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oldgringo2001
Reviews
The Gallant Hours (1960)
A Great War Film (but not great history)
I love watching this movie, even if I know it has some deliberate factual errors and gives a completely bogus impression of Halsey's Japanese adversary, Admiral Yamamoto. Other reviews have also noted that in truth Admiral Yamamoto wasn't shot down until April, two months after the last surviving Japanese forces finally withdrew from Guadalcanal and more than four months since the deaths of Admirals Scott and Callaghan. One thing which is not mentioned at all in the film is that Callaghan was given command over Scott, who had won the earlier Battle of Cape Esperance, simply because he was senior in rank.
Yamamoto did have an artistic bent, which he expressed through calligraphy, but geisha parties, cards, and chess were more his style, and he insisted his officers join him. Yamamoto was also an adventurous, individualistic man, a nail that stuck out that Japanese society never quite hammered down. He once hitch-hiked from Boston to Mexico!
Thomas Lamphier used to be credited for shooting down Yamamoto, but official credit has finally been given to Rex Barber, another P-38 pilot, who is not portrayed in the film.
There are many, many books about the Pacific War, Halsey, and the Guadalcanal campaign. My favorite, though it is out of print, is "The Campaign for Guadalcanal" by Jack Hoggins. It has a good mix of material covering sea, air, and land fighting, and is illustrated with fine drawings. For the Japanese perspective, John Toland's "The Rising Sun" has a very large section devoted to the campaign.
La cintura di castità (1967)
Curtis must have needed the money
I saw this movie in one of the grind houses that used to flourish between 5th and 7th Street on Market in San Francisco some time between 1969 and 1971. The version I saw was a full English Dub. Curtis did have a few good bits, but it also had some strange stuff like a young woman asking a saintly monk about her place in things and being told that like all women she has no soul. For all I know, the Italian dub might have entirely different dialog. I remember a laughably unconvincing "castle" somewhere in the Italian countryside (I presume). It's hard to believe Curtis had fallen so far since The Boston Strangler and (my favorite) The Great Race not that many years earlier.
In Harm's Way (1965)
Not what you might think.
I actually read the novel, and the movie is much more faithful to it than most screen adoptions. I agree that the model work was quite poor, but extremely forgivable given the strong story-line and acting. It captures the feel of the naval war in the Pacific for the Americans quite well. Since quite a number of other reviewers have agreed with me, the rest of this review will concentrate on differences between the movie and what actually happened.
Motor torpedo boats did sink a battleship once--in World War I. The PT boats of this war never sank anything larger than a destroyer, and few of those. Many had their torpedoes removed to fit small cannons, useful for sinking barges and floating drums. While new craft could reach 40 knots in calm water, engines tended to wear out quickly, and in combat conditions, the PT boats were generally slower than the ships they were trying to attack.
There never was a daylight battle between any Japanese battleships and American cruisers. There were two night battles, one at Guadalcanal and one at Surigao Strait in the Philippines, and in the latter, the American cruisers were backed by six battleships, versus only two Japanese battleships and one cruiser.
The mighty Yamato never fought anything more formidable than destroyers, and doesn't seem to have scored a single hit on an enemy vessel. Her sister Musashi never sighted an enemy vessel. Both were sunk by aircraft. Their poor performance might be explained by their spending most of the war at anchor. They were comfortable ships even for enlisted men, at least by the standards of the Japanese navy of the time. Yamato was often called "the Yamato Hotel" and the Musashi "the Palace."
The U.S. Navy did very little mining during World War II. Laying mines to protect Guadalcanal would have been a wonderful idea, but then, as now, mines were unpopular weapons with the admirals.
The final battle in the movie and the novel seems to be most similar to a night battle on November 13, 1942 between a US force of cruisers and destroyers and a Japanese task force built around two older battleships (each about half the size of Yamato). The US force suffered heavy casualties and two US Admirals were killed, but it crippled one of the battleships, leaving it vulnerable to US bombers the next day.
Battle: Los Angeles (2011)
Root for the Aliens
At least the aliens in this movie have no bad lines, probably because they have no lines at all. The characters are cardboard, everything is shot in stomach-churning jiggle-vision, often blurred, always badly lit. There's more smoke than Tommy Chong's apartment. The "widespread destruction" is so badly done it it could be Battlefield:Peoria except for the beach scenes. And yet, somehow, every building seems to have power for the televisions so we can keep up with the clever insertion of news coverage. No wonder it war released in March; no theater owner in his or her right mind would want to waste a screen on this one in summer.
If you make a movie about an alien invasion, you want to scare people, thrill people, make people laugh, and/or make people think. This movie is 0 for 4.
Ratatouille (2007)
What Was Brad Bird Thinking?
Okay, let's make the brave decision not to make Incredibles 2. Instead, let's go with a movie about a rat, and just to make sure even fewer people can get around that, let's make the rat and everyone else French. Nobody really likes the French. Even the French don't really like the French. The only reason to have French people in a movie is to make fun of being French. But that doesn't work unless there are enough non-French people to point out how much cooler it is not to be French. There was a great computer animation film featuring rats, but it was "Flushed Away" and the rats were Brits. There were some French frogs and they were hilarious. The only reason I give this one four stars was that everyone making this really worked hard. Don't waste your money on the Collector's Edition; you'll only feel bad for the Pixar people as they explain how they really, really thought they were doing great things making this disappointment.
Sink the Bismarck! (1960)
Why Bismarck?
I saw this movie when it came out. I was nine years old living in a tiny Idaho town, and it was great stuff. In different ways, it's still great stuff, despite the melodramatic excesses (Lutjens wasn't a Nazi idiot, and that completely over-the-top scene with the agent tapping out a few more words after the Germans shoot him.) Anything with Kenneth More is worth watching more than once.
So, why is the sinking of the Bismarck such a big deal for the Brits? Well, as Johnny Horton's song reminds you at the start, it was May of 1941, and Britain was out of allies. In the movie itself it mentions the loss of Maleme in Crete--a disaster on top of two more disasters, the recent evacuation of the Greek mainland, and Rommel's defeat of the British army remaining in North Africa. The Royal Navy took large losses covering the evacuation from Crete. In other worlds, any betting man in the USA would put his money on Germany whipping the Brits. But these disasters were happening far away and were hard to understand; the Bismarck chase filled American front pages at a very critical moment. It was Revenge at Sea (which, incidentally, is the title of a book about a similar chase-down in World War I.) Now that's the kind of stuff that sells newspapers.
Red Dawn (1984)
Red Dawn in full context
Yes, the Soviet Union really had the capability to land paratroops in Colorado in the 1980s if they really wanted to. The Strategic Defence Initiative really frightened the leadership and they did consider making a first strike while they still could. Our military power at the time, aside from our nuclear arsenal, was extremely weak. We had one airborne division; they had eight.
The movie was really an American remake of "The Battle of Algiers" plus some elements of the Afghan war of the Eighties (when the Russians were bogged down there--ask your parents.) The most memorable scene of the movie is where C. Thomas Howell faces down a Russian helicopter gunship, an American helicopter made up to look like an Mi-24, which was and is basically a flying tank. Before we shipped a few thousand Stinger missiles to the Afghan rebels, those gunships were practically invulnerable.
As a movie, it's pretty darned good. My Harvard-educated lawyer wife saw it for the first time last night and asked me to look it up. There aren't any "Rambo" characters in it. The guerrillas inflict some pain on the occupiers, but the occupiers retaliate big-time, and eventually hunt down almost all of them--pretty much like "The Battle of Algiers." "Algiers" is artier because it's in black and white, and was fully vetted by The New Left; "Dawn" has color and much better acting. The scripts of both spill over into purple (and politicized) prose sometimes, but both deliver the same underlying message: Don't expect to impose your own system on another culture by force. And it does not escape my notice that that is basically what we're expecting to do in Iraq and Afghanistan now. Maybe you should watch both "Dawn" and "Algiers".