A Date That Will Live in Infamy

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), which shows the events leading up to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor from the viewpoint of both sides, was almost certainly the first film I saw with subtitles. In fact, the subtitles extend beyond the Japanese dialogue to on-screen captions identifying almost every character who speaks a line, including single-scene appearances like General Tojo and the eccentric Japanese strategist "Gandhi" Kuroshima, who confines himself to his overheated cabin and works wrapped in a blanket. Bizarrely, the captions fail to name the pivotal character of Admiral Nagumo, who commanded the attack fleet and who is presented as a tough, hatchet-faced old sea-dog rather than the bullet-headed and over-cautious figure he actually seems to have been.

Presented by Twentieth Century-Fox, based on two American books and overseen by the efficient Richard Fleischer (the Japanese sequences were directed by Kinji Fukasaku, later of Battle Royale renown), the film is naturally biased towards the USA, with little indication (beyond some squeaking from Tojo about daggers pointed at the nation's heart) of what geopolitical circumstances might have provoked the Japanese gamble. "I give him proposals; he brings me counter-proposals," complains Secretary of State Cordell Hull about Japan's refusal to knuckle under; but the substance of the proposals and counter-proposals is never hinted at. By contrast, a great deal is made of the unintended delay in communication which means that Japan's formal declaration of war arrives only after the attack has taken place: an irregularity which evidently led the United States government to withhold some of its habitual restraint and chivalry when retaliating.

There are occasional amusing touches, such as the flying instructor and her nervous pupil who suddenly find their biplane surrounded by the deadpan gaze of the Imperial Japanese Navy's finest; but for the most part the film is a pedestrian affair until the stirring attack sequence at the end. Why I should be reminded, today of all days, about this long and lumbering effort which distorts and over-simplifies, misses large points while emphasising trivial ones, and climaxes with a big bully suffering a spectacular, if equivocal, defeat at the hands of a smaller bully, I'm sure I cannot possibly imagine.