A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2009 Warner Home Video In 2009, Warner Home Video released The Battle of Iwo Jima Collection, a box set comprised of director Clint Eastwood’s Iwo Jima Duology – Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. Co-produced by Eastwood’s production company Malpaso and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, these two movies examine one of World War II’s fiercest battles through the experiences of the American and Japanese troops that fought it. Legendary filmmaker Clint Eastwood cuts open the heart of war and reveals the souls of men on both sides in a landmark dual film project hailed as his masterpiece. Shot back to back to be viewed in sequence, Flags of Our Fathers is a riveting chronicle of U.S. heroes on the front lines and in the headlines at home, while Letters from Iwo Jima reveals the untold stories of the ill-equipped but fierce Japanese fighters who rallied against awesome American forces in a brutal 40-day campaign. Together, they create a triumphant, stirrin...

One of the interesting things about Clint Eastwood's  Letters from Iwo Jima  isn't so much that it's a cinematic rarity - an American-produced movie with a mostly-Japanese dialog soundtrack that qualified for a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Language Film - but rather a celluloid bookend to another film by the same director,  Flags of Our Fathers . Both films, released a few months apart in the fall of 2006, graphically depict the Battle of Iwo Jima (code named Operation Detachment by the Americans) from two different perspectives - the U.S. side's in  Flags of Our Fathers , and the Japanese defenders' in  Letters from Iwo Jima . Considering the high cost of making an effects-heavy film, a less ambitious director-producer team might have chosen to "do" an Iwo Jima-based film in the same semi-documentary format used by Darryl F. Zanuck and Joseph E. Levine in  A Longest Day  and  A Bridge Too Far , which tell the stories of D-Day and Ope...

On February 23, 1945, D+4 of the battle for Iwo Jima (code-named Operation Detachment), five Marines and a Navy corpsman clambered up to the summit of Mt. Suribachi, a dormant volcano on the southern tip of the 7.5-square mile island; with an altitude of 166 m (546 ft), Suribachi dominates the unusually flat terrain of Iwo Jima and, as such, was an important military objective – whoever held the high ground could direct artillery and mortar fire at any point on the small island located nearly 700 miles southeast of Tokyo. The five Marines - Franklin Sousley, Harlon Block, Michael Strank, Rene Gagnon, and Ira Hayes, along with their Navy medic, John “Doc” Bradley – were just a small fraction of the 110,000 members of the Fleet Marine Force that were involved in Operation Detachment, but as a result of what at the time they considered a routine – almost mundane – assignment, they became immortalized when Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal took one of the most famous pictur...

In 1993’s suspenseful In The Line of Fire, director Wolgang Petersen pits Clint Eastwood's Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan and John Malkovich's potential Presidential assassin Mitch Leary. Working from a screenplay by Jeff Maguire ( Gridiron Gang, Timeline ), Petersen gives audiences an intelligent thriller which examines the psyches of its two antagonists as they play a deadly cat-and-mouse game in which the life of the President of the United States hangs on the balance. In the Line of Fire tells us that a now 50-something Agent Horrigan was a young and hard nosed Secret Service agent in charge of President Kennedy's security detail in Dallas on November 22,1963.   Like his real-life counterpart Clint Hill, Horrigan is haunted by the fact that he lost the President of the United States under his watch.   As a result of Frank's slide into depression and alcohol abuse, his marriage ended and his career with the Secret Service has stagnated.  Inst...

Heartbreak Ridge,  the 13th film directed by Clint Eastwood, is a strange war movie that takes  very  familiar stock characters and situations and attempts to give them some contemporary (at least in 1980s terms) twists to a story about the training of a Marine platoon and its eventual baptism by fire in battle.  Eastwood, who also produced  Heartbreak Ridge,  plays Gunnery Sergeant (GySgt) Tom “Gunny” Highway, a 30-plus year veteran and holder of the Medal of Honor who is facing retirement after seeing combat in Korea, the 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic and – of course – Vietnam.  Because he has been in the Corps since he enlisted as a young adolescent, Highway is not too thrilled at the prospect of mustering out and feels he still has some role to play in the service.  Naturally, since the Marine Corps is one of the smallest branches of the military and “Gunny” is well-connected within the network of noncommissioned officers, he...

One of the great truths in life is that all art, as writer-director Nicholas Meyer ( Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ) is fond of saying, reflects the times in which is it created. A good example of this is 1970's  Kelly's Heroes,  a wry, dark, and sometimes downright daffy caper-comedy set in World War II. Starring Clint Eastwood as an oft-busted ex-lieutenant-but-now Private Kelly,  Kelly's Heroes  is not so much a giddy Blake Edwards-inspired World War II comedy a la  What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?  but more of a Vietnam War-era revision of all those war movies wherein the G.I.s are always portrayed as imperfect but well-meaning "angels in battle dress and helmets" who are fighting to liberate Western Europe from Nazi tyranny. Kelly's Heroes,  directed by Brian G. Hutton, whol made only a handful of fair-to-middling features and a score or so TV episodes of various series before switching careers to plumbing, is essentially a Sergio Leone spaghe...