WORLD WAR Pacific Theater II Movie Review

World War II: The Pacific Theater on Screen

In the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hollywood was quick to turn out movies about the campaign in the Pacific. Like the films about the European war, they reflect the realities of the time. In the first ones, the Americans fight gallantly and manage to hold back the invading Japanese long enough for the counterattack to form. True victories do not come until later. More significantly, those first films set the formula for the “unit picture” that would become the dominant vehicle for war stories.

The formula is a simple variation on the mythic “hero's journey,” familiar to all cultures and popularized by Joseph Campbell: Several men are brought together by chance or design. At first they are individuals who care more about themselves than the group or the cause. Through a course of training and combat, during which some are lost, they form a cohesive unit and are then willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. The transformation of that formula into entertainment is accomplished with the tools that Hollywood had on hand: good, tight writing, straightforward direction, familiar stars, special effects.

The first three examples are really terrific. Wake Island, which hit theater screens less than a year after the battle, is quick and tough, and it raises the bar in its graphic depictions of violence, showing the power of bombs and artillery with an unblinking clarity that was new to 1942 audiences. In Air Force, Howard Hawks lets the unit form around a B-17, the Mary Ann, as it arrives in Pearl Harbor on that fateful morning and then continues across the Pacific to a series of adventures. Bataan takes the formula a necessary step further by making the unit a multi-racial melting pot.

The plot of So Proudly We Hail roughly parallels Air Force, with a predominantly female cast of Army nurses (led by Paulette Goddard) heading across the Pacific at the end of 1941. Guadalcanal Diary is based on Richard Tregaski's non-fiction best-seller and places the unit formula in a more realistic setting than the others. The same can be said of Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, about the Doolittle raid.

On a more heroic note, Errol Flynn almost defeats the Japanese singlehandedly in Objective, Burma!. John Wayne puts on fatigues in Fighting Seabees. He is given a much more difficult role in John Ford's They Were Expendable, where the director's devotion to the Navy arrives on the screen in full flower. That film, made before the end of the war but released after it, marks the end of the unit picture. In terms of plot, the unit is established before the story begins and is slowly broken apart over the course of the action. At the end, though, the ideals of the unit—obedience, sacrifice, duty—are intact.

For a time following VJ Day, the war in the Pacific remained a popular topic for Hollywood, and the films became more complex. Home of the Brave, from 1949, is one of the motion picture industry's first serious attempts to deal with racial matters. Sands of Iwo Jima, made the same year, establishes John Wayne's reputation as a war hero, and was used by the Marines to promote the construction of the Marine Corps War Memorial at Arlington Cemetery. Wayne returns to the Corps in Flying Leathernecks, millionaire Howard Hughes's attempt to incorporate real combat footage with a fictional story. The Marines also gave full cooperation to Raoul Walsh for his adaption of Leon Uris's immensely popular best-seller Battle Cry. It's a grand, sprawling mess of a movie that has much more to say about the 1950s than about the war.

In the post-war years, the Navy fared well with Henry Fonda as Mister Roberts, the role he'd made his own on stage. Burt Lancaster and Clark Gable are well matched antogonists in Run Silent Run Deep, still one of the best submarine adventures. If The Gallant Hours is a bit too pious for its own good, James Cagney is excellent as Adm. “Bull” Halsey. Of the other reality-based Pacific films, Above and Beyond is about the dropping of the first atomic bomb; Merrill's Marauders is a relatively restrained effort from Sam Fuller; and Tora! Tora! Tora! shows the attack on Pearl Harbor from both the Japanese and American sides.

The exotic locales of the Pacific have also given rise to less easily categorized films. Kon Ichikawa's Fires On the Plain views the last days of the war through the eyes of a defeated, dying Japanese soldier. It is an astonishing work. John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific is a two-man psychodrama, with Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune as combative castaways. Finally, Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line turns James Jones's novel of Guadalcanal into a meditation on love, life, memory, and innocence with an incongruously star-studded cast. In the process, he apparently means to deconstruct the unit picture, but the result is an often attractive muddle.