50 Great War Films: Hell in the Pacific

 

Directed by John Boorman - 1968/9 Poster

I am afraid this is the first movie in the series where I was bored. Once or twice it felt like Hell in the DVD Room. The story is a very simple one. A Japanese naval officer (Toshiro Mifune) is stranded on an uninhabited island. He is then joined by a US naval pilot (Lee Marvin). They track each other in the jungle; they fight. Eventually, the Japanese takes the American prisoner. He escapes, and takes the Japanese prisoner. It rains. They calm down and start to share food; then a raft. They leave the island - there is rough sea, then calm sea, then rough sea. They reach another island. They find a deserted Japanese base; no it isn't - it's an American one. They share cigarettes and drink and a 'Life' magazine. Marvin asks if the Jap believes in God; they argue, ignoring sounds of the island being shelled. One lands on the building and destroys it and both men. The end.

A few questions:

• where did the two men come from. A ship? did Mifune (neither men are ever given a name) fall overboard; was it sunk and was he the only survivor? Was Marvin in a single-seater aeroplane? If it crashed - where?
• why did Marvin not explore the rest of the island, instead of hanging about that one beach?
• why did Mifune go into the sea, knowing Marvin was skulking in the bushes?
• why did he not kill Marvin when he first caught him?

You first.

Your turn now.

• were the two men meant to represent Christ on the cross at one stage? Particularly when Marvin was struggling along the beach.
• how does Marvin get over a very painful right leg so quickly?
• none of the bamboos thrown down from the cliff by the two men were very big. Yet, the raft miraculously appears, with substantial 'log-like' bamboo sections
• the continuity is occasionally haywire - at one point, Marvin is sitting in a decent set of clothes - after being reduced to rags. The different shots of the second islands are not synchronised
• above all - nearly every scene is too drawn out - e.g. rummaging through the jungle; alone on the ocean

There was minimal dialogue; inevitably, but there's no attempt to learn each other's language, even a few basic words. Apparently, the stark ending had an alternative one added in 2004 (not seen on this DVD), where no shell hits the building and the two actors go their own ways (where to, one wonders?)

Lack of understandable dialogue and anti-Japanese sentiments still about so soon after the ending of the Second World War, meant the movie was one of the biggest money losers (over $4 million) for ABC films. I am surprised that Tim Newark included it in his Fifty Great War Films - I can think of several which would have been more gripping.

2008 DVD