Compound Tragedy

By Stefan Kanfer

"Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamy . . ."

No one alive at that moment can forget the resonance of President Roosevelt's address to Congress. For the U.S., the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor was the detonator of World War II, the unofficial announcement that history once again was attempting suicide.

As Tora! Tora! Tora! demonstrates, the infamy was double-edged. Late in 1940, American cryptographers cracked the Japanese code and predicted war--to deaf ears. An hour before the bombing, the Japanese raiders were detected as blips on a primitive radar screen--and were dismissed by American officers as "our B-17s." As a compound tragedy of omission and commission, the events leading down to Dec. 7 could provide the grossest scenarists with a wide-screen epic. Those, apparently, are the ones 20th Century-Fox hired.

Jaw and Strut. The first half of the film is devoted to apple-pie softness and bamboo resilience. In war movies of the '40s, the Japanese were a thin yellow line. Tora! Tora! Tora!* is a refreshing reversal. The Americans tend to blend into an indistinguishable potbellied mob. It is the Orientals who are individuals. Admiral Yamamoto (Soh Yamamura) is Eskimo-like in appearance, stoical in practice, goaded by an affliction no leader can afford: doubt. Lieut. Commander Fuchida (Takahiro Tamura) is an Oriental Smilin' Jack, all jaw and strut. Ambassador Nomura (Shogo Shimada), present in Washington when the bombs fell, is the same shrunken cipher who appeared in all the newsreels. It is he who bears the verbal assault delivered by Cordell Hull, played by George Macready, one of the few performers capable of diplomatic outrage.

If his speech is meticulous, the others' is not. The script (based on two books and written by one American and two Japanese) seems to be scraped from the bases of monuments. "I have studied at Harvard," says Yamamoto, "and I know that Americans are a proud and just people." When the clouds break during the flight to Hawaii, the squadron leader exults: "The sunburst reminds me of our flag--a good omen."

Hunt and Peck. In the second half of Tora! Tora! Tora!, the bromides stop fizzing and the cliches are hushed. In a brilliant restaging, Japanese planes cut through the cloud cover. There, gliding beneath them, is a civilian biplane, looking like a goldfish among sharks. It is the film's last laugh. Trapped in that jug-necked harbor, the men of the Arizona, the regulars on easy duty in Schofield Barracks, are pathetically vulnerable targets. An airplane desperately taxis down its runway, straining for liftoff. A bomb scores a direct hit. The pilot becomes a gout of smoke, the propeller detaches crazily, scudding across the earth. Men are flooded in holds, set afire, strafed as they run along unprotected fields. American bombers and P-40s are bunched together, ideal targets for bombardiers. And back in Washington, the Japanese ambassadors wait for a lackey to hunt and peck his way through an ultimatum that they deliver to the Secretary of State 55 minutes after the attack.

The litany of irony and error is unending. Emperor Hirohito is outmaneuvered by his military cadre; President Roosevelt is crossed off the confidential list because the generals distrust his advisers. Bureaucracy and blind tradition amplify each error beyond calculation. No single man can be blamed, and no villains or heroes emerge from this foundering, slipshod--and hypnotic--drama. That judgment must hold not only for those who lived it but also for those who filmed it. Three directors, one American (Richard Fleischer) and two Japanese, Toshio Masuda and Kinji Fukasaku, have managed to move crowds and planes, but not the viewer. They have shown events, but not contexts; national characters, but not national character. Originally, Master Director Akiro Kurosawa (Rashomori) was signed to oversee the Japanese sequences. He might have revealed the complex psychologies that led to the abyss and beyond. Without him, the film is a series of episodes, a day in the death. As for real men and causes, they are victims missing in action.

. Stefan Kanter

* Literally, Tiger! Tiger! Tiger! -- Japanese code for "attack launched."

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