go for broke!

June 16 movie: Go for Broke! 1950 movie about an all-Japanese unit who fought in Italy and France during WWII. The movie starred Van Johnson as a racist officer who initially resents being put in command of, um, well he uses a word that I won't use on my blog. As the movie goes on he comes to know the men and learns to respect them.

At some point I realized that I had seen this movie a long time ago. I recognized two scenes: one of the Japanese soldiers adopts a pig and keeps it as a pet, and a battle scene where one man is way in the back firing some kind of rocket launcher on a little stand, and the men in the front call back to him, "Fifty feet to the right! Now thirty feet forward!" Bizarrely, I don't remember noticing first time around that all the soldiers were Japanese. I just remembered it as a war movie, not "an all-Japanese war movie."

This was good, an entertaining ensemble with a good proportion of comedy and drama. If it were made today it would come off as a bit preachy, especially when they're talking about the internment camps. But it was made just a few years after the camps existed, and many Americans didn't even know what had happened, so I think the tone was warranted.

(Then again, though it boggles the mind there are some in America today actually arguing in favor of the WWII internment camps. So maybe a little preaching on why it's wrong to imprison an entire class of American citizens based purely on their ancestry wouldn't be uncalled for.)