Reeling Backward: "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo"

I found myself getting really annoyed at "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," because the first half was all about the pilots getting mushy with their girls. To quote the kid from "The Princess Bride," you go to war movie expecting lots of action, and everyone keeps kissing all the time.

Fortunately, the movie redeems itself with a second act that is decidedly dark and dreary, and an extended air combat sequence that's still amazing nearly 70 years later. It incorporated some actual footage from Col. Jimmy Doolittle's bombing raid on Tokyo a few months after Pearl Harbor, so no wonder.

Militarily, the raid was inconsequential. Negligible damage was done to Japan's war-making industry, and all 16 of the B-25 bombers were lost -- crashing when they ran out of fuel, or the crew ditching before reaching this point. A large number of the servicemen who participated in the raid were killed, wounded or captured.

But the fact that American soldiers were able to deliver a sting right to the heart of the Japanese empire, a little more than four months after the devastating attack on the U.S. Pacific fleet had raised doubts in many Americans' minds about their ability to defend themselves, boosted morale by an unmeasurable factor. Doolittle, who at first thought he'd be court-martialed as the brains behind a colossal failure, later admitted the raid was conceived entirely for the sake of appearances. He won the Medal of Honor for his efforts.

Spencer Tracy plays Doolittle, but it's really a pretty minor role. He shows up every once in a while to give the pilots and crews a pep talk and a little strategy, then disappears for a long while. Considering the cast was mostly a bunch of unknowns -- Van Johnson and Robert Mitchum were not yet household names -- many have opined that Tracy took the role merely to help the project gain financial backing.

If so, Tracy was giving a leg up to the career of Johnson, whose work I've enjoyed discovering through the Reeling Backward journey. (See previous columns here, here and  here.) One of the few blond (or reddish-blond) male movie stars, "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" was his first lead role, and I'm guessing the story was constructed to emphasize his romantic appeal.

Of course, reality is not always what Hollywood would like it to seem. Johnson was fairly open about his gay lifestyle for the time, until the studios cracked down and forced him into a charade marriage. He also suffered serious injuries to his face during a 1943 car accident, including a metal plate in his head, and heavy makeup was usually used to conceal the scars on his forehead.

Ironically, his character Ted Lawson and his wife Ellen have a running joke about their shared handsomeness -- "How'd you get so cute?" "I had to be, to get such a good-looking fella" -- and he ends up losing a leg and having his face sliced open. It was unclear to me if the filmmakers simply removed the makeup to reveal Johnson's actual scars, or painted their own.

Ellen was played by Phyllis Thaxter in her first screen role, who is indeed exceptionally cute, especially the way she squints when she smiles. She would go on to have a long career in film and television, playing Ma Kent in her final film role in 1978's "Superman."

Anyway, roughly the first half of the movie -- it's 138 minutes, rather long for that era -- is taken up with the training for the Doolittle raid, about which the pilots and crews are kept completely in the dark. The fact that the main part of their preparation was how to get a mammoth B-25 to take off in 500 feet or less should've been a pretty big hint that they'd be launching from the deck of an aircraft carrier.

As much as I enjoyed Johnson and Thaxter's chemistry, I struggled to get through this section. It's fairly prototypical World War II propaganda-type stuff, with every soldier a good American who doesn't gripe or slack off and gets along with his comrades.

It's the "swell guy" routine -- that's Ted, he's a swell guy! And that tall fella, we call him Shorty, he's from New Orleans, what a swell guy! Hey, have you yet Bob, he was best man at Ted's wedding, he's a little on the glum side, but a swell pilot!

One yearns for a morose outsider, a la William Holden in "Stalag 17."

Bob, by the way, was played by Robert Mitchum in one of his early film roles. "Thirty Seconds" gave a big boost to his rising stardom, and soon like Johnson he was a top leading man. The other major role is Robert Walker as David Thatcher, the gentle-natured mechanic/gunner aboard Lawson's "ship" -- as they referred to their aircraft -- nicknamed "The Ruptured Duck."

Right around the time I was starting to lose patience with the movie, they take off on their bombing raid. It's an astonishing sequence, at least 30 minutes long, with hair-raising shots of the plan flying just a few dozen feet above the ocean, and later the hilly Japanese landscape, to avoid detection.

Director Mervyn LeRoy and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (who adapted Lawson's book) make this sequence absolutely thrilling, despite the fact that the Duck never gets into any dogfight situations with Japanese Zeroes. The raid was such a surprise, it seems, that few anti-aircraft forces were effectively deployed.

Alas, the gaping hole in Dolittle's plan was what happens to the flight crews after the bombing, beyond a vague directive to "land in China." In fact, none of the 16 B-25s landed safely. Most crashed somewhere along the Chinese coastline, or the crews intentionally ditched them or bailed out. Two crews were captured by the Japanese, and another was interned by the (supposedly friendly) Soviet regime.

Unexpectedly, the film follows the wounded Lawson and his men on their terrible journey to safety, aided by the Chinese natives currently under the harsh thumb of the Japanese. A little-known piece of history is that the Japanese killed an estimated 250,000 Chinese citizens while searching for the American air crews. The movie shows them burning a village the Americans had just left, but I had no idea the retribution was on that scale.

Every one of Lawson's crew is seriously injured except Thatcher, who heroically guarded and tended to his mates. Lawson eventually loses his leg after it becomes infected. The film ends with an odd denouement in which Lawson, recuperating in a Washington D.C. hospital, refuses to allow Ellen to see him because of his injuries. Of course, with a little (likely fictitious) assistance from Doolittle, they are joyously reunited.

I don't often say this, but "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo" is a film that's due for a remake. I enjoyed the movie, despite its overly long and mushy first half, but the dramatic way the Doolittle raid was planned and executed is riveting stuff.

 3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Spartacus" (1960)

"Spartacus" should have been a disaster. The original screenwriter, director and cinematographer were all fired off the project -- the latter two a week into filming.

It was more or less a vanity project for Kirk Douglas, who was angry he didn't get the lead in "Ben-Hur" and ordered up his own sword-and-sandals epic. Novelist Howard Fast was in over his head trying to adapt his novel about the Third Servile War of Rome for the screen, so Dalton Trumbo was brought in. Unfortunately, Trumbo was blacklisted at the time, and had to work under a pseudonym.

Douglas bravely insisted that Trumbo receive an onscreen credit, which led to the breakdown of the McCarthy-era blacklist.

But Douglas clashed with director Anthony Mann, and canned him after a few days of shooting. A 30-year-old Stanley Kubrick, who previously directed Douglas in the wonderful "Paths of Glory," was brought in.

Kubrick largely disavowed "Spartacus" later in his career, but mostly, I think, because of entering the project as a hired gun rather as the primary and unquestioned author of the film. The dark genius preferred to work in relative isolation, and to write and shoot his movies himself. (Russell Metty, pushed out by Kubrick, retained his credit for legalistic convenience, and thus won the cinematography Oscar for "Spartacus," even though he only worked on the film a little longer than Mann did.)

Far be it from me to call Stanley Kubrick stupendously wrong, but I think "Spartacus" is one of his finest films, and one of the true giants among the mid-century epics.

I won't belabor talking about the plot, since the story of the man who led a slave revolt against the Roman Empire is well-known.

What most interested me in watching the 50th-anniversary Blu-ray edition -- which is a marvel, with crisp lines and bold colors courtesy of the 1991 film restoration -- is the film's pace. At 3¼ hours, the film is certainly not in a hurry. And yet, it never feels like it's draggy or fat ... just taking its time.

It's amazing to watch simple establishing shots, or montages of marching armies. Or just the slow pan of the camera as it enters a Roman bath. It gives the audience a chance to breathe, soak up all the Oscar-winning sets, and sets the tone for the coming scene.

Nowadays editors would chop these moments by half or more. The movies have sped up in the last few decades, and have not improved in their quickness.

The fight scenes have held up fairly well, both the gladiator matched pairs and the huge battle featuring 10,000 extras. Content-wise, "Spartacus" was quite daring in the waning days of the old Production Code, before the Motion Picture Association of America starting giving out ratings. There's even a brief flash of Spartacus severing an arm, complete with twin arterial blood spurts.

The film was also bold sexually. Jean Simmons, playing Spartacus' slave wife Varinia, appears nude twice, although both times shot with a careful angle to avoid showing her breasts. There's a thrilling moment where they're cavorting in a meadow, and he is tracing her face with a bit of plant, and she opens her mouth to accept it. For 1960, this was pretty yowza stuff.

One of the most famous scenes did not make the cut, however. This was the bath scene where the Roman general Crassus (Laurence Olivier) asks his new slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis) if he prefers oysters or snails, calling it a question of taste rather than morality, and declaring that he eats both oysters and snails.

The barely-concealed reference to same-sex coupling was cut out of the original film, and only later restored. According to one account, the audio track for this scene had been lost. Curtis was still around to re-record his lines, but Olivier was dead by then. So Anthony Hopkins, once Olivier's understudy and a fearsomely good mimic, recorded the dialogue.

The cast is simply a marvel, although some of the smaller supporting performances (including Curtis) are a bit stiff. Peter Ustinov is a delightful scene-stealer as a mercenary slave trader -- he won the Academy Award, the only person to do so for a Kubrick film -- but the performance I keep coming back to is Charles Laughton as Gracchus, a Roman senator and political opponent of Crassus.

In less than perhaps 10 minutes of total screen time, he paints an indelible presence as a figure of integrity buried beneath a mound of corruption. Gracchus is a man of the people, both their virtues and their faults, and represents the last dying voice of democracy against the coming dictatorship of the emperors. Only an actor of Laughton's wit and weight (figurative and otherwise) could pull it off. I love this piece of dialogue in a scene between Laughton and Ustinov:

"You and I have a tendency towards corpulence. Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?"

Douglas of course is great, playing a powerful man of destiny who still seems full to the brim with a distinctive humanity. I love the scenes where Spartacus is at the hands of some evil Roman or another, his limbs in chains and his life on the line, and he stares at them with an impudence that could enrage even an emperor.

4 stars out of four

Johnny Got His Gun

It's been said that every war movie is an anti-war movie, but I'm not sure that's true. "The Green Berets" is an overtly pro-war movie, with John Wayne making the case for American involvement in Vietnam. Even "Saving Private Ryan" and other films that extol the tremendous human cost of war do so through thrilling action scenes that are often as attractive as they are repulsive.

Dalton Trumbo's 1971 film "Johnny Got His Gun" is the epitome of a truly anti-war movie. Made during Vietnam but set during World War I, it looks contemptuously upon not only those two wars but all armed conflict between men. Old men are meant to sit at home and send young men to war to die, is the explicit message. Even the defense of democracy is something to be sneered at.

The protagonist is the ultimate figure of sympathy: An injured American G.I. Not only that, but he's injured so badly that almost no one would want to continue to live in his condition. But the Army doctors keep him alive as a way to help scientific research of traumatic injuries.

Joe -- played by Timothy Bottoms, in his very first film role -- has lost both his arms and both his legs, and even his face has been obliterated -- "scooped out" by an artillery blast, to use his words. He cannot talk, eat, smell, see or hear. In essence, he is a stump of flesh attached to a brain, but one which cannot communicate with the outside world. All he can do is move his head a little, and feel vibrations when someone walks into his room.

The thought of living like this is abhorrent to most people, including me. Unable to connect with the real world, Joe spends most of his time remembering his life, or dreaming, or a hallucinatory combination of the two. Joe has long conversations with his father (Jason Robards), who offers him some advice on his current predicament. He also gets some help from Jesus (Donald Sutherland), who chats with Joe and some of his fellow soldiers, who all seem to know how and when they will die.

Trumbo, who had one of the great screenwriting careers, also directed this film -- his only stint behind the camera. It's too bad, because he showed himself to be an able and imaginative director.

For instance, he makes the bold choice to portray all the present scenes in gauzy black-and-white, which lends them a somewhat dreamlike feel, while Joe's hallucinations are crisp and colorful.

The film plays out as something like a parable, with Joe as the pure and innocent who has been used shoddily by an uncaring world devoted to war and power. It would make a wonderful play, with Joe never emerging from beneath his mysterious tent of white hospital sheets and mask to hide his destroyed face.

(UPDATE: After writing this, I find that actor Ben McKenzie has done a stage version which is also being turned into a film.)

The military doctors keep Joe carefully locked away from the rest of the population, surmising that his condition would shock and anger other wounded soldiers. One nurse is sympathetic, though, and opens the shutters and strokes his forehead and unmarred chest tenderly.

"Johnny Got His Gun" isn't a film for everyone. It's not overtly violent or gruesome, but the horrid existence of this unfortunate young man is in some ways more disturbing than the goriest horror film. Such is war.

3 stars

Reeling Backward: "Exodus"

"Exodus" is a big, sprawling (209 minutes) epic about the birth of Israel. It uses fictional characters, but infuses the production with enough historical fact to lend it a certain sense of verisimilitude.

Paul Newman plays Ari Ben Canaan, a Jewish commando responsible for transporting 611 Jewish refugees from a British internment camp on Cyprus to the land of Palestine, as it was then known. Eva Marie Saint plays Kitty Fremont, an American nurse who gets caught up in the exodus and eventually falls for Ari, in one of the most unconvincing cinematic romances I've ever seen.

The film was directed to Otto Preminger, one of the most active directors of the 1950s and '60s. It was notable that Dalton Trumbo was credited as screenwriter, since he had been blacklisted. He continued working steadily through the '50s, using other writers as fronts. "Exodus" marked the first major film in which he was given an official credit, and doing so effectively ended the blacklist. In 1960, besides "Exodus" Trumbo also wrote "Spartacus," another huge-scale epic. Not a bad year.

"Exodus" is a decent film, but its first half is stronger than its second. That deals with the actual exodus, which includes a neat bit where Ben Canaan impersonates a British officer and fools them into supplying their own trucks and crew to carry the refugees to a ship. The ship is promptly blockaded, but a hunger strike by the Jews draws world-wide attention, and eventually they are allowed to go on to Palestine.

From there, the middle section is taken up by a prison break to spring Ben Canaan's uncle, who's the leader of the Jewish terrorist organization. The last third or so deals with the United Nations vote to partition the land for a Jewish state, followed by the violent aftermath.

I should mention the strong performance by Sal Mineo as Dov Landau, a hotheaded young Jewish revolutionary. Mineo is one of those wonderful supporting actors who sometimes get forgotten with the passage of time. He was nominated for an Oscar for this film, as he was five years earlier for "Rebel Without a Cause," when he was just 16 years old. He was stabbed to death in 1976.

I have to admit that it's only in recent years that I've learned much about the founding of Israel. So "Exodus" acts as interesting document (somewhat fictionalized) of recent history that many people know little about. As a work of cinematic fiction, it's somewhat weak, but certainly an enjoyable spectacle.

2.5 stars