Tora! Tora! Tora!

D: Richard Fleischer, Toshio Masuda & Kinji Fukasaku

20th Century Fox / Toei (Elmo Williams)

US/Japan 🇺🇸🇯🇵 1970

144 mins

War/Drama

W: Larry Forrester, Hideo Oguni & Ryūzō Kikushima [based on the novels ‘Tora! Tora! Tora!’ by Gordon W. Prange & ‘The Broken Seal’ by Ladislas Farago]

DP: Charles F. Wheeler, Shinsaku Himeda,  Masamichi Satoh & Osamu Furuya

Ed: James E. Newcom, Pembroke J. Herring & Inoue Chikaya

Mus: Jerry Goldsmith

PD: Richard Day, Taizoh Kawashima, Yoshiro Muraki & Jack Martin Smith

Martin Balsam (Adm. Husband E. Kimmel), Joseph Cotten (Sec. Henry Stinton), James Whitmore (Vice Adm. William Halsey, Jr.), Jason Robards (Maj. Gen. Walter Short), Sō Yamamura (Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto)

Tora! Tora! Tora! is a dramatisation of the events building up to and during the 1941 Pearl Harbor attack, told from both the American and Japanese perspectives.

From a technical standpoint, this is arguably the best film when it comes to recreating the attack that led to the USA’s involvement into the Second World War, which is of huge credit to the cinematographers, production designers and visual effects crew that worked on the production, especially the latter who took home the Oscar for 1970’s Best Special Visual Effects.

The cast also boasts a huge ensemble of excellent character actors from both sides of the Pacific, and everyone does an immaculate job.  However, framing the film from both sides of the divide without any political bias or racial prejudice does leave the film without any protagonist, or indeed an antagonist, which may have been by design, but makes this entire film more of a docudrama than a rousing war adventure.

Nevertheless, it’s a great deal better than what Michael Bay did with 2001’s Pearl Harbor, though I’d still consider 1953’s From Here To Eternity as the best film to feature the same historic event as its backdrop. 

Akira Kurosawa did some uncredited work on both the screenplay and direction of the Japanese sequences, which make up the better part of the movie in both style and substance.

An iconic war movie from the early 70s and the 144 minute running time absolutely flies by.

7/10