Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

This film was made during the war. 1944 was the year in which we invaded Normandy. We did the famous Doolittle raid in 1942. This was definitely a propaganda film. But look at it this way. It was a propaganda film about what was basically a propaganda mission. The Doolittle raid did nothing to produce the outcome of the war. But it was was good for the morale of the US soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines. This film as you can see exploits that but not to an extreme level. It's not like Birth of a Nation(1915) on the Japanese which as we all know did happen in other parts of the country. But it showcased a bombing raid on the Japanese only 2 years after the raiding happened. Spencer Tracy and Robert Mitchum are great as always and I love all the characters. As historical films go it's certainly not Tora! Tora! Tora!(1970). But how could it be. Remember this was 2 years after it's event whilst Tora! Tora! Tora!(1970) was 29 years after it's event. But go check it out either way.

I was born in July, 1945, and viewed the film in 2009 as research for my memoir about growing up in a Texas orphanage. I was searching for clues about my mother's life, the era into which I was born. She would likely have viewed the film. I was struck by a line spoken by Ted's young wife Ellen and repeated in his mind at key emotional moments of the film.Ellen says (in effect), "This baby is what tells me you will come back to me." In the mind of an insecure young woman in a rocky marriage (as my mother was), the powerfully delivered message seemed to say: get pregnant to keep your man. It didn't work out that way. Right after my father left for duty in Germany, she divorced him. I was eight months old.I read the book when I was ten and enjoyed it immensely. I liked how the film portrayed wartime American culture, though I'm sure it was idealized for the propaganda effect.The buffoonery about singing "The Eyes of Texas" was painful because the abuse at the Texas orphanage was horrific.It's ironic that I live in Alameda, where the Hornet is a tourist attraction as a museum.

Out of the five widely panned comments on this movie, the one quoted in my summary posted by Ariellion 8-27-05 does not deserve the 100% disapproval it has gotten since, especially if any of the naysayers were familiar with 1940s pop music.The theme to the Rodgers-Hammerstein musical OKLAHOMA! is used as a motif at least four times in this film, and it is not so much disguised as slightly adapted to be a self-contained musical expression of Americana, joining songs sung by airmen in the movie ("The Yellow Rose of Texas" and "The Eyes of Texas Are upon You"), the Star-Spangled Banner sung in Chinese by the Chinese children's chorus, and instrumental versions of "Anchors Aweigh!" and the Air Force Hymn.Seeing as how Richard Rodgers was commissioned to write the soundtrack for the so-called propaganda documentary VICTORY AT SEA (a score which still sells separately as a tone poem in the tradition of Richard Strauss' work or Gustav Holst's "The Planets"), it is more likely that the composer suggested the OKLAHOMA! motif be included in this score a year later, than that TOKYO composer Herbert Stothart tried to pull off one of the clumsiest musical plagiarisms in history.

All right, I'll admit it, this one makes me weepy every time I see it. Over-the-top MGM production values, first rate score, solid players and a literate script based on a thrilling true story and, voila', wartime cornpone at its best. The problems derive primarily from the cardboard characters, staunchly middle American archetypes generously contrasted against one-dimensional foreign stereotypes, the idealized missionary couple, the Chinese doctors, the Chinese civilians and guerrilla soldiers and the largely unseen Japanese. The facts of Doolittle's raid are well known, a daring, perhaps even foolhardy, attack on the Japanese homeland very, very soon after Pearl Harbor as a demonstration that they were, in fact, vulnerable and we could bring the fight to their shores. It is unlikely the bombing had any real effect on Japanese industrial capacity but at home, as a morale booster, it was a great success, the air crews and everyone associated with the raid rightfully hailed as heroes. But I suspect the real story is somewhat grittier than portrayed here. Van Johnson's Ted Lawson comes across as apple pie ala mode with nary a discouraging word, Spencer Tracy breezes through his unchallenging turn as Doolittle with little to do beyond stern and resolute and Robert Mitchum hits just the right note as a buddy pilot. Don DeFore supplies the comic relief which, of course earns him a painful fate on a China beach (he's lucky they didn't kill him off) and Robert Walker lards on the golly-gee-whiz. Phyllis Thaxter's performance as Ellen Lawson bears a warning: avert your eyes if you are susceptible to sugar diabetes. Rarely has the syrup run so thick. Still an enjoyable two and a half hours if you don't ask too much of it. Nary a shirker, nor a coward, nor a cynic to be found. If only war were this simple.