Fighting the good fight

Like 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'The Patriot,' 'Pearl Harbor' marks the return of the noble war film.

May 19, 2001

Stories by STEPHEN LYNCH
The Orange County Register

None of the main characters in "Tora! Tora! Tora!" the 1970 big-budget account of Pearl Harbor, dies, but no one emerges unscathed, either. The Americans, shamed by the surprise attack, mope about and mourn the destruction. The Japanese, realizing that their declaration of war arrived after the bombing, fret as well. "I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve," Adm. Isoroku Yamamoto says.

This Friday, another extravagant film about the Japanese attack arrives. But with 30 years gone by, and audience sensibilities changed, "Pearl Harbor" will have little of the ambiguity of "Tora! Tora! Tora!"

Where "Tora" was somber, "Harbor" is melodramatic. Where the former focused on our defeat, the latter refers to the raid as "the dawn of our greatest hour."

Instead of the foreboding "sleeping giant" ending, "Pearl Harbor" showcases President Franklin D. Roosevelt's famous call to arms, the "date which will live in infamy" address.

"Pearl Harbor" is a return to the kind of war movie that hasn't been made much since before 1970 - the patriotic, valiant epic. Along with "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Patriot," it is reviving a genre that for three decades dealt mostly with the horrors of war, not its heroes.

This being a more politically correct world, of course, this new breed of "fighting the good fight" movies are not as black and white as their predecessors. "Saving Private Ryan" demonstrated the horrors of the Normandy invasion along with the valor. And as Michael Bay, the director of "Pearl Harbor," says, one could not make a World War II movie today that portrays the Japanese with the same cartoonish stereotypes as period films.

"We show it for what it was, a brilliant raid by the Japanese," says Bay, speaking by phone from Hawaii. "This is a movie that shows that war is hell. The attack is a fact of life. This is what happened. We treated (the Japanese) with much respect and courage, just like the Americans in the movie."

A HERO'S WELCOME

What is missing from "Pearl Harbor," though, is the mood - prevalent in so many war films of the '70s and '80s - that battle is futile and bleak. Part of this is because of the clear-cut motives and morals during World War II. It is a story of the "greatest generation" that people seem eager to celebrate today.

But younger generations also have not lived through a controversial war like Vietnam and aren't as cynical about unabashedly patriotic messages. Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, who wrote a book called "Reel Patriotism: The Movies and World War I," says this is usually the case.

Attitudes toward war in society are cyclical. Films made by veterans tend to be more realistic and dark. Given time, the pendulum swings back to noble - especially for those who have never fought themselves.

"You saw it after World War I. Many of the films asked, 'Why did America get into the war?' A bitterness sets in," says DeBauche, a professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. "This goes on until the end of the 1930s and early 1940s."

At that point, DeBauche adds, America is on the verge of joining World War II. And the first step, from a sociological point of view, is redeeming the last war. "Sergeant York," in which Gary Cooper plays a pacifist turned World War I hero, does a fine job of that in 1941.

Some of this was dictated by the U.S. government, which leaned on Hollywood to release positive portrayals of the military during World War II, editing scripts to make films into recruitment propaganda. But many films, including John Wayne's gallant war stories of the 1950s and '60s, simply played to a nation high off the victory. And most of the "evil Kaiser" movies released during World War I were either born of individual ideology or Hollywood's attempt to self-censor to keep out government hands, DeBauche says.

A turning point for war films comes in 1970, as the nation becomes more disillusioned with the conflicts in both Korea and Vietnam. The Best Picture Oscar that year went to "Patton," one of the last of the World War II epics and one that showcased an officer far more complex than most Wayne adventures. "Tora! Tora! Tora!" was a joint Japanese-American production. And "M*A*S*H," a comedy set in Korea, shows a complete disregard - disdain, even - for military hierarchy and custom.

Things only get more dire for the war genre from there. Films like "The Green Berets" - Wayne's attempt to do a heroic Vietnam picture, in 1968 - begin to look more and more anachronistic as anti-war sentiment rises, and existential films such as "The Deer Hunter" and "Apocalypse Now" become the day's reigning military pictures.

'PLATOON' to 'PRIVATE RYAN'

It was shortly after this that Dale Dye, a retired Marine Corps captain, began looking for a new job. A Vietnam veteran and movie fan, he decided to go into consulting, because every war film he saw angered him. "It didn't reflect my own experience," he says. "The kind of people I knew were bright people - all I saw were toothless Southern crackers and corrupt lieutenants."

Dye didn't have much luck convincing Hollywood, until he met with Oliver Stone, and collaborated on a movie called "Platoon," in 1986. The film was acclaimed for its realistic portrayal of war (especially compared with something like "Rambo," which was released the year before), and Dye says it was hard for directors to go back.

"People are so media savvy these days that you can't deliver something untrue," he says. "They see Kosovo on the news, and they know what war looks like."

Dye has worked on two dozen war movies since then, including "Casualties of War" and "Rules of Engagement." Most of the war films that came out during the '80s and early '90s were about Vietnam and mostly reinforced the idea that war is hellish and wrong.

That is, until "Saving Private Ryan," director Steven Spielberg's homage to his parents' generation. "Ryan" combined the realism of combat allowed by computer technology and audiences' tastes with a more old-fashioned tale of war.

There was a rush after "Ryan" to return to World War II, and not all of it was good, Dye says. "Studio executives want something with a real strong American hook," he says. "So they end up inserting something ridiculous, like we captured the Enigma machine (as was shown in 'U-571')."

And Dye also feels that efforts to "modernize" stories sometimes lead to dishonesty. Making sure no one in "Pearl Harbor" uses a racist slur for a Japanese person "sort of reconstructs history. If they are so concerned about selling the movie in Japan they probably shouldn't be making the movie." This works both ways, however: Critics panned "The Patriot" for trying to make the British more evil than they were for the sake of drama.

Dye does hope, however, that the current appetite for noble war pictures leads to re-examination of other conflicts: "We need a good Korea movie. And we could still look at World War I."

Jerry Bruckheimer, producer of "Pearl Harbor," says even Vietnam is open for reinterpretation. Done right, a noble, if tragic, film can be made about that war.

"There are thousands, millions of stories," Dye says. "There is a constant market for war movies, because they run the gamut of human emotions. And you can't do that in any other film."

Staff writer Barry Koltnow contributed to this report.