Movie Review: 'Tora! Tora! Tora!'

(C)  2012 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

Director of American Sequences: Richard Fleischer

Directors of Japanese Sequences: Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda

Screenplay by: Larry Forrester, Hideo Oguni, and Ryuzu Kikushima

Based on: The Broken Seal by Ladislas Farago and Tora! Tora! Tora! by Gordon W. Prange

Starring: Martin Balsam, So Yamamura, Jason Robards, Joseph Cotton, Tatsuya Mihashi, E.G. Marshall, Takahiro Tamura, James Whitmore. Eijiro Tono, Wesley Addy

On September 23, 1970, 20th Century Fox released Tora! Tora! Tora!, a $20 million docudrama about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor Naval Base and other military bases on the island of Oahu. Conceived by studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck in the mid-1960s as an epic follow-up to The Longest Day, his successful 1962 recreation of the Normandy invasion on D-Day (June 6, 1944), it received a warmer reception in Japan than it did in American movie houses or in the eyes of contemporary film reviewers.

For instance, Roger Ebert, one of the most renowned film critics of our times, wrote in his contemporary review:

"Tora! Tora! Tora!" is one of the deadest, dullest blockbusters ever made. The very word "blockbuster" may be too lusty to describe it; maybe "blocktickler" is more like it for this timid epic. The subject is grand enough, but the screenplay mostly concerns itself with clerks, secretaries, teletype operators and government functionaries.

The New York Times' Vincent Canby was equally unenthusiastic about Tora! Tora! Tora! In his September 24, 1970 review, the eminent film critic noted:

Like "The Longest Day," which it tries to emulate (unsuccessfully), "Tora! Tora! Tora!" wasn't as much directed as it was assembled, by one producer overseeing three directors and batteries of cameramen. The intimate dramatic scenes depend principally on the reading of what are purported to be official documents, interspersed, occasionally, with minutiae (such as the information that, for a few weeks before Pearl Harbor, anyway, President Roosevelt wasn't permitted to see American top-secret documents because he was thought to be a poor security risk).

Maybe Ebert and Canby judged Tora! Tora! Tora! purely on its cinematic merits (or lack thereof); much of the film's 145-minute-long running time is devoted to the events that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor; the actual air raids on Oahu take up only 15 to 20 minutes of the movie...then it ends.

However, it's also likely that the film's lackluster performance in the U.S. was a reflection of the cultural sea changes in America and the film industry during the Vietnam era.

Consider: the film was produced by Elmo Williams, Zanuck's line producer for The Longest Day. Williams used many of the same techniques used to adapt Cornelius Ryan's international best-seller about D-Day  in the making of Tora! Tora! Tora!, including:

• Shooting many scenes on or close to some of the actual locations in which the events take place
• Hiring directors from both the U.S, and Japan, as well as an international cast to represent both countries
• Base the massive script on non-fiction books about Pearl Harbor, especially Ladislas Farago's The Broken Seal and Gordon W. Prange's published-in-Japan account of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Tora! Tora! Tora!
• Present the film as a "You Are There" docudrama, without creating fictional people and giving them "character arcs"

The only major cinematic difference (other than the choice to present the film in color) between The Longest Day and Tora is Williams' choice to cast character actors (including Joseph Cotten, Martin Balsam, Norman Allen, Edward Andrews, and Richard Anderson) instead of marquee names. 

Yet, The Longest Day is remembered today as a classic war film that saved its studio from bankruptcy, while Tora! Tora! Tora! got bad contemporary reviews and an indifferent reaction from American audiences.

Tora! Tora! Tora! is the code that advised Japanese Imperial Navy commanders that the devastating December 7, 1941 attack on Hawaii commenced with utter surprise and without resistance. Torpedo bombers, dive bombers, and fighter planes swept down upon Pearl Harbor and other military targets, killing over 2,400 and wounding over 1,200. More than a dozen ships were damaged or destroyed. Dozens of aircrafts (sic) were lost. America, "the sleeping giant," was abruptly awakened by WWII. - Plot summary blurb, Tora! Tora! Tora!

I have seen Tora! Tora! Tora! countless times since I first saw it on commercial television stations in mid-1970s. I've owned home video releases of the movie in various formats (VHS tapes, DVDs, and now Blu-ray discs) since the mid-1980s. It's not a movie that I'll watch more than once a year (usually in time for the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor raid), but I don't think it's as bad as Ebert and Canby's reviews state so firmly. 

Obviously, Ebert and Canby saw and critiqued the film in 1970, a year in which American troops were still fighting in Southeast Asia even as President Richard Nixon was promising to end the Vietnam War "with honor." Most young moviegoers of the era were not likely to see a movie about the Pearl Harbor attack. Older viewers, especially World War II vets, were probably less resistant to the war movie genre, but even they thought the film was downbeat because it depicted an American defeat. (The Longest Day, in contrast, commemorates an Allied victory over the Germans, albeit a costly one.)

So, even if you take into consideration that most of the film delves into the various diplomatic, political, and military maneuvering that Japan and the U.S. engaged in between early 1940 and December 6, 1941 with a lot of dialog-heavy expository scenes set in offices, code rooms, and ships' cabins, I think that Tora! Tora! Tora! was simply made at the wrong time, at least for the American market. 

While I agree with Ebert that the "film's acting is anti-dramatic, if anything," I think that if Martin Balsam, E.G. Marshall, or Wesley Addy, three of the many U.S. character actors featured in Tora! Tora! Tora! had tried to ham it up before the cameras, it would have spoiled the docudrama effect that directors Richard Fleischer, Kinji Fukasaku, and Toshio Masuda tried to achieve. 

And even though Michael Bay's 2001 potboiler romantic epic Pearl Harbor features better effects, Tora! Tora! Tora! feels more authentic, more believable. Bay's "two guys and a girl and a war" is the movie Roger Ebert wanted when he wrote his 1970 review, but Tora relies on the historical record and on-location filming in Washington, D.C. and Oahu (with interiors shot in studios in Japan and California).  For viewers who want a realistic version of the Pearl Harbor attack, the older film is superior to Bay's overheated version of Titanic-meets-World War II.

Blu-ray Specifications: 

Video

• Codec: MPEG-4 AVC (19.95 Mbps)
• Resolution: 1080p
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Original aspect ratio: 2.35:1

Audio

• English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
• English: Dolby Digital 4.0
• Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
• French: Dolby Digital 5.1
• Portuguese: Dolby Digital 5.1

Subtitles

• English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Korean, Mandarin (Traditional), Thai

Discs

• Blu-ray Disc
• Single disc (1 BD-50)

Playback

• Region A, B

Sources: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/tora-tora-tora-1970

http://www.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9F0CE7DC1E38E73ABC4C51DFBF66838B669EDE