The idea behind “Tora! Tora! Tora!” (1970) was for 20th Century Fox to create a companion piece to  “The Longest Day” (1962) that would also reproduce that big-budget, all-star, WWII extravaganza’s success — a success that had pretty much saved the studio from bankruptcy. And, in a way, this made sense. Still reeling from the 1963 box office  catastrophe “Cleopatra,” and dealing with a number of high-profile flops such as “Hello Dolly” (1969), “Star” (1968), and “Doctor Dolittle” (1967), Fox was again in financial  trouble. As a result, the legendary Darryl F. Zanuck, the Chairman of the Board who had overseen production of “The Longest Day,” and his son Richard, the studio’s president, felt that the 1941 sneak attack on Pearl Harbor would be the ticket out of all their problems.

Unfortunately, the complete opposite proved true. The film went over-budget, costing a then-astronomical $25 million, earned critical raspberries and flopped. The fallout would contribute to one of the most incredible events in the history of Hollywood, when the elder Zanuck fired his own son. In the end, when compared to the film, the actual attack on Pearl Harbor was much cheaper to produce, took less time to plan, and was, at least in the short-term, a success.

“Tora! Tora! Tora!,” however, would outlive its detractors and find a new audience on television and eventual profitability from home video, as well as some overdue critical respect. The Blu-ray transfer (released yesterday to commemorate today’s 70th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor) delivers this near-classic full justice with a gorgeous widescreen transfer and a ton of extras that delve deeper into the backstories I touched on above.

Using a similar approach to the “Longest Day,” where American, British, and German directors filmed the scenes involving their respective countries, the American scenes for “Tora!” were directed by journeyman Richard Fleischer (“20,000 Leagues Under the Sea”) and, after the notoriously difficult Akira Kurosawa had a narcissistic meltdown, Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda were last-minute hires brought in to direct the Japanese action and actors. The result is a splendid docu-drama — a tense, engrossing tick-tock approach that tells the story of the meticulous planning, diplomacy, and stupidity that resulted in a crippling blow to our Pacific fleet and the deaths of 2,042 Americans.

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It’s a holiday and some might say we should be charitable to the unfortunate. By unfortunate usually they mean those that don’t have as much as you and I. But one might construe “unfortunate” to mean being gut wrenchingly stupid, too. And when one thinks of the gut wrenchingly stupid one often thinks of the denizens of Hollywood above all others. Still it is awfully hard to be charitable toward such stupidity, I have to admit.

Today I have two members of the gut wrenchingly stupid Hollywood set to report upon. It might have been three but the terminal lunacy of Charlie Sheen just goes without saying.

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This week Americans stood ready to wish each other a Happy Thanksgiving, to be sure. Well, everyone was but the  Angelina Jolie, that is. If reports are true, to her this holiday isn’t a day to thank God for our fortunate bounty and to reflect upon the fortuitous founding of this nation, it’s little else but “happy murder the natives day” and she refuses to take part.

Angelina Jolie hates this holiday and wants no part in rewriting history like so many other Americans,” a friend of the actress tells me. “To celebrate what the white settlers did to the native Indians, the domination of one culture over another, just isn’t her style. She definitely doesn’t want to teach her multi-cultural family how to celebrate a story of murder.

I suppose we can be charitable and ignore these kitschy musings based on a woefully incoherent view of American history. Unfortunately, it is just the sort of vapidity that is de rigueur for the empty headed Hollyweird set. As they puff themselves up imagining they care more than you about “the little people,” they indulge a corresponding hatred of our country all too often.

But Jolie’s absurd notion pales in comparison to the outright lunacy of “comedienne” Whoopi Goldberg (real name: Caryn Elaine Johnson). Whoopi thinks that the world does not have a Muslim problem, thinks “white men” are terrorists, and thinks that Muslims in the USA are persecuted more than Jews. Oh, there’s more. Goldberg also thinks that the Japanese didn’t attack Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Those are truly gut wrenchingly stupid notions. (more…)

So, President Obama’s speech wasn’t a bad one, but it wasn’t a great one either. If anything, it reminded me a little of Osama bin Laden’s speech – the one where he told us exactly when he was going to take down the World Trade Center. And remember the speech given right before Pearl Harbor – the one where the Japanese Imperial Headquarters let us know when the planes would arrive? Eerily similar.

I kid. Those speeches never took place – because our enemies never tell us when they’re going to attack. But we’re different. Not only do we tell them when and where, but also, how long before we’ll go home. Terrorists? Alas, they have patience in spades. A few years is nothing when you`re looking at an eternity with 72 virgins.

But look: this is war, and we need to call it war, and when we fight a war, we must back the President. So I`m with him 100 percent. But I wish he`d, you know, embrace the damn thing – and say we`re going to destroy these bastards, minus the egg timer. And to me, the coach shouldn’t talk strategy out in the open until after the game, when we`ve beaten the pants off the other team. (more…)

“That bold buckaroo with the cold green eyes.”

– General Douglas MacArthur, describing his savior John Bulkeley –

In March 1942, facing imminent capture by the Japanese, America’s commander in the Far East was ordered to slip away to safety in Australia. The Empire of the Sun controlled both air and sea, and only a precious few Allied planes and ships remained in-theater, skulking through the night fog like pirates to avoid capture and running on little more than spit and baling wire. “Overhauling those motors without any replacement parts was a terrible job,” one of the few to escape that nightmare later remembered. “For instance. Any tank-town garage which overhauls a flivver back in the States always replaces the gaskets with new ones. Only we didn’t have any. Or any sealing compound. So those old gaskets had to be carefully removed, handled as gently as though they were precious lace, and laid back in place when the motors were reassembled.”

When MacArthur arrived at the dock with his family and key commanders, he found waiting for him a trio of tiny, dilapidated motor torpedo boats crewed by dirty, emaciated men with long, unkempt beards and wild eyes. Their skipper was a thirty-year-old U.S. Navy Lieutenant named John Bulkeley, who for months had held his disintegrating squadron together by scrounging like a rat among the islands for gasoline, torpedoes, and other basic supplies. His boats were little more than plywood matchboxes, but Bulkeley had kept them active long after the rest of America’s Navy and Air Force had been destroyed or driven off. He made sneak assaults against transports, cruisers, destroyers, airplanes, landing parties — anything to frustrate the pace of the overwhelming Japanese invasion. Every time he attacked it was a fearsome David-versus-Goliath mismatch, but Bulkeley had done so time and again, sinking many enemy vessels. (more…)

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“[John Ford] was the only one of the Hollywood directors who fought who did not forget his men.”

– Captain Mark Armistead, USN –

Thus quotes Joseph McBride in his masterful biography Searching for John Ford, at the head of the chapter dealing with the director’s wartime activities. It is usually seen as lamentable when a genius is pulled from the practice of his art for any extended period, but here we must make a special allowance. As filmmaker Lindsay Anderson (1923-1994) explains in his essential critical volume About John Ford (which, like the McBride book, should be sitting proudly and dog-eared on the bookshelf of every conservative film fan): “War service took Ford away from the making of films for some three years when his powers were at their height. One would regret this interruption more had it not led directly to the making of a masterpiece.” (more…)

There are certain dates that are indelibly etched in our minds because they were drummed into us in school, such as the 1066 Battle of Hastings; some because they commemorate joyous events such as July 4th, December 25th or the births of our children; and some because they remind us to never forget how quickly everyday life can be turned into something horrific. 

The first of three such dates for Americans is 12/7/41.  That was, as FDR put it, a day of infamy.  It was a Sunday between Thanksgiving and Christmas when, without warning, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians.

The second of the nightmarish dates was 9/11/01 when 19 Islamics hijacked four airliners and murdered 2,998 human beings, most of whom were Americans. (more…)

You may not know who Mr. John Finn is, but you should. He is one of the true heroes who live among us. Today Mr. Finn turned 100-years-old. To simply live to that age may, to some, be an accomplishment in itself but to know who this man is and what he has done should amaze and humble you even more.

On Dec 7th 1941 many Heroes were made. John Finn received the Medal of Honor for his bravery on that day. He says he doesn’t deserve it and simply holds it for all the others who fought and died that December day. I disagree. On that December morning John held his position firing on the enemy for over two hours even though he himself had been hit 21 times. Several of his wounds were serious. Once the skies were quiet he sought medical help only after being ordered to. He then returned to help rearm the remaining airplanes at Kanoehe Bay. Because Kanoehe was hit five minutes before Pearl Harbor, many believe that John Finn is the first man to earn the Medal of Honor during WW2. But when you sit and listen to his stories he will tell you of his men, not of himself. Even at 100-years-old his mind is sharp and he loves to share his stories with those who will listen. And if you get the chance to meet Mr. Finn, listen to his stories for they are truly amazing. (more…)

Robert Avrech’s lovely paean to the patriotism of Old Hollywood reminds me, by way of contrast, of a blink-and-you-missed-it scandal from seventeen months ago. Even in a cultural arena rife with liberal outrages against military families, it marked a new low. And although it was but one small battle in the culture war, it is worth recalling in the wake of Memorial Day as a reminder of just how far our popular media has fallen from the sterling ideals of our forefathers.

What does NBC stand for again? National Broadcasters against Conservatives? No Blessings for the Corps? On December 7, 2007, as the country solemnly remembered Pearl Harbor and the timeless sacrifices of soldiers long dead, one of our major television networks decided that running ads praising today’s modern armed forces constituted a bridge too far. The two thirty-second spots had been produced by Freedom’s Watch, a now-defunct conservative action group which aspired to be the MoveOn.org of the right, using “grassroots lobbying, education and information campaigns, and issue advocacy” to fight the good fight against the legion of hippy-dippy protesters, nihilists, and ideological bullies that perpetually rage (and increasingly reign) throughout blue-state America. (more…)

The United States Navy is in the news and on my mind lately. The events off the coast of Somalia are surely one very good reason for this. Heroism and service. Ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances. Another not nearly so dramatic, but nonetheless exciting reason, for me at least, involves the very recent honor I’ve had of contributing my prose to a citation to confer on Mr. George Herbert Walker Bush the degree of Doctor of Social Science, honoris causa.  His own history, his willingness to serve, to sacrifice and risk everything for a cause, for others, is something we should never underestimate. It’s something we, as Americans have always been good at.

It’s also something our movies used to portray well. We don’t get to see too many of these kinds of movies anymore. Nope, they don’t make them like they used to. That can be said of both the men and women of Bush 41’s generation, as well as the films of that era. But sometimes, in more recent times, we’re graced with shining examples of tarnished excellence, of battered beauty in our citizens and in our favorite art, the movies.    (more…)