Tora! Tora! Tora!

I remember viewing this film as a kid shortly after it came out in Sweden. At that time I was not impressed. I was expecting an action filled war movie and what I got was a boring movie where the good guys got beaten up at the end. I do not think I even new anything about the real events in Pearl Harbor at the time. Naturally I view this movie in a somewhat different light and now and when re-watching it yesterday evening I enjoyed it quite a lot. I cannot help but wondering at the historical accuracy though. If someone would have told me that this was nothing but a Hollywood script, and a predictable at that, I would probably not have doubted it. Did all these blunders really take place? That the Japanese where not playing with all their cards on the table is clear but there where so many screw-ups all over the place. Sightings not being reported, communications a mess everywhere, people asking for confirmations in absurdum, lining up the planes like ducks on a shooting range etc. etc. If this is really what happened then some of those movie scripts that seems so ridiculous maybe are not as ridiculous as one might think? Naturally the film has the drawback of being predictable. What else can you expect when it is supposed to depict actual, well known, events? I think I would have felt that it was predictable even if I did not know what was supposed to happen though. Even so it is an enjoyable, well done, movie as far as I am concerned.

This is told a little in the style of “The Longest Day” (1962) as it shows us both sides of the preparations for the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. With the US having moved it’s Pacific fleet from the safety of San Diego to an altogether more vulnerable location on Hawai’i, Admiral Kimmel (Martin Balsam) arrives to take command amidst considerable concern from his advisors - across the services, that the Japanese could attack with relative ease. Meantime, across the ocean the last vestiges of resistance to Japan’s alliance with the Nazis are being eroded and with Admiral Yamamoto (Sô Yamamura) now in charge of the imperial Navy, the momentum to attack becomes unstoppable. What might be a game-changer for the attackers is the ability to drop torpedoes from aircraft. The harbour was hitherto deemed to be too shallow for those to be effective, but the skilful airman Genda (Tatsuya Mihashi) thinks that with practice and a certain amount of audacity he can make this method of precision bombing work. In Washington D.C. the motions of diplomacy are still being gone through, with Secretary of State Cornell Hull (George Macready) and the Ambassador (Shôgo Shimada) trading political niceties. The Americans can intercept communications to and from Japan, but of course nothing is clear enough to convince President Roosevelt to commit the enormous resources required to guarantee the safety of their bottle-necked base. With the principal characters now established, the film illustrates just how things panned out on that fateful day, and with quite startling visual effect. What I did like about this dramatisation is that it largely focussed on the events leading up to December 7th without turning it into a personality contest. There are no glamour boys, on either side, for us to worry about. It isn’t at all sentimental, but instead quite a matter of fact reportage of just how the ruthlessness on one side was met by the paralysis on the other. The photography offers us quite a detailed analysis of just how the formations worked, of how the waves of aircraft used what was clearly copious amounts of meticulously gatheted intelligence to target not just the warships, but the adjacent air force bases that soon proved easy pickings. It isn’t trying to be a documentary, and of course there are dramatisations here, but by having both sides on this conflict present their own version of the proceedings leading up to and during the assault, it delivers us an authentic looking version of an history. The chronology also works well, darting from Tokyo to Pearl to Washington and developing each emerging strategy compellingly. The acting and writing are all adequate enough and provide all we need to tell a story that all-too-easily speaks for itself.