Another of the movies that I think I recorded during 31 Days of Oscar and have been meaning to watch before it expires, is the World War II film Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.
The movie is based on a book, which is based on a true story. As everyone knows Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, sending the US into World War II. The surprise attack was a shock to American morale, and something needed to be done to improve that morale, both among troops who were going to be sent into the Pacific theater, and civilians on the home front. Lt. Col. James Doolittle (played in the movie by Spencer Tracy), came up with the daring idea to try a raid on the Japanese Home Islands.
Of course, this wasn't going to be easy. With the fall of the Philippines and Japan having effective control over a good portion of the western Pacific, there was no land base from which bombers could take off. And over in Europe, bombers could fly from the UK, drop their payloads over Germany or one of the occupied countries, and return to the UK. That's not something that could be done in the Pacific. Instead, bombers would have to take off from an aircraft carrier, which has a notoriously short runway. That, and they wouldn't be able to fly back to the carrier, instead having to fly on and hope they could reach the part of China that hadn't been taken by Japan yet.
Doolittle sets out to recruit men for the mission, with the caveat that they don't know yet what the mission is going to be because of the fact that it has to remain top-secret until the last minute. Among them is pilot Capt. Ted Lawson (Van Johnson), who as the movie opens has recently been married and is about to start a family (Mrs. Lawson is played by Phyllis Thaxter), or at least was hoping to before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Lawson is the main character here mostly because he's the one who in real life after the raids wrote the book Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. Gunner on Lawson's plane Cpl. David Thatcher (Robert Walker).
Lawson's crew, and the crews of a couple dozen more planes are sent to Florida for training, since they have to practice short takeoffs at low speed. Some of the men are smart enough to figure out part of what's going on, but they have to keep it a secret for obvious reasons. Eventually they fly west to San Diego, before the planes get loaded onto ships taht are going to be transported across the Pacific until they can get close enough to Japan to attack -- at least if they can avoid Japanese subs. This portion of the movie, however, is the part for a bit of comic relief as there's a sort of friendly rivalry between the flyboys who are part of the Army air corps (the US Air Force as a separate branch not being founded until after the War) and the Navy men on the ships.
Eventually, the raiding planes take off, earlier than planned once the element of surprise has been lost. They bomb Tokyo and some other places in Japan, and make their way across the Sea of Japan to China, barely making it and in some cases having to ditch just before getting to shore. Lawson and several of his men are pretty substantially injured. How are they going to get to safety? Well, of course we know they do and that Lawson gets back to America since he wrote the book. But it's actually a surprising amount of the film that's set in China.
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo was filmed in the first half of 1944, with the movie being released late in the year. This was while the war was still raging. As a result the movie is fairly formulaic and more designed to be a morale-booster than something even-handed. Then again, that's in part because what actually happened was fairly well known by the public of the day. Even with all that in mind, watching 80 years later, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo is a pretty good movie.
It's also interesting to see the credits list of the movie as it opens up. This was one of Robert Mitchum's first movies. (Wikipedia says it's his debut, although I could swear that The Human Comedy came out earlier. Perhaps it's his first screen credit.) Several B-listers, like Don DeFore and Leon Ames show up, while Wikipedia says a very young Blake Edwards has a small role.
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