Hell to Eternity

I recorded several movies that I hadn't blogged about before during TCM's day of military movies last Veteran's Day. Some of them got shown again as part of the Memorial Day marathon, so I haven't quite had to worry about them expiring from the DVR, but thare are a few I need to get to. Among them is Hell to Eternity.

The movie opens up during the height of the Great Depression. Guy Gabaldon is a young student of Hispanic descent at a multiethnic school in Los Angeles who has a tendency to get in trouble. When Mr. Une, the father of one of his classmates, who also happens to be a teacher at the school, inquires as to what's going on, he learns that Guy's small house is a mess because Dad is dead and Mom has gotten sick and in the hospital. So Mr. Une takes Guy home with him to stay until Mom gets better. She doesn't get better, but dies in hospital, so the Unes make guy their foster son. Guy takes an interest in the Une family's Japanese culture, especially since the two grandparents have a relatively poor command of English.

Some years pass, and it's December, 1941, which as we all know means the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that sends the US into World War II. The other thing that it means is that Franklin Roosevelt orders all the Japanese-Americans rounded up and sent inland to be away from the Pacific coast where they're seen as a threat to America, even though grown-up Guy (Jeffrey Hunter) knows fully well that the Une family is no such thing. There's nothing Guy can do about it, and he doesn't particularly want to fight against Japan. He gets his draft notice, but it's revealed that he's 4-F thanks to a perforated eardrum.

And then, when visiting Mama-san at the internment camps, Guy learns that his Japanese "brothers" are fighting for America over in Italy as part of a regiment of Japanese-Americans that we saw profiled in the film Go for Broke!. This makes Guy change his mind and think about seeing if he can enlist, because his Japanese language skills could be useful. He just wants to make certain Mama-san doesn't object to his possibly having to kill Japanese.

The Marines accept him, and during basic training he becomes good friends with a couple of them, Sgt. Hazen (David Janssen) and Cpl. Lewis (Vic Damone). The three of them get sent to Hawaii before shipping out, which gives us time for a long and in my opinion pointless scene where the three go out on a triple date with women who are like the Donna Reed character from From Here to Eternity. They then get sent farther west, as that's where the fighting is. Eventually they wind up on Saipan, where the battle against Imperial Japan is raging. Guy, as prologue titles tell us, engages in heroic actions on Saipan that it was thought likely saved the lives of thousands.

Hell to Eternity is a moderately good World War II movie, made more interesting by the fact it's about a real subject. But it's also a movie not without its flaws, with the first one being that it's a good half hour too long, clocking in at 131 minutes. It also feels a bit too pat, in that the tragedy of having to deal with the internment camps is not something that's explored in great depth. The real-life Gabaldon was just shy of 16 on December 7, 1941, which makes me wonder what would have happened to him in real life when his foster family was sent to the camps.

All in all, Hell to Eternity is an entertaining enough movie that's worth one watch at least.