This was solid. Recently I have taken an interest in both the propaganda films and wartime documentaries of World War II from both sides. I especially wanted to see this, since I love Ford's 'They Were Expendable' so much. Definitely worth the effort to find if you have a similar inclination for the material.
I have always wondered if a truly 'objective', 'unbiased' documentary can be made. Simply the decisions a director makes in what to capture and what not to makes such a gesture impossible, doesn't it? I especially feel this is the case when it comes to nationalistic documents, such as this.
I have NO idea what its competition was, but this deservedly won Ford an Oscar for Best Documentary: Short Subject--this was a fine work he was well to be proud of.
CinemaSerf
August 20, 2025
6
Though technically a docu-drama, this is really more of a conspiratorial retrospective on just how the Japanese managed to catch the US military on the hop, disastrously, on this fateful day. It’s narrated, of sorts, by way of a supposed conversation between a notional “Uncle Sam” (Walter Huston) and “Mr. C” (Harry Davenport). They start off by extolling the virtues of the multi-national/ethnic population that has revolutionised the economy of Hawaii, especially with sugar cane and pineapples, but gradually start to take a more menacing tone about those 157,000 who make up around a third of the population and who have Japanese roots. Were they all just proud of their provenance and their Shinto religion, or were some part of a network of fifth columnists feeding sensitive information about fleet movements and other sensitive military activity to Japan via it’s consulate - shown here fairly cheek by jowl with the Nazi chargé d’affaires. Those speculative and generalising dramatic sequences don’t really add much to the film, but there’s no getting away from the effectiveness of parts of the edit showing the attack on Pearl Harbor. Using a surprisingly comprehensive collection of real film (clearly intercut with some especially shot action reconstructions) we see about five minutes of the sustained attack on the facility, it’s ships and it’s adjacent air forces bases as they take quite an hammering from the over 200 aircraft that took the defenders completely by surprise. By the conclusion of this feature, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there was nothing serviceable left either afloat on capable of flying, and as a tool to galvanise anti-Japanese’s wartime sentiment it probably worked rather well in 1943. There are better films depicting the events of December 7th, but few that better use such a wide array of photography.
