September 28 movie: 30 Seconds Over Tokyo. I think I've mentioned before how much I love this, a dramatization of Doolittle's famous air raid on Tokyo. It may be my favorite war movie. Spencer Tracy stars as Jimmy Doolittle but he's actually not in the movie that much. The story focuses on one bomber squad, led by pilot Van Johnson, and follows them from volunteering for the mission, through training, the attack, crash landing in occupied China, their rescue by Chinese rebels and escape from the Japanese. I guess I just gave the movie away but come on, it's a (fictionalized) true story.
While I'm giving things away I'll mention one of my favorite scenes: the Chinese have to amputate Van Johnson's leg and the anaesthesia wears off in mid-procedure. Johnson falls into a delirium in which he hallucinates talking on the phone with his wife, while in the background two men cut down a tree with one of those giant two-handled saws. It sounds like a cheap, gross laugh, but the way they do it is creepy and surreal and highly effective.
Robert Walker is in the movie also. There's something strange and sad about him that always makes me feel sympathy for his characters. You just want to hug him and bake him a pie to make him feel better. Robert Mitchum (who does not inspire feelings of pie-baking) also has a very small part as the pilot of another plane.
5 Comments
"It may be my favorite war movie."
Wow--that's quite a recommendation, considering the phrase "war movie" includes films like Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, Three Kings, and Kelly's Heroes.
Well, I wrote that a few days after watching it -- I'm sure I'd feel differently on a different day. Although I must say, of your list I've never seen Kelly's Heroes, didn't think of Lawrence of Arabia as a war movie, and am not that crazy about Apocalypse Now. But Three Kings, that's a tough one. Between Three Kings and 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, I don't think I could pick a favorite. They're so different.
I thought about it some more and "favorite" is maybe a bad term. What does it mean anyway? If it means "best, highest quality" then 30 Seconds Over Tokyo might not be on the list, but Three Kings definitely would.
If it means "movies I'd happily watch over and over" then 30 Seconds Over Tokyo is among a short list that also includes Stalag 17, Since You Went Away, The Great Escape, and that's just off the top of my head.
Then there's the "favorite post-war movie" which would be a toss-up between The Best Years Of Our Lives and I Was a Male War Bride.
I can't even definitively call 30 Seconds over Tokyo my favorite war movie made during the war in which it's set, because Since You Went Away was also made during the war. Assigning favorites is too much pressure!
30 Seconds is my favorite. With the camera in the bombadier's cockpit shooting ahead as that beautiful plane screams toward Tokyo, dipping and rising, I get chills everytime I watch it. I would watch this movie just for those scenes.
Hi Roger, I love this movie too! Did you watch it on TCM today?