Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

This film always seemed schizophrenic to me.  Or rather, it's like three separate films in one.  The first is a cornball stateside wartime drama, the second an edge-of-your-seat action thriller, and the third a bleak, almost existential survival tale.  Of course, we're talking about "Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo," a fact-based film about the Doolittle Raid, the first American action that brought World War II to the Japanese homeland.  The script was based on the book of the same name by Ted Lawson, one of the Dootlittle Raiders and not coincidentally the main character in the film.  Both behind and in front of the camera, the film has an impressive pedigree and was instantly successful with audiences, but outside some stylistic choices and special effects, this was a time capsule of cliched Hollywood filmmaking that looks less and less worthy as time goes on.

Splitting the film into its three disparate parts, the most effective by far is the middle, or edge-of-your-seat thriller section.  This is the long sequence that portrays the raid itself, and it's effective because the director, Melvyn LeRoy, intersperses special effect shots with film footage taken on the actual raid.  This could have gone really wrong, but the special effects are credible enough, for its day, and the editing tight enough that the visual retelling doesn't lose any of its momentum.  Moreover, LeRoy makes great use of cockpit view shots as the planes fly low over the coast to their targets.  I don't know it this nose camera footage was taken during the actual raid, but the maneuvering to avoid treetops adds to the hair-raising tension.  There's also very little dialogue here.  Mostly, the only sound is the engines revved at full throttle, giving the audience a visceral sense of all that vibration and power.  As for the footage over Tokyo itself, as I said, the editing is seamless, so even if you can easily distinguish the documentary from the special effects footage, it's easy to give it a pass.  Incidentally, the best special effects were probably aboard the carrier portraying the takeoff beginning the mission.  As this was made in 1944, the US Navy couldn't spare any of its own carriers, so a mockup was built in a studio and the results are pretty great.

So what about these other two sections I mentioned, these disparate parts to the whole?  Unfortunately they come off worse, especially the first section.  I believe cornball was the word I used.  This stateside part of the drama, where the raiders are brought together for secret training in Florida, tries to let the presence of war do all its work for it.  The writer, Dalton Trumbo, feels little need to make his characters more than cardboard cutouts, with wartime worries about the girl back home and other trite cliches.  As a result, these characters never breath as real people.  They're merely stand-ins for the common experience, which is boring.

Cinematically, the photography in these early scenes is handsome but quaint.  The love scenes between Van Johnson's Lawson and his wife (Phyllis Thaxter) have a haloed shadow effect, giving the shots a timeless effect that feels forced.  The music doesn't help.  These scenes are scored exactly as you'd imagine a 1940s love scene with tender dialogue would be.  Quaint all up and down, much like the other characters who make up the flight wing.  In whole, this stateside section was like "From Here to Eternity" without the interesting parts.

Then there's the other bookend to the raid, the final survivalist section.  Since they had to take off earlier than expected after being spotted by a Japanese scout ship, the raiders were short of fuel when flying to their destinations in China.  Lawson's ship ran out of fuel right on the coast, and worse, was caught in a blinding rain storm.  I want to say crash-landed, but it was more crash than landed, though Lawson and his crew were able to wade ashore in the shallow surf.  However, except for Robert Walker's Corporal Thatcher, they were badly hurt.

The sequence exudes a sense of loss and hopelessness from the beginning as Lawson looks out at his broken, sinking plane and says, with the wind and rain beating his face, "I lost my ship.  I lost my ship."  What's a man without his ship?  What's more, what's a man without his use of arms and legs, which is the boat most of the crew are in.  Fortunately they get help from local Chinese fighters and begin their long trek to safety.  These scenes weren't terrible, but they were a bit of a missed opportunity.  The danger, the pain, the sacrifice of others on their behalf, was too sanitized and Hollywood, though they did show their beards growing out which is an ode to realism you don't often see.  Not terrible scenes, but not great, either.  Things were further undermined by Lawson's flashbacks of his wife back home.  In his wound-induced delirium (he'd eventually have his leg amputated), he'd be transported back to his wife with the same cornball dialogue and same cornball music.  These were not welcome intrusions.

So was this triteness the fault of the writing or the performances?  Well, the performances didn't help.  Spencer Tracy as Jimmy Doolittle isn't bad.  He doesn't have a whole lot to do and plays it straight as the pressed creases on his Army Air Corp slacks.  Van Johnson doesn't fare as well.  He'd later go on to be an effective everyman, but here he plays every moment so on the nose the cumulative effect is almost comical.  All the other flyers seem to be suffering from the same disease, or maybe direction, of hamming it up and overplaying all the obvious beats.  Only Robert Mitchum, as Lt. Bob Gray, seems to have failed to listen.  In this, one of his earliest roles, he plays it cool as a cucumber.  He seems to already have this acting thing figured out, thank you very much.

Phyllis Thaxter does okay as Lawson's wife, but I've never seen an eyelight so abused as with her.  An eyelight in cinematography is a light level with the eyes behind the camera, but not too bright to cause shadows or the actor's eyes to squint.  The effect is a small reflection in the eyes to make them stand out.  With Thaxter, the cinematographers give it to us in practically every shot, and not subtly, either.  That was one bright eyelight.

Curiously, the view of the raiders is portrayed as somewhat less than blood thirsty toward the Japanese.  Lawson and Gray have a conversation aboard the carrier when they're out to sea, and Lawson waxes about about his parents' Japanese gardener ("a nice little guy"--cringe).  They say they can't hate the Japanese, but if it comes down to it, it's either "we bomb them or they bomb us."  Additionally, Doolittle repeatedly gives these volunteers a chance to back out of the mission, saying if they have moral qualms about possibly killing civilians, no one would hold it against them.  No one takes him up on his offer, but I found it interesting knowing what would come less than a year after the film's release, where the US adopted a firebombing, and then an atomic, bombing policy that would deliberately target and kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.  It's hard to square the attitudes of this film, which were relatively restrained, with the massively homicidal actions in the last six months of the war.  It's like they're two different countries.