If finding convincing foreign actors was not easy in California, it was even harder in Japan. Hollywood could have done better but too few people cared. Japanese soldiers were usually played by an assortment of Asian-Americans who shouted a few words in barely comprehensible Japanese. It was hard in Hollywood, until recently, to find enough competent actors to play Japanese roles (or Vietnamese for that matter). There are reasons for this lack of enemy characters, both practical and propagandistic. We see historic figures barking orders on the bridges of aircraft carriers and the odd Japanese pilot baring his teeth as he approaches the USS Arizona, but there is no time in the midst of all the gunfire for intimacy. Then there are the epic battle films, such as Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), about the attack on Pearl Harbor, jointly directed by an American (Richard Fleischer) and two Japanese (Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda). And even the exceptions tend to fall into familiar types: the bumbling or sinister German, hissing about ways to make you talk, the loud, crass American, the snarling Japanese.Ĭolonel Saito, the camp commander in The Bridge on the River Kwai(1957), played by Sessue Hayakawa, shows some personal qualities, but they still fall within the well-trodden domain of the stoic samurai, growling his way to the inevitable ritual suicide. What is missing, with rare exceptions, is any sense of individual difference, of character, of humanity in the enemy. They are there, in the way Indians were there in old westerns, as fodder for the guns on our side, screaming Banzai! or Achtung! or Come on! before falling to the ground in heaps. Tales From Iwo Jima is released in UK cinemas on Friday 23rd February 2007.A common factor in conventional war movies, whether they are made by Americans, Europeans, or Asians, is the lack of visible enemies. Put the two films together and you get an involving wartime epic that also serves as an indictment of the lies governments will tell to keep their soldiers fighting. Caught in the middle of this conflict are the frightened grunts, who mostly just want to get home to their wives.Įastwood directs his performers with great skill, and brings a weary, astringent eye to the carnage that unfolds on Iwo Jima's blackened sands. Wanatabe's commanding officer is a trained strategist, but he is frustrated by his officers, who will commit suicide by hand grenade at the drop of a hat, thus damaging the army's already slim chance of victory against the US.
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What we get, in this long, sober and sad movie, is a bitter conflict between modern warfare and an enshrined ideology that regards dying in battle as an honourable sacrifice. It's a better movie for that, as well as the decision to play everything in Japanese with English subtitles.
![letters from iwo jima movie review letters from iwo jima movie review](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/TYHWGD/actor-director-clint-eastwood-whose-movie-letters-from-iwo-jima-won-best-film-chats-with-actor-forest-whitaker-left-who-won-the-best-actor-award-for-his-work-in-film-the-last-king-of-scotland-at-the-2006-national-board-of-review-award-ceremonies-held-in-new-york-on-january-9-2007-whitaker-wife-looks-on-upi-photoezio-petersen-TYHWGD.jpg)
Where Flags of our Fathers dealt with the public relations story behind Iwo Jima, Letters is more closely focussed on the battle itself, and leaves the island only in a few brief flashbacks.
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Returning to the pivotal second world war battle, this time from a Japanese perspective, Eastwood has fashioned a quietly powerful indictment of the war's wanton waste, and anchored it with a fearsome performance from Ken Wanatabe.
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This is the second of Clint Eastwood's double bill of films about Iwo Jima, although the tone and colour palette is so similar to last year's Flags Of Our Fathers that it could easily be the second half of the same movie.