First Yank into Tokyo (1945)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

This film is almost camp in its sophomoric racism. As a member of a minority that has also experienced this kind of dehumanization at a time when this was not at all uncommon I think that this movie has value as an example of what generations ..even my own daughter will never believe unless they see it. I think we all need these movies in their uncut form as a reminder (embarrassing though it is to the filmmakers) of how dumb we can get with these kinds of issues. I speak as a minority and as a fellow brother to all of you reading this. This is not shocking and the Japanese I am sure have the self confidence (as does my minority group) to point at this as a laughable example of white racism in its most childish form. It does not inspire hate for the whites who made it ...it inspires incredulity and empathy in me personally because it is truly embarrassing. I am sure it is the whites who would most like to eradicate this film and forget they (or the few who believed this) ever exhibited this kind of insipid point of view. It was an emotional time. Sometimes emotions make us say and think stupid things. This movie is an example.

During World War II, Hollywood tried everything to boost the morale on the homefront. Some films were great, but other films reached into the bottom of the barrel especially this one. This has got to be one of the most racist films in the history of the medium. What especially was disturbing were lines like "You all should be put in cages", the film makes it seem like that they are trying to portray the Japanese were less than human. I don't mind movies that try to boost morale, but there is no place for racism in the movies.

I agree that a movie -- or almost any other cultural artifact -- should be judged on the basis of the times and circumstances of its production. It's unfair to judge what people have done in the past through the prism of our own prevailing prejudices. Barbara Field, the African-American historian, was critical of Lincoln's deciding to wait until after Antietam to announce the emancipation of slaves -- this in Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War. That sort of statement has always irritated me, brimming over with self righteousness. (I wonder how historians will judge us a hundred years from now. I hope they're kinder to us.) So I am willing to take the temporal context into account. The simple fact is that a movie that humanized the enemy would not have been made in 1945 -- or for years afterward for that matter. Steinbeck's script for "The Moon is Down" was criticized for turning a German soldier into something resembling a human being. And in "The Desert Fox" (ca. 1950) James Mason's touching performance as Erwin Rommel was blasted. In the later "The Desert Rats," playing Rommel again, Mason was forced to resort to the usual stereotype. How would you feel if you now saw a movie that included a partly sympathetic portrayal of a member of Al Qeda? Given all that, this movie is pretty crummy. The crumminess is not only in the script, although it's certainly there too, but especially in the performances, and most notably in Tom Neal's. He was out of his depth, although the part was simple enough. (He was IN his depth in "Detour".) He doesn't even get the Japanese bow right. The bow is face down, smart and snappy, in real military life. Neal bows slowly from the hips down, keeping his face up all the time, as if involved in some particularly outre tai ji exercise. The make up job is astonishing. And his speech! He evidently has a set of false teeth (all Japs are buck-toothed) which make him sound as if he's speaking through a mouth full of tooth paste. On top of that he struggles desperately to impose a "Japanese" accent which consists mostly of substituting [r] for [l] and vice versa. Let's just say he speaks his lines memorably. Sure it's a racist movie, but it WAS wartime, and it's understandable -- a lot more understandable than rounding up Japanese-American families and shuffling them off to internment camps. THAT manifestation of racism is less justifiable. But the movie is pretty bad nonetheless, unless you can enjoy it as pozlost.

This movie was so convincing, it might be difficult to watch. The acting was so real you can feel the hatred. I've watched it several times. I was disappointed at the ending, because Major Ross (Ton Neal) and Abby Drake (Barbara Hale) almost reunited. But Major Ross felt that his "changed appearance" would get in the way of their life. He forgot that if he had plastic surgery to change his appearance then he could change it again (just not the way it was before).