REPORT FROM THE ALEUTIANS Movie Review

1943 John Huston

As the first Technicolor documentary that director John Huston made for the Army Signal Corps, this film lacks a certain dramatic tension. Instead, as the title indicates, it's a valuable record of a virtually unknown and unseen part of World War II. In a voice-over introduction, Huston says, “The Aleutian Islands are situated in the North Pacific Ocean, forming a chain which extends about 1,200 miles south southwest from the Alaskan peninsula toward Siberia to form the southern boundary of the Bering Sea. The Aleutians comprise four groups—the Fox, Andreanof, Rat, and Near islands—and constitute part of the territory of Alaska, USA.”

Obviously, Huston and the War Department wanted to let soldiers know what was going on there, but before they could define the action, they had to tell people where it was and to make sure that they knew it was part of their country. In June 1942, the Japanese attacked Midway—everyone knows about that—and a second part of the naval force went north and attacked the Aleutians. The raid was unsuccessful, but the Japanese did manage to acquire a foothold on the island of Kiska. The Americans established a base on Adak, one of the coldest, most barren, and stormy places on earth. “As remote as the moon and hardly more fertile,” the island is “next to worthless in terms of human existence.” Because of that, no one had fought a modern war there.

Huston's cameras show how the place was constructed—a million and a half square-foot steel runway had to be laid down by the infantry for the Air Corps—and how the guys lived and worked there. (They were all guys; no women.) The last third of the film follows bombing runs from Adak to Kiska, where the Japanese are literally dug in underground. Compared to William Wyler's documentary, Memphis Belle, Huston takes a more unemotional, omniscient point of view, not looking at identified individuals but at the men as a group and the dangerous job that they're doing. The flying footage is every bit as rough, authentic, and riveting as Wyler's.

From the construction of the base, Huston goes on to show the everyday side of life there; from eating meals and washing mess kits to the loading of thousand-pound bombs and belts of ammunition. The faces of the men—and their dogs—are the same ones we've seen in the more realistic fictional films from The Story of G.I. Joe to Saving Private Ryan. The incredible amounts of rain on Adak make the place a constant quagmire. Even the runways are often flooded, giving Huston the opportunity to show some spectacular shots of a P-38 sliding in on its belly and of fighters attempting to land and take off as they kick up huge plumes of spray.

It's a corner of the war that remains virtually unexplored by other filmmakers, and so this concise, no-nonsense portrait of it should go on the viewing list of anyone who has missed it. The tape ends with some Movietone newsreels.

Producer: U.S. Army Pictorial Service. Running Time: 47 minutes. Format: VHS, Beta.