Very disappointing...

The Age of Commercialism

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

My Father, LCDR Frank Bernard Quady, USN, was killed aboard the USS Bunker Hill by a double kamikaze attack. For my Father, I say this movie was so bad I quit about half an hour into it.The guy who played the sailor with the cap pulled down ridiculously was absolutely disgusting. No sailor would wear his cap on like that except possibly at home cleaning out the gutters.Note: This guy was the "star" of the film – the part that I watched. I couldn't force myself to watch any more.I grew up in the '50s in Coronado, CA and this movie never played there, as far as I know. I never heard of this flick.I'll have to rent it sometime and watch only the official U.S. Navy footage, fast forwarding past the stupid sailor, whoever he is or was.I didn't see any U.S. Naval personnel listed as advisers. They surely would have nixed it.One more thing about the stupid sailor. He was a disgrace to all sailors. Sailors are the heart of the Navy.

I don't get the hate for this movie. It's not cheap, it's deliberately small, focused and about as emotionally involved as you can get with a small crew of men acting in a 1940s way. I almost wish we hadn't had the bridge scenes with the command crew, and had to entirely take it from the point of view of the gun crew. That's how history happens; people go about their little part, and get these rare little views of the big action. I was unusually not disturbed by the cookie cutter characters. We rarely see how they really are, but instead get their public face, to their crewmen while at war. People fall into bravado and storytelling just like this. There were moments of doubt and fear that showed this off I think, very well. Stock footage, sure. But only rarely did I notice the grain mismatching, and they spent an awful lot of effort to make it blend into the narrative. My favorite of these is about 50 minutes in when one of the characters grabs onto a fitting on the gun to lean out and look at a heavily damaged passing ship. They did this because in the foreground of the stock footage is a sailor doing just that. It brought the stock into the story, and is such unseen stock of such specific damage you could never have simulated it with new footage, especially in the 50s. I was especially pleased with the sets. I guess they are sets due to lighting and so on, but the interior of the gun mount looks absolutely perfect and realistic, and absolutely unexpectedly so. It really helped with the verisimilitude of the whole endeavor.

The battle for Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands just south of Japan, trailing off Kyushu like a jet stream was the final battle of World War II in the Pacific. Commanding the Navy Task Force was Raymond Spruance the victor at Midway and it was the largest flotilla ever put together, over 1500 ships. Not to mention the Army and Marine forces who did the fighting on land. As this was Japan's back door so to speak they fought with ferocious intensity with full use of the Kamikaze suicide planes.The story of Okinawa needed an epic film like The Longest Day. Instead we got a hastily put together film with a lot of cliché stock characters from war films of the era. Pat O'Brien stars as the skipper of the destroyer on which this film's story is told and Richard Denning is his executive officer.They may be top billed but O'Brien and Denning take second place in screen time to the crew of one of the naval guns on the destroyer. The crew consists of Rhys Williams, Richard Benedict, James Dobson and Cameron Mitchell who dumbed down his command of the English language to the level of Leo Gorcey. The crew is mostly sitting around waiting for the Kamikaze attacks which they know will come.Okinawa is not a horribly bad film, but with an epic title like that it sure falls short of the mark. The Army, Navy, and Marines who fought there deserved something much better.

I don't want to carry on too long about this shoddy film because it isn't worth it. Okinawa was an important objective towards the end of the Pacific War, a sizable island intended for use as a staging area for the invasion of Japan. It was a terrible battle fought under terrible conditions. Mud was everywhere, and civilians died by the thousands. It was one of the few battles in which the Navy suffered greater casualties than the Army and Marines ashore. The main reason for the difference lay in the first massive use of suicide airplanes, loaded with explosives, called Kamikazes. They managed to sink or put out of action more than 33 American ships as well as some others belonging to Allied forces. And they inflicted damage on still more. About 6,000 naval officers and men were casualties.This movie exploits the Battle of Okinawa. We watch a destroyer attacked by flights of Kamikazes every once in a while, in between long sessions of the usual minor conflicts and bantering of the crew. The bantering sounds more desperate than funny. The overall impression is that someone realized that a good deal of footage of the attacks had recently been released but not yet used in a feature film. So a few dumb clichés were slapped together to build a framing story in which the newsreel footage could be interpolated.I was disappointed -- almost ashamed -- when I saw this the first time, about twenty years ago. I've watched it again since then and it hasn't improved. It's an insult to the men, women, and children who were involved.