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Showing posts with the label Philippine Islands

'The Great Raid' Movie review

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Miramax Films Director John Dahl’s “The Great Raid” is a World War II film that is in turns an old-fashioned war movie and a realistic depiction of a military action that actually took place. Written by Carlo Bernard and Doug Miro, “The Great Raid” depicts a successful U.S.-Filipino raid in early 1945 on a Japanese prisoner of war (POW) camp to free 500 American survivors of 1942’s infamous Bataan Death March. Based on the books  The Great Raid on Cabanatuan  by William Breuer and  Ghost Soldiers  by Hampton Sides, “The Great Raid” stars Benjamin Bratt, Connie Nielsen, James Franco, Joseph Fiennes, Marton Csokas, Motoki Kobayashi, Gotaro Tsunashima, Sam Worthington, and Dale Dye. “The Great Raid” starts on a gruesome note by depicting the massacre of American POWs by Japanese forces on the island of Palawan in late 1944. The Japanese were not signatories of the Geneva Convention on Prisoners of War, and their military code, called  Bushido,  taught Japanese soldiers

Back to Bataan: Not one of John Wayne's best WWII movies

One of the problems about making a movie an actual conflict while said conflict is still raging is that sometimes events on the ground tend to overtake the filmmakers’ production schedule, especially if the movie is set in a specific place where battles are being fought.  This is exactly what happened to producer Robert Fellows when he was making  Back to Bataan , a blend of action-adventure, wartime propaganda, and a not-so-subtle reminder to the American public that the Philippines wanted independence not only from their Japanese occupiers but also from their U.S. “protectors.”  Written by Ben Barzman (who was pro-Communist, as was director Edward Dmytryk), William Gordon, and Aeneas MacKenzie,  Back to Bataan  starred John Wayne as a U.S. Army colonel who stays on Luzon to help organize a U.S.-Filipino guerrilla group to fight the occupying Japanese forces and help pave the way for Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s long-promised return.  During the filming of  Back to Bataan,   which took 13