Hell to Eternity

Plot synopsis:
In Depression-era Los Angeles, Guy Gabaldon gets into a fight at school when another boy snitches about his breaking into a grocery store. After Japanese-American Kaz Uni (the brother of Guy's friend George) finds out Guy's mother is in the hospital and his father is dead, he invites Guy to stay with his family. As Kaz's parents speak little English, Guy begins to learn Japanese. Then, when Guy's mother dies, the Unis adopt him. He becomes especially close to Kaz's mother.
After the attack on Pearl Harbor and the US entry into World War II, Gabaldon's foster family is sent to an internment camp: Camp Manzanar. Gabaldon is drafted, but fails his physical exam due to a perforated eardrum. When Gabaldon goes to visit the Unis, he learns that George has been allowed to join the Army and is fighting in Italy. After making sure that "mama-san" does not object, he manages to enlist in the Marines on the strength of his language skills.
Gabaldon does not make a good first impression on S/Sgt. Bill Hazen at Camp Pendleton, but wins him over. When they are shipped to Hawaii to join the 2nd Marine Division, he gets himself, Hazen and Cpl. Pete Lewis bottles of whiskey and dates with two Japanese-American women and standoffish reporter Sheila Lincoln. Sheila is disgusted by the behavior of the rowdy Marines, but eventually warms up to Gabaldon after a few drinks.
Going ashore on Saipan, he freezes at first when he comes under fire for the first time, but regains his composure. During a Banzai charge, Lewis is killed, and later during the bloody campaign for the island, Hazen is shot in the leg and then killed by a Japanese swordsman. Gabaldon then gets mad and starts killing Japanese soldiers ruthlessly, but after he sees two civilians kill themselves, he remembers George and "mama-san" and changes back to the way he was. During the final battle, he convinces the Japanese general to order approximately 1000 Japanese soldiers and 500 civilians to surrender.

Tags: revenge, depressing

Review:
World War II hero Guy Gabaldon's story could hardly have been entrusted to a more suitable director than Phil Karlson.
Operating as usual on a less-than-A budget, Karlson nonetheless makes the most out of every scene and elicits excellent performances from his cast.Hell to Eternity is by far the most violent war film made up to that time.
In terms of its violence and sexual content, Hell to Eternity probably went as far as the censors would allow in 1960.As Gabaldon, Jeffrey Hunter gives a performance of great sympathy, but also one of considerable edge in his battle scenes.
The fact that Hunter made King of Kings only one year after this film and also offered diverse characterizations in Key Witness and Sergeant Rutledge the same year as Hell to Eternity is a testament to his versatility as an actor.Leith Stevens provides an outstanding dramatic score, which unfortunately was poorly represented by the soundtrack album, which contained mainly his jazz-oriented incidental music.The lower-than-A budget for this film more than likely accounts for it not being better known.
.. A great war/personal true story, as previously commented, about a Mexican-American young man from Boyle Heights (just east of Los Angeles) CA., who worked close with the migrant Japanese-American workers and learned to speak Japanese.
"Hell to Eternity" represents a true story of spiritual development in an individual involved in a spiritual conflict from the beginning of the film to it's conclusion.
It depicts a real person, Guy Gabaldon, who was raised in California by a Japanese family and his reluctance to kill the Japanese enemy in WWII, a hardening of his heart and a means of reconciliation that borders on miraculous.
This is a great war film without the impact of Audie Murphy's story in "To Hell and Back" (1955) only because that film starred the hero that wrote the book about his personal exploits.
The movie "Hell to Eternity" still stands out as a great biography of an American hero, Guy Gabaldon!.
Guy described himself as "swarthy." In addition, there is a scene where the mamasan, in order to distinguish him from her Japanese grandchildren, refers to Guy as her "All American son." I once saw the movie on the History Channel.
The historian briefly answered that the movie was focused on the treatment of Japanese Americans during WW II and that Guy's ethnicity would have distracted from that.
Fortunately, even thought the movie takes some liberties with the truth about the life of Guy and his life, the more important moral messages about war, human emotions, race relations and the Japanese Internment controversies more than make up for these inaccuracies.
David Janssen and Vic Damone stand out in my memory and Jeffrey Hunter was always a class act in films.
Good looking Jeffrey Hunter, plays Guy Gabaldon who was raised by a Japanese foster family.
Gabaldon, turned down by his own draft board, nevertheless, joins the Marines and meets two close friends, played by David Janssen and Vic Damone.
Interestingly enough, Guy Gabaldon risks life and limb, saving the lives of thousands of America soldiers and Japanese civilians, yet fails to be nominated for the Medal of Honor.
The goal was to get the Japanese to surrender.Years later, Gabaldon called his actions foolish, but back then he had reasons to believe he would succeed.Many years before, in Boyle Heights (Los Angeles, CA), a Japanese American family had taken in Gabaldon  a wayward boy, prone to trouble  and raised him.
During the war years the family was sent to an internment camp and Gabaldon joined the Marines.
What makes this part of the film interesting is that there's a nightclub scene that has rampant sexuality featuring a female character and Gabaldon played by Jeffrey Hunter which must have seemed somewhat explicit at the time The second half features the bloody battle of Saipan and one interesting thing about the landings is that Japanese characters speak to Japanese characters in Japanese without the benefit of subtitles .
The battle scenes are relatively graphic though little children turning reminded me of THE GREEN BERETS The problem with this movie is that for something that is marketed as a war film it takes a long time to reach its destination of the battlefield and with the exception of the nightclub scene the film is very talkative with little in the way of incident which stops it from becoming a great film .
I recommend it to all who wish to know some of the real stories from World War Two. What is interesting however, is that my grandfather was in the Air Force I believe during World War Two, and his brother was employed by the government to take movies and pictures of the war, which, quite ironically, lead him to meet his wife in Italy, who consequently, was a very beautiful woman.
Hell to EternityThis is the first movie (from Hollywood) to deal with the incarceration of Japanese Americans in 1942 during WWII.
What follows is a war movie based somewhat on fact-the unit he eventually joins fights the Japanese, and there is doubt, heroism, and tragedy and it's a well done story.
(Other WWII movies were still being made, but many are about the exceptional parts of the war, like D-DAy in "The Longest Day" in 1962 or Nazi trials "Judgement in Nuremberg" in 1961.)The main character is supposed to be based on a Mexican-American kid, but the actor (Jeffrey Hunter) is a very white American, which adds to the contrast (and meld) between cultures.
When the fighting starts the movie clicks into place -in fact, director Phil Karlson is great with smaller budgets and yet keeping an honest intensity to the acting.
HELL TO ETERNITY (1960) is, I believe, the first Hollywood film to depict the experiences of Japanese-Americans in the early stages of World War II.
This must have been powerful material in 1960 and, I daresay, remains so today.The movie pulls the viewer in emotionally right from the start as we see a troubled white youth, Guy Gabaldon (who was Mexican-American in real life), get into fights at school and go home to a decrepit shack, only to find his mother gone, taken to a hospital where she will soon die.
Nine years later in the narrative, in 1941, Guy is played by Jeffrey Hunter and his Japanese brother, George, is played by George Takei.
(The mother is played by Tsuru Aoki Hayakawa, wife of Sessue Hayakawa, who appears in the film as General Matsui, the Japanese commander on the island of Saipan.) It's the exchange with his mother at Manzanar that convinces Guy to try and enlist in the Marines.
(Hunter's portrayal of an orphan raised by a family of different race recalls his role as Martin Pawley, a part-Indian raised by the Edwards family in Texas in John Ford's THE SEARCHERS, 1956.) After such advanced racial politics, there's a bizarre scene about midway through the film showing Guy and two of his marine buddies (David Janssen and Vic Damone) on liberty in Hawaii, where they wind up at the apartment of Sono, a Japanese bar hostess (Michi Kobi) and Famika, her Japanese roommate, a stripper from San Francisco (Reiko Sato).
Eventually everyone's paired up and, as Guy starts grappling with Sheila's bra strap, there's a quick cut and---BOOM!--the big guns go off in the naval bombardment of Saipan, where the rest of the movie takes place.The scene with the women is a long one and has no bearing on the rest of the narrative.
It's a remarkable display and I guarantee you've never seen him like this in anything he did for TV.After intense and bloody combat on Saipan (filmed on Okinawa), the final stage of the film involves Guy's attempts to get the Japanese holdouts to surrender.
Contrast this with Japan's own entry in the genre that year, I BOMBED PEARL HARBOR (1960), which I've also reviewed on IMDb. While HELL TO ETERNITY is about 25 minutes too long, it's still a powerful treatment of its subject, despite the unfortunate Hollywood compromise of hiding Gabaldon's true racial background.Jeffrey Hunter and David Janssen would re-team the following year in MAN-TRAP (1961), which opens with a scene of Korean War combat featuring the two and also shows Janssen as a very different kind of character than we normally saw him play.
Great war film and respectful look at Japanese people.
Based on a true story from WW II, of Guy Gabaldon, who single-handedly brought in more than 1,500 Japanese prisoners and civilians in the Battle of Saipan in 1944.
The film is a rare one in also showing the concern and care by the American combatants for the innocent Japanese civilians.
And, it portrays well the conflicted psyche of the grunt Japanese soldiers and civilians who had been told by their leaders that the Americans were cruel barbarians, and that the Japanese must fight to the death or kill themselves and their children rather than surrender.Wikipedia has an interesting piece on Guy Gabaldon.
However, "Hell to Eternity" has an exceptional story--and with only a few small but obvious changes, it could be a great story...because it's true.This film is about a Marine named Guy Gabaldon.
First, although the movie was VERY progressive in dealing with anti-Japanese prejudices, the film was also prejudiced in its own way--having the VERY non-Hispanic Jeffery Hunter play the lead.
This is an overlong and corny drama about a white American raised by a Japanese family who ends up fighting the Japanese in WWII.
Although based on a true story, it seems situations are contrived just to take advantage of the fact that a Japanese-speaking American is present among the U.S. troops.
Though Hell to Eternity fans out to being a fairly standard WWII war drama, for me it was the opening scenes and background circumstances that make this one stand out above many others.'Yanks vs Japs' movies do tend to be two-a-penny, it seems but lead character Guy Gabaldon (a very good, determined Jefrey Hunter) was brought up from a young age by a Japanese family after his mother dies, in his California community.
By the time of Pearl Harbour, and as a young adult, he sees his Japanese siblings as his brothers and of the same blood and race - therefore you can see and appreciate his heartbreak and dilemma on conscription and he is sent out to the Pacific.His knowledge of the Japanese language becomes a huge asset and he becomes a war hero when he uses this talent to get an enemy battalion to surrender and the film is essentially a biopic of him and his story.Fortunately, despite much that could be over-sentimentalised, it never gets too cloying and the dialogue remains pretty much matter of fact, i.e. realistic.
I submitted a comment about Seven Against the House, suggesting Phil Karlson was a director worth retrieving from the forgotten, but I should clarify that Gunman's Walk and Rampage are pretty bad, whereas The Brothers Rico and Hell to Eternity are pretty good; in fact, Hell to Eternity is a real eye-opener, for those of us who remain ignorant of the internment of the Japanese in the early days of World War Two. Guy Gabaldon was a real guy, and Jeff Hunter is actually convincing in the part.
He is first sent to Hawaii and then his unit is sent into the Battle of Saipan.A Star Trek fan may notice George Takei as older George and Jeffrey Hunter as older Guy. The childhood section is fascinating and war's opening has some important scenes.
Some Hedging and Changes were made to the "Real Life" Story of Guy Gabaldon (Jeffrey Hunter), but the Core Message Remains.The Movie is too Long, with some Scenes Extended beyond Tolerable, mainly the Marines Drinking and Sexing, but there are others.
The whole First Half of the Film is a Setup and Pre-War Family Bonding, that was Needed but it goes on Way too Long.
There are other Small Missteps like No Subtitles in the Long Japanese General's Speech to His Men.It's Not a Perfect or Great Film, but Overall, it is Karlson's Edgy Direction of a Story Worth Telling that makes this a Remarkable and Memorable Movie.Part of its Reputation is because in 1960 it was an Anticipatory Style that Prefigured the Decade and Beyond and there just wasn't anything like it at the Time.
Phil Karlson directed this true story about Guy Gabaldon(played by Jeffrey Hunter) a young boy with absent parents who is adopted into a Japanese foster family in the 1930's, and later has to deal with their internment during the outbreak of WWII.
Guy joins the marines, where his fluent Japanese proves vital in dealing with the enemy, and he later distinguishes himself by capturing 800 prisoners in Saipan after the general commits ritual suicide.
Such statements were more typical of the later 60's.I love the fact that the film keeps us talking about Guy Gabaldon, he is a great American hero.
You reinforce the fact he was rescued and raised by a Japanese family (The film did a good job of this  it is important)4.
Jeffrey Hunter is Guy Gabaldon, a real person, in this "based on a true story" film.
Gabaldon was an orphan in the Great Depression, adopted as a child into a Japanese family in California.
The movie demonstrates, without making the point overtly, that in the Marines, everyone is a rifleman first, and a cook, a clerk, or a translator second.After a long stop in Honolulu, Hunter finds himself in combat on Saipan where two of his buddies (David Janssen and Vic Damone) are killed by the Japanese.
Phil Karlson directs with less than an A-movie budget, but comes up with outstanding war action scenes and the best from his talented cast.
The story is based on the real life story of Guy Gabaldon, who enlisted in the Marines and became a hero in the Battle of Saipan by persuading 2,000 Japanese soldiers to surrender.
After Pearl Harbor, the young man from Chicago was turned down by the Army due to a split eardrum...but being able to speak Japanese fluently the Marines knew he was of use to his country.At this particular time HELL TO ETERNITY contained harsh and violent war action.
By the time the war starts, he has grown up with his new parents.The story as told does not exactly state whether the boy (Guy Gabaldon) is legally adopted by the family or not and I think back in that era that perhaps they would not have had to do that?
It does pull in the viewer with Guy's relationship with his new family after his mom dies (we never meet his mom on screen as she is in the hospital ill when we first meet Guy).George Takei is 23 years young and this is his 9th role of a fine career in support as George Une. He is an older brother to Guy. The script can be admired for creating what would have been an extremely rare family situation for the 1930's, and early 1940's but it is quite easy to take apart.This is a film that addresses the issue of the internment camps and the race relations during this time period.
In a way, the worst scene in the film is the party where we have Americans and Japanese mingling in a social setting.
It's not the exact true story of Marine Private Guy Gabaldon that you see in Hell To Eternity, but you've got enough of the story to appreciate what a remarkable thing he did at the Battle of Saipan.
If the story were done today, you can be sure a Latino actor would be in the role.What is true is that as a kid Gabaldon is taken as a foster child and raised by a Japanese American family, learning the customs and language in the best of schools.
The Japanese had been fed a steady diet of what to expect from American capture, a lot of that inspired no doubt by what they did with their prisoners.When Gabaldon brought in his charges, his commanding officer immediately dubbed him the Pied Piper of Saipan and the nickname stuck the rest of his life.Despite having the wrong background Jeffrey Hunter delivers a fine performance.
Imagine Colonel Saito the commandant in combat in Saipan and you have some idea of his role.The film also deals with the fact that Gabaldon's foster family was interred as many Japanese Americans were, Hell To Eternity was one of the first films dealing with that issue.
One of his foster brothers is played by a young George Takei and he fought with the Nisei division in Italy.Despite the steamy sex angle, Hell To Eternity is a good enough war film without it and a real tribute to a genuine American hero.
Not only was it a great war movie, but it was also a human interest story in the fact that Guy was raised by a Japanese American family, by the way he only seen them as family, that was obvious when he told his foster parents that he had enlisted in the Marines to go fight the Japs!
This fine movie is based on a true story about an American raised in the home of Japanese-Americans and his unique opportunity to serve our country in the battle of Saipan, using his language abilities.
The scenes with the hero's adopted Japanese-American family are best, the scenes where the Marines get drunk with three chicks in Honolulu right before shipping out.