Product: Midway (Collector's Edition) (1976)
Rating: 4.0
An All-Star Look At THE Pivotal Battle Of The Pacific
As the Japanese had feared, the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 had awakened a once-sleeping giant in America. But in the six months that followed the attack, the Americans were still at a disadvantage. Then came the June 4-6, 1942 Battle Of Midway. That battle is depicted here in MIDWAY, one of the biggest box office hits of 1976, even though it was roasted by more than a few critics.Structured much like past all-star World War II opuses, especially THE LONGEST DAY, BATTLE OF THE BULGE, and TORA! TORA! TORA!, MIDWAY dramatizes how American intelligence got wind of the Japanese Navy's plans. By letting it get out over the air that the water condenser on the island of Midway, a small atoll at the far northwestern end of the Hawaiian Island chain, some 1200 miles from Pearl Harbor itself, was down, the American Navy planned to ambush the Japanese and make a stand by huddling a somewhat depleted force of carriers and planes in reserve to the northeast of the island. The risk in this ambush was that it could leave the Aleutian Islands and Alaska, and possibly even Hawaii and the mainland West Coast, wide open for invasion if it failed. As it turned out, of course, the decision by Admiral Chester Nimitz (portrayed by Henry Fonda) was the correct one; and the Japanese were caught completely off guard, suffering the most crippling defeat of the war. Prior to Midway, the Japanese never lost a single battle in the Pacific; after it, however, they never did any better than a draw; and it was a three-year road towards the atomic horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Amongst this dramatization of one of the great battles of World War II, MIDWAY inevitably draws in a subplot of sorts that may or may not have actually existed: a love affair between the pilot son (Edward Albert) of a senior officer (Charlton Heston) of the U.S. Navy, and a Japanese-American woman (Christina Kokubo) that he has just met, and whose parents have been interred at Pearl Harbor simply because they are Japanese. This particular element was one of the things many critics, quite mercilessly, slammed the film for. In the end, however, it is a minor distraction from the actual lead-up to the battle; and MIDWAY, like TORA! TORA! TORA! before it, gives equal credit to the Japanese and their revered admiral Yamamoto (Toshiro Mifune), this even though the dubbing of some of the Japanese actors' voices (Mifune's is dubbed by Paul Frees) is somewhat dangerously close to being laughable. Robert Mitchum has a walk-on (or, in this case, in-bed) cameo as Admiral Halsey, who was unfortunately laid up in the hospital during the period of Midway due to a bad case of the shingles.While some of the special effects shots must seem painfully dated in the age of CGI (indeed, some of the footage is also taken from the 1944 film THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO), MIDWAY nevertheless does a very good job of things, and thankfully is not a huge hunk of gung-ho John Wayne theatrics. The film's all-star cast also includes Hal Holbrook (ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN), Cliff Robertson (CHARLY), Robert Webber (12 ANGRY MEN), Robert Wagner, Monte Markham, Ed Nelson, James Shigeta, Clyde Kusatsu, Kip Niven, Erik Estrada, and many others. Most of them largely have walk-on cameos, as is traditional with many World War II and 1970s disaster films, so the major focus of the film is on the planning on both sides for how the Battle of Midway will play out. Jack Smight, who helmed films like HARPER and AIRPORT 1975, directs the film largely unobtrusively, letting the cast, including Heston, Fonda, and Mitchum, get on with the business of acting.As it has often been pointed out, accurately, the Battle of Midway, if it had ended in defeat for the U.S., would perhaps have been the beginning of the end of America as a nation, and led not only to the Japanese takeover of the Pacific, but the takeover of all of Europe by Nazi Germany, since the 1944 D-Day landings wouldn't have occurred. The fact that America's winning of that battle off of Midway was the result of risk-taking was important, however, in that it gave the U.S. the advantage it needed to win the war in the Pacific, and did so by stealth. Despite its melodramatic interludes in Donald S. Sanford's screenplay, MIDWAY is a fairly accurate portrayal of those three days in the late spring of 1942 that turned the tide in America's favor. John Williams' superb martial music score, one of the few he has ever done, is the icing on the cake of MIDWAY, one of the most tragically undervalued war films of any kind in any era.