Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)
Directed by Toshio Masuda
In the summer of 1941, the United States and Japan seem on the brink of war after constant embargos and failed diplomacy come to no end. "Tora! Tora! Tora!", named after the code words used by the lead Japanese pilot to indicate they had surprised the Americans, covers the days leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, which plunged America into the Second World War.
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What critics compared Tora! Tora! Tora! to
Tora! Tora! Tora! -- Richard Fleischer's 1970 Pearl Harbor film, told from the Japanese and American perspectives with all the passion of a three-hour classroom lecture -- was about the details, peace talks, and betrayals.
The politics of Pearl Harbor, from military unpreparedness to the hunger for war from the White House, were relayed more cogently in 1970's Tora! Tora! Tora!, an ambitious but inert film that tells the story from both the American and Japanese sides.
Aside from 1970's Tora! Tora! Tora!, no feature film has effectively captured the scope of the Japanese offensive of that day.
There are the ones like 1917 , Dunkirk, or Saving Private Ryan that focus on the mental and emotional impact of battle on those fighting it, and there are ones more concerned with the technical and strategic aspects of the events depicted, like Tora! Tora! Tora!
Not since classic Hollywood epics of yore, films like Patton , Tora! Tora! Tora! , The Longest Day or Battle of Britain , have the mechanics and machinery of combat utilized during WWII felt so tactile and concrete.
In the context of the director’s biography, this shift seems to occur with a number of pivotal events: Kurosawa’s decisive split with his star, Toshiro Mifune; the financial failure of his film Dodes’ka-den and the independent company that produced it; his disastrous aesthetic impasse with the American producers of Tora! Tora! Tora!; and finally, his attempt at suicide.
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Then again, the current retrospective on director Kinji Fukasaku -- maker of countless brutal yakuza flicks in the '60s and '70s, the pop-art curiosity Black Lizard and the Japanese sequences of Tora! Tora! Tora! -- doesn't contain much in the way of brooding Bressonian silences or glacier-slow pans of desolate Russian landscapes.