bomber pilots doing their
rehearsals along the Japanese coast, while women wave to them and a local
fisherman complains, “Those pilots! They’re attracting the geisha girls — but
scaring away the fish!”) and the Americans were getting information about the
planned attack from MAGIC, their interception of the Japanese diplomatic code
(though as historian John Toland — who had the advantage on this subject of
having married a Japanese woman and therefore having learned to speak and read
Japanese — pointed out in his two books on the subject, The Rising
Sun and Infamy, the Americans were able to read the Japanese code but
not to translate it accurately because no one on the translation staff knew the
Japanese diplomatic language; instead they translated the intercepts according
to what the words meant in ordinary Japanese, which made the Japanese
intentions sound considerably more warlike than they were), but glitches in the
distribution of this information and the complacency with which much of the
American command structure greeted the warnings from the code-breakers ensured
that nothing was done to stop the attack. At least that’s the conventional
historical view, and the one endorsed not only by the movie itself but also by
a documentary featurette included with the DVD as a bonus item, which
deliberately set out to knock down the alternative view that President Franklin
Roosevelt knew the Japanese were set to attack Pearl Harbor and did nothing to
stop it because he wanted a casus belli to get the U.S. involved in World War II on the Allied side, and a
Japanese bombing attack on the U.S. fleet would provide it. (There’s been a
similar historical argument over whether the Bush administration knew of the
9/11 attacks in advance and allowed them to occur because they would provide
the pretext for a “global war on terror,” including an attack on Saddam
Hussein’s regime in Iraq and heavy repression of dissent here at home.)
Interestingly, John Toland rejected the “Roosevelt knew” analysis of Pearl
Harbor when he wrote The Rising Sun
but changed his mind and embraced it a decade later when he wrote Infamy. If the version of Pearl Harbor presented in Tora!
Tora! Tora! is historically accurate — and
the filmmakers worked as hard as they could, within the limitations of
Hollywood, to make it so — it’s an object lesson proving one of my favorite
sayings, “Never attribute to malignity what can be explained by incompetence.”
As portrayed here, the Americans had all the information they needed either to
stop the Pearl Harbor attack or at least to mount a more effective fight-back
(the “Tora! Tora! Tora!” call itself was devised by the architect of the
attack, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto [Soh Yamamura], as a go-code to the pilots;
the idea was that would be the signal that they had achieved the complete
surprise Yamamoto regarded as essential for the attack’s success), but they
never put it all together in one place (and the same is likely true for the
Bush administration and 9/11 as well).
The film goes into great detail about
all the missed opportunities for the U.S. to put two and two together —
including one set of commanders that actually predicted a Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor but predicted it for November 30, a week before it actually took
place (which meant that the warnings of the actual attack were treated as more
nonsense from the boys who’d cried wolf). It also mentioned a missed
opportunity on the Japanese side:
a second wave of attackers were ready to go when Yamamoto’s on-site commander,
Admiral Zengo Yoshida (Junya Usami), called it off, partly because he wanted to
preserve Japan’s own planes and the aircraft carriers that had launched them,
partly because he didn’t know exactly where the American aircraft carriers were
(the absence of the carriers from the fleet at Pearl Harbor when the attack
occurred is the principal piece of evidence cited by the “Roosevelt knew” crowd
— supposedly Roosevelt, a former assistant secretary of the navy in World War
I, had divined ahead of most military people that in future naval wars the
battleship would become increasingly useless and the carrier would be decisive,
so he was willing to sacrifice the U.S. battleship fleet to preserve the
carriers — but I still don’t believe FDR was either that brilliant or that
Machiavellian) and he didn’t want to risk his planes running out of gas and
crashing in the sea while they were looking for them. (This seems to me a
military blunder comparable to Civil War Union General George B. McClellan’s
failure to go after Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces after the Union victory
at Antietam Creek in September 1862, which allowed Lee to do a strategic
retreat instead of facing a rout that might have ended the war then and there.)
Aside from its importance as an historical document — though, not surprisingly,
some inaccuracies slipped in despite the best efforts of the filmmakers to
avoid them — Tora! Tora! Tora! is
a quite good movie, slow going in the early stages (and missing a key piece of
information included in the later, and mostly far inferior, 2001 film Pearl
Harbor: the Americans thought their fleet
would be invulnerable to attacks from dive bombers with torpedoes because the
harbor itself was so shallow the torpedoes would sink before their reached
their targets, but the Japanese figured out a way around this: they took off
the metal stabilizing fins from the torpedoes and replaced them with wooden ones,
which kept the torpedoes buoyant long enough to hit the ships they were aimed
at) but building up to an exciting climax with the actual attack, which seems
(unlike in most depictions of it) to go on forever. The film shows not only the Japanese attack but
also the attempts of the U.S. forces to mount some sort of resistance —
hindered by the lame-brained decision of the on-base Army commander, Walter C.
Short, to leave the base’s planes out in the open, parked wingtip-to-wingtip,
because he thought the real danger to them was from sabotage and he wanted to
be able to see any potential saboteurs. Instead the Japanese were able to blow
up most of the planes with a few well-aimed bombs, and even the ones that
weren’t destroyed had a difficult time actually getting airborne.
It’s mostly
an ensemble cast, but at least two performers stand out: one is E. G. Marshall
as Col. Rufus Bratton (he’s designated a lieutenant colonel in the movie but he
was a full colonel in real life), the head of the office that had broken and
was intercepting the Japanese coded messages. Marshall turns in a finely honed
performance expressing his frustration at being virtually the only one in the
U.S. military or the civilian government who understands the danger Pearl
Harbor is facing from an imminent Japanese attack. The other standout actor is
Soh Yamamura as Yakamoto, who in this reading of the Pearl Harbor story comes
off much the way Colin Powell did in the second U.S.-Iraq war: loyally signing
on to and executing a policy he knows will have disastrous consequences for his
country, and doing his best to make a government decision he disagrees with
work. The much talked-about line at the end of the film in which Yamamoto says,
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a
terrible resolve,” is probably fictional — at least no one has ever traced it
to anything the real Yamamoto said or wrote about the war — though there’s a
similar quote in Hiroyuki Agawa’s biography of Yamamoto: “A military man can
scarcely pride himself on having ‘smitten a sleeping enemy’; it is more a
matter of shame, simply, for the one smitten. I would rather you made your
appraisal after seeing what the enemy does, since it is certain that, angered
and outraged, he will soon launch a determined counterattack.” What that’s a
reference to is an element in bushido, the traditional Japanese code of the samurai warrior, that it was wrong to sneak into an enemy’s
bedroom and stab him in his sleep, but O.K. to wake him up, allow him to reach for
his sword and defend himself as best he could — and the Japanese plan had been
to hand the U.S. government an ultimatum at 1 p.m. Eastern standard time on
December 7 and launch the attack a half-hour later, but because the Japanese
secretary typing up the ultimatum only knew how to type with two fingers, the
ultimatum didn’t reach U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull (played in the film
by George Macready) until an hour or so after the attack started (and Hull’s fury when he receives
it is one of the best moments in the movie).
Tora! Tora! Tora! isn’t a great movie, but it’s surprisingly good —
better, I think, than The Longest Day (its clear model) and also comparing to Pearl Harbor about the way the 1958 British film A
Night to Remember, about the Titanic, compares to the James Cameron Titanic; like A Night to Remember, Tora! Tora!
Tora! avoids inventing fictional characters
and having them play clichéd situations. Instead it uses only dramatis
personae that actually existed historically
and gets more than enough drama from the real people involved. It’s certainly a
movie that didn’t deserve the rather arrogant dismissal it got from the New
York Herald-Tribune when it was released
(the one-line summary of their review was, “Torable! Torable! Torable!”), and
it’s worth recounting the joke around the 20th Century-Fox lot when
it was about to be released in Japan. Fox had just put out the movie Star!, an attempt at a follow-up to The Sound of
Music — same director (Robert Wise),
screenwriter (William Fairchild) and star (Julie Andrews — again cast as a real
person, Gertrude Lawrence), and it had been such a total bomb they tried
reissuing it in a cut-down print under the title Those Were the Happy
Times. (It still flopped.) So the joke
around the lot was that when Tora! Tora! Tora! was released in Japan, they were going to cut an hour
out of it and call it Those Were the Happy Times. — 5/26/14
