Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #45: Guadalcanal Diary

Most DVDs and blue-rays avoid using this image

The Battle of Guadalcanal was the first Allied offensive in the Pacific War. Guadalcanal was one of the larger of the Solomon Islands, the island chain northeast of Australia. Naturally, the Americans and their allies would first have to take these islands to begin the laborious process of beating the Japanese back towards their home islands. Though often referred to as a battle, it was more like a campaign with many land and naval battles. Unlike many of the later island battles, the Japanese still had a chance of pulling out a victory. Particularly at sea, the Imperial Japanese Navy scored its final victories over the American fleet before beginning a long losing streak. The battles on land were decidedly more in America’s favor, if still heavily contested, and are notable for being the first of many hellish slogs for the US Marine Corps.

I chose Guadalcanal Diary since I had never seen it before, but I must have mixed it up with some other war movie because I was surprised to see it was a black-and-white film released literally the same year of the latter part of the battle in 1943. The movie itself is also a quickly produced adaptation of an equally quickly produced book by journalist Richard Tregaskis. The movie’s opening credits even start on an image of the book, which opens up to reveal the cast and crew on its pages. There's also voiceover narration lifted from the book. Tregaskis accompanied the Marines during the campaign and diligently wrote down anything of note. He then compiled it into Guadalcanal Diary. Thanks to its factual presentation of events, free of dramatic license, the book was a smash hit, becoming Random House’s first major seller (I often see old copies of it working at an online bookseller).

The movie itself is unique on my watchlist in that it was released smack dab in the middle of the war. This means two things. First, there is no ability to seriously reflect on the wider implications of the battle. In fact the movie is completely from the point of view of the lower ranks, so don’t expect much in the way of big picture strategy or major military leaders. Secondly, this is a pure propaganda piece, and it’s because of this that it feels a bit hollow as a dramatic story.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #44: Midway (1976)

The Battle of Midway was the great turning point of the Pacific War, just half a year after the Attack on Pearl Harbor that got America into the overall global war. The cause was the Doolittle Raid (discussed in my last review) which is featured in the opening credits of this review’s subject. The ability of the Americans to launch a raid on Japanese soil, no matter how pitifully small, actually gave Admiral Yamamoto approval from high command to draw the Americans into a decisive naval battle. Yamamoto had chafed at the failure to find and destroy the US aircraft carriers at Pearl Harbor and had then been forced to use the Imperial Japanese Navy to support the Army’s conquests across Southeast Asia. A major Japanese victory could set back the American Navy months, buying Japan time to fortify its gains. On June 4, the Japanese and American fleets would clash near Midway Island in what turned out to be an important, perhaps decisive American victory. The loss of four Japanese carriers gave the Americans the momentum they needed to start driving their enemy from their conquests.

Understandably, the Battle of Midway has gotten three major filmed treatments, all historically accurate in terms of what happened. It was the only battle to receive full-fledged onscreen attention in the War and Remembrance mini-series (based on former navy man Herman Wouk’s World War II novels). In 2019 Roland Emmerich released his own movie that tried to be palatable to today’s attention-deficit general audiences, but still failed at the box office (I think it’s a fine film, but could use some extra oomph). This review goes back to the 1976 film, which was a box office hit, but hasn’t aged that well as a piece of movie-making.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #43: Pearl Harbor

We finally get to World War II, and we start with one of the more lambasted historical epics. Before we get into the movie itself, here’s a brief historical overview of Pearl Harbor. The United States, despite President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s desire to get involved, wanted to stay out of the large wars that had broken out in Europe and China during the late 1930s. By 1941, however, the nation was already starting to get entangled. For example, the US was appalled by the horrific atrocities Japan was committing in China, so it decided to cut off oil exports. Needing oil to continue its war in China, the Japanese decided to strike at the American and European colonial powers in a rapid, surprise onslaught. The date of the attack was December 7, 1941 (December 8 if you were in Asia).

Pearl Harbor is considered a great example of a bad movie, though also quite watchable for the most part. Much of the blame for it has been placed on the director Michael Bay, who’s known for many really stupid but financially successful films. However, while Bay does share some blame, it should be noted that Buena Vista Pictures (this is a Disney movie!) had a much bigger say in how Pearl Harbor turned out. Bay had originally wanted an R-rated update on Tora, Tora, Tora (1970), the highly regarded near-documentary on the famous Pearl Harbor attack, taking advantage of CGI and other modern technical innovations.

The studio had other ideas. James Cameron’s historical disaster epic Titanic had just made box-office and Oscar history. Since Pearl Harbor was also a great historical disaster (and one that involved ships, no less), Michael Bay was told to make something similar, a three-hour romance set amid the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #42: The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

 

Most films set during the Great Depression tend to focus on the criminals that were active at the time or just use the economic downturn as a background event for a fictional story (think King Kong). However, there is one major work, adapted from a book, that looks at the actual economic effects on the working class. John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath was a product of research he did for a series of articles on migrant workers in California during the Great Depression. He was struck by the plight of the migrants, their poverty, desperation, and struggle against limited jobs and exploitation. These migrants were perhaps the hardest hit people of the Depression, as just after the economic downturn the Dust Bowl, a series of dust storms, destroyed thousands of farms and livelihoods. Steinbeck decided to write the tale of the Joads, a tenant farmer family that, after being forced off their land by the company they work for, all pack into one overloaded car and head to California, where there is the promise of employment and thus food and dignity. Instead they find frustration and suffering.

The book was a big success and remains a fixture of top American novels today. 20^th Century Fox immediately decided to adapt it to the big screen with none other than John Ford at the helm. The resulting movie was released less than a year after the novel’s publication. Thus Grapes of Wrath the first case on my watchlist where the movie was released amidst the same historical event it was covering, as thousands of migrant farmers were still struggling in southern California (albeit with the worst of the Dust Bowl’s effects having passed). As with the novel, the film is highly regarded and is no stranger to greatest films lists.

The first half of the movie is very accurate to the novel. Thomas Joad (Henry Fonda), is a paroled prisoner who heads to his family’s farm in Oklahoma. He finds the farm abandoned and inhabited by one of the neighbors, Muley Graves. Using narration and flashback footage, we learn that the farmers, now unable to pay the landowners, are being evicted. In some cases the homes they grew up and lived in have been bulldozed. Tom finally finds his family and they head west to California.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #41: Public Enemies

 

There were so many famed outlaws during the early 30s that I chose to do another one. My choice is John Dillinger, and the movie is Michael Mann’s Public Enemies. It originated as a book by journalist Bryan Burrough’s Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI. It encompassed all the great criminals and Burroughs hoped to see it turned into a dramatic miniseries. After a few twists and turns, however, it became a theatrical film with a singular focus on John Dillinger.

John Dillinger grew into a troublesome youth in Mooresville, Indiana and committed a robbery. He was sentenced to a surprisingly harsh sentence of ten to twenty years in prison. Instead of turning him straight, his incarceration hardened him and kept him around experienced criminals who taught him all sorts of things. When he came out, he developed into the infamous bank robber. Like Bonnie and Clyde, he received exaggerated press and some romanticizing, but even professional historians and journalists note that he had his good qualities. This made him a good subject for Michael Mann, who specializes in showing the good and bad sides of cops and criminals alike.

Most of what’s in Public Enemies is true, but jumbled around chronologically for narrative purposes. For example, the Sioux Falls Robbery combines elements of three of Dillinger’s crimes, with Dillinger’s wounding and the incident of a teen jumping onto the back of one of the robbers before being thrown off through a window. In another example, the Little Bohemia hideout and shooting actually occurred after, not before, the arrest of Dillinger’s girlfriend Billy Frechette (Marion Cotillard, more on her later). Furthermore, Baby Face Nelson, while present, made his escape and would actually die four months later than Dillinger on November 27, 1934. While the chronology is mixed, Mann did go to a lot of trouble to shoot on real sites and even had some locations altered to look more like they did back in the 30's.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #40: Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

 

The cities saw the rise of organized crime in the early 20^th Century. Meanwhile, for a few years at the end of the 20s and into the early 30s, the small towns and rural areas of the American Midwest and South saw a collection of the classic outlaw, updated for modern times. Instead of gangs of robbers riding horses, the likes of Machine Gun Kelly, John Dillinger, and the Ma Barker Gang drove from town to town, hitting banks or in some cases pulling off kidnappings for ransom. The stars of this particular movie are Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker, more simply known as Bonnie and Clyde.

Aside from their long string of crimes, the duo was widely known for the simple fact that they were a devoted romantic couple (Wikipedia doesn’t even give them separate pages). Also, like many of the highway robbers of the time, they displayed a “ride-or-die” attitude, engaging in illegal and violent activities with seemingly no actual exit plan. Eventually a posse of Texas and Louisiana lawmen ambushed them on the Louisiana State Highway 154 on May 23, 1934, riddling them with about 130 bullets. Over 30 years later, the famed villains were turned into antiheroes in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde.

Bonnie and Clyde was one of the first New Hollywood films. By the late 60s, the stringent Hays Code was on its way out. At the same time popular culture was starting to grow more cynical and anti-authoritarian. As a result, Bonnie and Clyde (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty) as well as their fellow gang members got a heroic lift. They can be chummy with random strangers (including hostages), openly sympathize with farmers struggling with the effects of the Great Depression, and are just all around likeable people when not robbing banks. Actually, one of the stranger aspects of the movie is that while romanticizing the leads it still presents a couple of their ugly moments, such as when Clyde blasts a civilian in the face for hanging onto their car in an attempt to slow them down. For the most part, though, their violence is directed at law enforcement, reflecting the counterculture of the time.

Americas 250th Birthday Cinemathon #38 and #39: Al Capone (1959) and The Untouchables (1987)

Of the many criminals who have become big names in American history, perhaps none has stood out more than Al Capone. Alphonse Capone was born and raised in New York City, where he soon got into that gang scene and then became part of what would later become the Mafia. During this time another hoodlum, angry at a remark Capone made to his sister, slashed his face and gave him the nickname “Scarface”. Capone moved to Chicago, where he rose to become the head of the mob. Unlike other mob bosses, he loved public attention and was practically winking at the Law as he managed alcohol bootlegging, gambling racketeering, protection rackets, and other illegal enterprises. Eventually he got nailed on tax evasion and went to prison, but not before helping establish the Chicago Outfit that would dominate the underworld for decades.

Originally the movie industry disallowed real outlaw figures on film, moreso later in the 30s with the Hays Code, but the story of Capone’s rise and fall inspire many crime pictures. Most obvious was Scarface, which used his nickname for an ambitious but violent Italian-American ganger named Tony Camonte (Paul Muni). This movie even has him in Chicago leading an Italian-heavy south side gang against the rival north siders. Late in the 50s, restrictions were loosened and finally Capone made it to the big screen as himself. I’ve decided to review two movies, one where he’s the main character and the other where he’s the villainous antagonist.

Al Capone (1959)

Of all the higher profile actors in Hollywood in the 1950s, Rod Steiger was the best choice. It’s hard to find someone who looks like Capone, but Steiger does have a rounder head like him. The makers of Capone’s first big screen outing certainly thought he was the guy, because they had to rewrite the script several times to gain his acceptance. Reportedly, earlier drafts softened up the gangster. It’s not clear why, but perhaps it was going to focus on his more sympathetic qualities. Steiger wanted people to understand how bad Capone really was and how he hurt people. With little more than 100 minutes to cover Capone’s entire criminal career, however, it was probably wise not to spend time on his soup kitchens and other charitable works, which might have been cynical ploys to deflect negative public perception anyway.