It pays to lend a fictitious touch

Hollywood recreates the events at ``Pearl Harbor'' which shattered American complacence 60 years ago. ANAND PARTHASARATHY weighs its visual pyrotechnics against the emotional drama and documentary realism of earlier treatments.

THE ACTUAL airborne attack launched by Japan against the sleepy American military base at Pearl Harbour in Hawaii, lasted just over two hours, destroying virtually the entire U.S. fleet moored in the harbour, and leaving over 2,000 dead. A rudely shaken U.S. President Roosevelt was to dub it ``a date that will forever live in infamy'' - and till Vietnam in 1975, it was to remain the most traumatic military reverse in U.S. military history.

Why would any one want to replay the event, six decades later? Jerry Bruckheimer - for one. Hollywood's ``Mr Bang'' is a producer known for noisy explosion-filled entertainers - from the aerial hijack drama ``Conair'' to last year's cult car chase movie ``Gone in Sixty Seconds''. And team him with Director Michael Bay - a past collaborator on such high octane products like the Sean Connery-Nicholas Cage actioner ``The Rock'' and the Bruce Willis Outer Space calamity drama ``Armageddon'' - and you have the most lethal combo today, of the ``more-action-for-your- money school of film making.''

Not surprisingly, critics have concentrated their superlatives on the central 80 minutes of ``Pearl Harbor'' which recreate the actual attack, a sequence, that ``for sheer, eye-popping spectacle'', according to the BBC, ``makes `Titanic' look like a kiddies' bath toy''. If you have to show visceral battle sequences these days, you will end up being compared to what Steven Spielberg achieved in the first half hour of ``Saving Private Ryan''. Bay is aware of this - which is why he spent a major chunk of his $135-million budget in a skilled marriage of computer-effects and real action that allows you to feel the heat of the attack... to ``ride'' a bomb all the way from the Zero fighter plane that launches it, till it hits its target, a huge aircraft carrier. Cynics have commented that the Bay- Bruckheimer recreation spent more money than the Japanese did on the actual attack.

But what do you do for the rest of the three hours? You preface the central attraction with a romance a la ``Titanic''; in fact you go one better and make it a very Hindi-filmi triangle: ace pilots Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) are childhood comrades. Rafe's girl friend is a nurse, Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), who ``fixes'' his eye test so that he can serve his country by flying with America's allies during the Battle of Britain. While he goes missing in action, his girl and buddy, find themselves posted to Hawaii and take up with each other. But `fun in the sun' it is not - for one thing, Rafe returns, very much alive. Before a bar room brawl can settle the romantic tangle, the Japanese come visiting... this is mawkish soap - soppy even by the standards of plot making during the film's setting, the early 1940s. Randall Wallace, the script writer whose lines sound so rousing when spoken by Mel Gibson, in ''Braveheart``, here provides a catalogue of banal cliches.

To end a film showing America as the loser in a battle, is apparently bad box office. So the makers have stapled a last act, showing our two heroes, now reconciled, joining the real life Col. Jimmy Doolittle in an air raid on Tokyo that took place almost a year later - in April 1942.

U.S. reviewers have been somewhat unkind to these passages. Variety, the film industry daily, pans the film's ``standard issue inspirational cliches'' which are ``played out from here, to what seems like eternity''. The allusion is to the classic of yesteryear that recreated the attack on Pearl Harbour, the eight- Oscar-winning 1953 film based on the James Jones's bestseller ``From Here to Eternity''.

The film was a sanitised version of a novel that severely indicted the U.S. military establishment of the day - brutal, racially prejudiced and ill-prepared for combat. But enough fireworks remained in Fred Zinnemann's direction, and the central characters were sharply recreated with an ensemble cast of Hollywood's best: Burt Lancaster is the good hearted Sergeant Milton Warden, who tries to shield the sensitive soldier Robert ``Prew'' Prewitt (Montgomery Clift) from the excesses of their commander, Captain Holmes, even while carrying on a torrid and danger-filled romance with the captain's repressed wife Karen (Deborah Kerr).

Frank Sinatra who had lost his singing voice made an acting comeback as the happy-go-lucky, Pvt. Angelo Maggio, who finally dies after being brutalised by the sadistic Sgt. ``Fatso'' Judson ( Ernest Borgnine). Donna Reed plays the archetype ``whore with a heart of gold'' who is wooed by the star-crossed ``Prew''.

It was an unforgettable portrait of fighting men and their women, under stress, with (for its day) a frank and daring depiction of taboo subjects: military injustice, corruption, alcoholism, adultery, murder. The melodrama merges seamlessly into action when the Japanese attack is launched with the final and tragic death of the Clift character, woven into the aftermath of the attack. The film won supporting acting awards for Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed, as well as the Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay (Daniel Taradash).

Interestingly ``From Here to Eternity'' was made by the same company - Columbia - that is distributing today's Disney production ``Pearl Harbor'', in India. When the critic of The Washington Post saw the new film, he wrote: ``Perhaps they should have called it `Bore-a, Bore-a, Bore-a'!'' He was recalling the other film dating back to 1970, which recreated the events of Pearl Harbour, the Japanese-American production, ``Tora! Tora! Tora!'' (Tora is Japanese for `attack'). The film was co-directed by American Richard Fleischer and a trio of Japanese led by Toshio Masuda, with a dual perspective on events that was almost military in its precision. In their quest for documentary realism and even handedness, the film's makers created almost half its sound track in Japanese with English subtitles (at some Indian centres, the film was shown without the subtitles - making it impossible to follow the skilled planning of Admiral Yamamoto (Soh Yamamura) and leading to boos and catcalls in many theatres). Top American officers of the Army and Navy were played by veteran actors, Martin Balsam, Jason Robards and Joseph Cotten. In contrast, the new re-creation eschews big-name actors. ``Tora! Tora! Tora!'' was no match for today's computer enhanced visual spectacle - though its solitary Oscar was for Best Special Effects; yet it won critical plaudits for that Hollywood rarity - honest film-making which placed reality above fictional demands. But to an Indian audience it was mostly boring and uninvolving stuff.

If you could take your pick, which film would you choose to see a second time? ``From Here to Eternity'', where Pearl Harbour is a background nothing more, to the steamy and realistic story line? The earnest semi-documentary ``Tora! Tora! Tora!'', which has no time to spare for personal anecdotes real or fictional? Or today's flag waving opus, ``Pearl Harbor'', which tries to hedge its bets, piling on the special effect blasts; ladling in the romance - then tagging on a happy ending to a notably unhappy episode in history? Critics might carp; but today's audiences might just plump for today's spectacular version of the Truth According to Hollywood.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Entertainment
Previous : Plans that worked to perfection
Next     : Vintage music from Krishnan's violin