BATTLE OF MIDWAY Movie Review

1942 John Ford

The significance of John Ford's Oscar-winning documentary lies more in its historical importance than in its entertainment value. A commander in the Navy, Ford was on Midway Island when the Japanese attacked in 1942. As the story goes, when he learned what was about to happen, he placed 16mm cameras filled with color film in the sand and filmed as much of the action as he could. Ford also shot film himself from a water tower while he was relaying information on Japanese planes to men on the ground. Two of the cameras were destroyed and some of the footage was damaged. What survived became this no-frills version of the incident.

Ford sets the stage with images familiar from his Hollywood films—reverence for the military, marching Marines still wearing the flat World War I helmets, unashamed sentimentality with a guy softly playing “Red River Valley” on the squeeze-box at sunset. There's even a bit of voice-over dialogue from Henry Fonda. The air attack is abrupt, with planes coming in low and fast while American gunners fight back from anti-aircraft batteries. When the bombs explode, the cameras shake so violently that the film seems to be wrenched out of its sprockets and the sky is filled with heavy oily black smoke. Following the attack, a short coda of a church service at a bombed hospital casts the battle as a conflict between devout American boys and “Godless Japs.”

The larger picture of what happened elsewhere is shown in the numbers of planes and ships destroyed. In short, the film is John Ford's home movie of what he saw at the battle. But in its brief running time, the film shows an aerial attack in all its mad confusion, and those images are so powerful that the film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. (Reportedly, the President and Mrs. Roosevelt were so moved by a White House screening of the film that FDR said, “I want every mother in America to see this picture!”) A year later, Ford would win another Documentary Oscar for Dec. 7th, his recreation of the attack on Pearl Harbor, co-directed with cinematographer Gregg Toland. In artistic and technical terms, the two films are polar opposites, and so they would make a fascinating double feature for anyone interested in the movie industry's first attempts at capturing the war on screen.

Written by: Dudley Nichols, James K. McGuinness, John Ford; Cinematography by: Jack MacKenzie, John Ford; Music by: Alfred Newman. Producer: John Ford, U.S. Navy. Awards: Academy Awards '42: Best Feature Documentary. Running Time: 18 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta.