Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) (and The Longest Day (1962))

    Pearl Harbour aflame in 1941, and below, as depicted in Tora! Tora! Tora!

History, they say, is written by the victors. This one dared to tell the story from both sides. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said at the time, history will not remember who fired the first shot but who fired the last. The Japanese attack was at least (for him) a convenient means of how to get America into a war that was rapidly spiralling out of control in Europe and Asia, and for whom he had been at pains to try and supply his allies whilst keeping the pretence of neutrality. The one person who was most 'pleased' by the attack ultimately was Winston Churchill, who knew that America's entering WWII would help to turn the tide.

In an era when history is often sidelined when it comes to historical films, here is one from the time that scrupulously kept to the record, wherever possible. The truth as they also say, is often stranger than fiction.

To put Tora! Tora! Tora! into its proper context, one also has to mention (and sneakily add as an extra favourite film to this blog) its similarly epic predecessor The Longest Day, conceived by producer Daryl Zanuck as a tribute to those men and the whole operation of D-Day. As an operation very much involving several countries (on both sides), he chose to stage it from different perspectives from the American, French, British and German perspectives. For all of its idiosyncrasies (such as Rod Steiger and Richard Burton - right - doing walk-on parts), it remains the definitive telling of D-Day, from many of the original locations.

I may be in the minority here, but TTT  improves on The Longest Day by having more of a dramatic focus by telling the story from two specific perspectives, and also having the greater dramatic and historic power, particularly for Americans.

In order to re-create the story of the attack authentically, Zanuck likewise felt the need to use two simultaneous crews from Japan and America to tell the tale. From the American perspective, the reliable craftsman Richard Fleischer was hired to direct in rather pedestrian fashion, although the bulk of the major action that headlines the film is in his section, in addition to which he captures the escalating tension and unwitting incompetence of the American intelligence service that fails to act on fateful information that the Japanese attack was coming.

Maybe this why the film was generally critically panned at the time - it dared to commit the great Hollywood sin: depicting Americans as losers. Whilst The Longest Day had John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda and others triumphantly marching into Normandy, TTT is rather more muted in terms of star power: Joseph Cotten (above) is one of the few star names to pop up, the rest are excellent character actors of varying degrees of fame (similarly with the Japanese cast - Soh Yamamura was a supporting player in the acclaimed Tokyo Story.) This is where the history is much more important than the star-spotting. 

Time has been kinder to TTT however, and its screening on television was where I was first introduced to it. The film also tries to redress the balance over who in American eyes were to blame for the failure of the US to react effectively to the attack - in effect, the scapegoats: Admiral Kimmel (Martin Balsam) of the navy and General Short (Jason Robards) of the army, both stationed in Hawaii at the time.

One of many poignant images: the Japanese America farmers in Hawaii before the war itself is about to change the course of their lives forever.

The more skilful and more powerful piece of filmmaking however comes - as in the battle attack itself - from the Japanese angle. The two Japanese directors, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, capture the mood, the emotions and, in particular, the dignity of the Japanese Navy, pressured into going to war by the overzealous army and an ambitious Japanese Government, more influenced by the likes of General Tojo (Asao Uchida, left) than the Emperor Hirohito, accompanied also by a fine score for these scenes, by the American Jerry Goldsmith.

The most intriguing aspect of the Japanese half of the film is that it was originally to be directed (and shot - for just one week) by Akira Kurosawa - a legend in Japan for his autonomy, and unused to the foreign environment of working for an American film studio who called the shots more than he did. Twentieth Century Fox took the bold move of firing the great director. We can only speculate on how his style would have impacted had he been allowed the free artistic reign he was more accustomed to in his own country. In spite of Kurosawa's absence, the replacement directors do more than a creditable job - a reminder to largely ignorant English-speaking audiences of the depth of talent on offer in Japan.

The Zeroes take off - footage allegedly directed by the great Kurosawa

The showpiece of the film is the of course the raid itself, and the spectacular effects, both on and above ground - so much so that the footage was used for several subsequent WWII films (and even some documentaries which mistook it for the real archive.) The film also captures in semi-documentary fashion some of the ironies and authentic small true incidents, such as the hapless flying school instructor who suddenly found herself surrounded one morning by squadrons of Japanese planes, or the impact of the USS Arizona's explosion glancing even the Japanese planes that had destroyed her - in a similar semi-observational manner to A Night to Remember, with subtlety and no great fanfare, but quiet effect and power.

Like A Night to Remember, TTT itself also suffered the peculiar fate of a rather romanticised and trashy modern remake, directed by Michael Bay in 2001, about which the less said of Pearl Harbor, the better. It did at least serve to remind just what a quality product TTT was.

Over a quarter of a century after the first major attack on United States shores (if an island 2,000 miles away from the mainland can be considered on America's "doorstep"), its impact is still felt - a reaction of shock and revulsion among most Americans, that was reflected, once more, 70 years later, when the World Trade Centre in New York and the Pentagon in Washington were attacked by Al Qaeda terrorists.

Martin Balsam and Soh Yamamura reflect the gravity of the event felt by both Navies - the prophetic quote at the end is alleged to have come from Yamamoto's diary.

Kafka (1991)

This comes under the category - of which there are many other candidates - of the "curiosity interest" film. Over the years that I've followed films and their development, news filters through of those in production which quickly become a "must see" in the mind's eye. For example, there was much anticipation and expectation when Francis Ford Coppola planned to make a faithful version of the original novel Dracula - the resulting film, entitled Bram Stoker's Dracula, betrayed the hint in the title that it was pretending to be a faithful version: the film had its admirers but they were more of Coppola's work than Bram Stoker's. Nevertheless, the expectation prior to the film was immense. There are other items in this page (Postcards from the Edge or Star Wars Episode I), which live up to their expectations, or others that do not.  

So it was too with Kafka, Steven Soderbergh's anticipated second film after the acclaimed Sex, Lies and Videotape that had won him the Palme D'Or at Cannes. The phrase "second film" seems to be something of a potential curse for successful filmmakers, especially in Hollywood: free of all constraints from the first film, second time around the director is a tried and tested "hot property" who can make whatever film he chooses that a grateful studio will entrust him with: John Sturges was successful enough with The Magnificent Seven to persuade United Artists to finance The Great Escape; George Lucas's American Graffiti was a big enough smash to persuade Alan Ladd Jnr to green-light the improbable Star Wars; Quentin Tarantino had made enough of a mark with Reservoir Dogs to be able to roll the dice even more audaciously with Pulp Fiction. Perhaps most notoriously, Michael Cimino's The Deer Hunter gave him the power to make Heaven's Gate, whose ultimate failure caused an entire Hollywood studio to go out of business.

With Kafka therefore, Soderbergh was playing an equally dangerous game in taking something entirely removed from the style of his first film: a paranoia thriller in black and white, no less, in 1991. Up until then, only The Elephant Man in 1980 or Coppola's Rummble Fish in 1983, or other relatively obscure, arty films had dared to do this since the process became largely obsolete in the mid 1960s. In fairness, the only one who really managed to pull off the gimmick successfully was Steven Spielberg with Schindler's List.

Outside of commercial interests however, black and white still retains its magic and sense of mystery, particularly in a film such as this. Orson Welles once said that black and white was the only proper medium to convey the drama and the emotion of the human face: colour distracted and brought too much awareness of the pigmentation of the skin (all but his last three films were made in black and white). It is likewise, two of Orson's most famous films, The Trial and most particularly The Third Man, that served as a benchmark for Soderbergh. His cast was, likewise, a mixture of British, American and international faces, with the likes of Theresa Russell, Jeroen Krabbe, Joel Grey (almost as one critic put it, as if his MC from Cabaret was on a day job!), Armin Mueller-Stahl, Biran Glover, Ian Holm, and even veterans like Alec Guinness and Robert Flemyng lured to play supporting roles. The always treasured sight of Guinness in a film in his later career is a typically unexpected one from him (as the Chief Clerk), but full of wry, quiet humour amid suppressed menace in his two scenes with Kafka. 

In the title role, Soderbergh only ever had one  actor in mind: the tall but otherwise similarly slim, gawky and nervously handsome Jeremy Irons, who brings an intelligent yet clumsy and nervous tension to the role and the decaying, uncertain Bohemian atmosphere around him.

It is not a biopic of Kafka as such, but a semi-fantasy drama incorporating elements of Kafka's life and the settings of some of his stories (most particularly The Trial and The Castle). 

 
Things start to get creepy in the castle when the film suddenly switches over from mundane, atmospheric black-and-white, to in-your-face 'literal' colour (a la Wizard of Oz, although Powell and Pressburger reversed the process in A Matter of Life and Death from colour to b&w).

This perhaps is ultimately the film's main failing: once the sinister Dr. Murnau (a cheeky homage to the director of Nosferatu), is revealed in the flesh, all the implied terror becomes actual, and yet in the low-key presence of the talented Ian Holm, Murnau is less of a figure of fear that a would-be hack doctor with ideas above his station. The requisite chase scene in a (fantasy) film of this kind seems routine, before things return to the mundane and more comfortable black-and-white world of everyday Prague, after the colour interlude; Kafka has seen into the dark recesses of the Castle, and is depressingly content to stay in his own environment and write his stories, which turn out to have an even more vivid imagination than reality (as expected).

As such it is neither commercial entertainment or "arthouse" character observation: for some, it falls between two stools - which accounts for its relative obscurity, and the fact that I didn't get round to seeing it at the MGM Shaftesbury Avenue until two years later in 1993! I nonetheless found it a quirky, eye-catching experience, particularly with such an interesting cast, in such an old world environment.

I was lucky enough to visit Prague itself for the first time in 2017: it is the only one of the three great cultural Bohemian cities of Eastern Europe (alongside Berlin and Vienna) to have survived the ravages of history and still remained largely intact from the 19th century. The city itself is in many ways the star of Kafka, with its old, looming statues of the Saints watching over the characters like ghosts - two key locations are, of course, the giant castle (with the imposing Sternbersky Palace), and the original (and at the time, sole) bridge over the Vltava, the King Charles Bridge (named after the monarch under whose reign the bridge was designed and constructed.)

I recently watched Sex, Lies and Videotape for a second time to appreciate its virtues as a film - but I have seen bits of Kafka constantly in the intervening decades. Such a film has that curiosity value, and it's true that a lot more can be garnered from a director's "failed" film than from many of his successes.

Jeremy Irons on King Charles Bridge (also below)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1955)

Ironic, and yet perhaps appropriate, at the time of writing when the world is in shutdown from a pandemic, to cover a film that crosses the globe; appropriate because it allows audiences the experience of travelling the world, of a kind, from the benefit of their own cinema seat - or now their sofa at home on video.

"It's a wonderful world, if you'll only take the time to go around it!"

For the ultimate enduring success of the epic, we owe it to three principal gentlemen: firstly to its showmanlike New York producer Mike Todd - with a little creative inspiration from Jules Verne (who duly "drops" his book down from the heavens in Saul Bass's amusing title sequence): the novel is a fast-paced adventure yarn about a stuffy, enigmatic member of the London Reform Club, Phileas Fogg (very much the stereotypical English gentleman from a French perspective), who is suddenly dared into travelling around the world in 80 days - as boasted by modern transport in 1872. Fogg's sudden decision comes to the equal surprise of his new French manservant Passepartout, only recently thrust into the job after a visit to the London Employment Exchange to fill the new position of a "gentleman's gentleman."

This scene of Passepartout's recruitment is among the first of many witty vignettes which pepper throughout the film in between its epic journeys by road, rail, sea, and (via cinematic invention) by air, in a balloon.

No less a person than John Gielgud is the unfortunate predecessor to Passepartout's role, driven to distraction by Fogg's fastidiousness in requiring baths to be specific sizes, and his toast to be cooked at 23 degrees, no more, no less. "Extraordinary, how does one measure the temperature of toast?", asks Gielgud's employer, played by Noel Coward!

Coward was Todd's big catch: regarded then (and still now) as "The Master" of British theatre, he proved to be the hook that managed to get most of the British supporting cast into the film: Gielgud, and many others. That, together with Todd's own charm and dogged persuasiveness (and probably some form of lucrative reward for the actors), he managed to entice no less than 44 guest stars into the film, in "cameo" roles (an expression coined by Todd himself), and a suitable cosmopolitan bunch for a cinematic journey round the world - even if most of the cameos had a slight Hollywood bent.

Charles Boyer was among the 44 guest stars lured by Michael's Todd's money (and Phileas Fogg's)

The second key gentleman next to Todd himself, was his Passepartout in the form of the charismatic David Niven as Phileas Fogg. Niven was baying for the role, and he seems a natural choice today, but back in the 1950s he only occasionally merited leading man status. Samuel Goldwyn was once at pains in the 1940s to make him a new Hollywood leading man in the mould of Ronald Colman (who has a cameo in this film), but the stronger calling of duty to his country brought Niven back to Britain during World War II.

After the war his career consolidated but never took off. Around the World in Eighty Days was a grand showcase, for all the many players, of whom Niven was the most frequently seen throughout the film. The role surmises all his suave gentlemen he ever played, with an added flavour of English punctiliousness.

The third key and largely overlooked key figure in the success of Around the World in Eighty Days was the unassuming figure of director Michael Anderson. A production assistant and also brief actor (sparring once with John Mills in In Which We Serve), his film career prospered with The Dam Busters in 1954, now considered a classic (in spite of its naive special effects), and it impressed Michael Todd enough to replace original director John Farrow with Anderson - who, unlike Farrow, quickly accepted who the real boss of 80 Days was. This also however allowed Anderson to work with the key core of the movie, namely, the principal four participants on the long journey - Fogg, Passepartout, the princess (a miscast but pleasant Shirley MacLaine), and Inspector Fix (a gorgeous swansong by Robert Newton).

30 years after The General, Buster Keaton is still busy on the railways

I read the book first: the film is a surprisingly faithful adaptation, particularly in its depiction of London and of the novel's sudden twist ending. Television, being what it was in those days, could give only limited scope to the breadth of Todd's original epic. A video release restricted the picture to pan-and-scan square ratios, but commendably much of the humour still comes through. It took its time for widescreen TV to give the broad perspective of the Todd-AO canvas - and now in disc form, comes the film in as much of the original 1950s presentation style as could be presented.

It is very much a product of an era when movies were made primarily to entertain, and for the audience to have good time - in many ways, a form of cinematic circus, with lots of guests artistes, thrills and spills and laughs on the way. Other all-star adventures duly came along in its wake, such as Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines, It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World, Monte Carlo or Bust, The Great Race, and others - until movies felt the need to grow up and offer less fluffy spectacle.

Around the World in Eighty Days had its exclusive London run in 1957 at the Astoria in Charing Cross Road