I’ve read a few books on the subject, including the most recent scholarship about “Doolittle’s Raid” on Tokyo, one of the more daring American air exploits of World War II. And I distinctly recall the chill that went through my fellow sailors when we stood up, awed, as the surviving members of those air crews passed us to gather at a park adjoining the Sarasota city marina, on their way to celebrate their achievement and remember those who no longer in their ranks some years back.
But a lot of things kept me from taking a look at the big screen version of the World War II memoir “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo.”
“Accuracy” was a big selling point of this mid-war (1944) WWII film. The brilliant Dalton Trumbo scripted it based on one of the raider’s memoirs.
But how sober and accurate could it be, passing patriotic U.S. censors, coming from the biggest and most sentimental studio, MGM, and starring Van Johnson, for Pete’s sake, the Robert Taylor of Randolph Scotts?
And if there’s a characteristic that unifies the films of director and producer Mervyn LeRoy, it’s that he made a lot of them (“Quo Vadis,” “Waterloo Bridge,” “Mister Roberts”) and that there’s nothing distinct about the direction of any of them. The ones with the best source material that attracted the best cast (“Mister Roberts,””Little Women”) were pretty good. The rest? Competent but colorless.
But remembering the decent job Roland Emmerich and a cast that included Aaron Eckhart did when recreating the raid as the forward to 2019’s “Midway” made me finally knuckle under for the two hours and 18 minutes that LeRoy and MGM devoted to the training, bombing and aftermath that faced those 16 B-25 crews in April of 1942, some of the darkest days of the war.
I knew this picture would be a bit stiff and entirely too gee-whiz-you-guys cheerful, and it is. But this is a smart, sometimes tense and bluntly accurate — if myopic — recreation of a pivotal moment in the Pacific war, when U.S. Army Air Force pilots disabused the Japanese aggressors of the alleged safety of their remote island home in just “Thirty Seconds Over Toyko.”
Spencer Tracy makes Lt. Col. James Doolittle a blunt, just-aloof-enough taskmaster, the guy who dreamed up this scheme of putting medium range land-based bombers on an aircraft carrier’s flight deck and zipping over Japan for a broad scattering of bombings that would startle and rattle millions of Japanese, no matter how their fascist government might try to spin the attack.
“It’ll work out, general,” he reassures a superior. To the 24 crews he brings to Florida for training, to be winnowed down to sixteen, he’s no nonsense. No mistakes, no mechanical problems with your “ship,” no attacks of conscience or fear in any of your crew or you’re out.
“That Doolittle’s a cheerful one, isn’t he?”
Lt. Ted Lawson (Van Johnson) skippers the four men of the B-25 they’ve named “Ruptured Duck,” getting them as ready as the other pilots (Robert Mitchum plays one, and singing, smiling and drawling John R. Reilly plays another) compete to see who can be the first to master taking off at half the speed and with one third the runway that they usually use.
Tracy’s Doolittle is a leader, and pretty unsentimental. The Trumbo script and MGM lineage ensure that pretty much everybody else in the picture makes up for that stoicism — sentimental Southern Cal dad-to-be to Virginia card sharp who gets hustled to Shorty (Reilly), always leading the boys in “Eyes of Texas” or any other Texas song he knows in sing-alongs.
The grinning actors playing cheerful, patriotic character “types” and the light tone are only interrupted by Mitchum’s sober, cynical visage. The man knew how to smoke a cigarette (the movie’s practically an “Enjoy smoking” ad) and size-up a worst-case scenario.
That’s kind of what transpires as their task force is spotted half a day and hundreds of miles short of its planned launch point, forcing the crews to take-off without the cover of darkness, or the guarantee of having enough fuel to reach the safe (unoccupied) part of China.
LeRoy integrates declassified documentary footage of the U.S.S. Hornet’s launch of the planes with soundstage close-ups, planes on a recreated flightdeck (with carrier tower) and footage of a B-25 actually taking off from the famed Santa Monica pier, dressed up to pass for an aircraft carrier deck.
Scenes in China are a marvel of rear and front projection, soundstage sets and painted glass backgrounds, putting Chinese-looking mountains behind a Chinese junk and village across the bay and the like.
A favorite shot? The “Hornet” public address system announces “the smoking lamp is lit,” and air crew, on the deck in the dark, shot from the bridge above, all lighting up in response.
The sentimental stuff grates a bit — hearing Phyllis Thaxter, as Lt. Lawson’s pregnant wife, chirp to fellow pilots’ wives that “If anything should happen, I’d have the baby, a little bit of Ted still living.”
The ordeal of those who survive the raid is over-simplified, partly because only those the Japanese didn’t capture (and in some cases, execute) were available to tell their story. But Lawson’s is particularly harrowing, allowing for scenes of Chinese aid and fluffing the alliance of China and the U.S. during the war with “You people are all right by me” sentiments.
And the low altitude flying footage and in-the-cockpit fakery is first rate, helping the suspense build during the raid itself and dramatically, can’t be topped. They had no idea they’d take the enemy by surprise, and their shock had to be akin to that of the first fliers of Japanese bombers sweeping over Oahu.
Johnson acquits himself quite well in the suffering airman scenes, and one could tell MGM was prepping Robert Walker and Mitchum for stardom with their spotlight supporting roles.
New facts and accounts of the show trials the Japanese staged for some captured airmen would flesh out any more modern account of this pivotal piece of World War II history, and new technology might render the raid itself more immersive and thrilling.
But give it to Mervyn LeRoy, MGM and the U.S. War Dept. of the 1940s. They got a solid, linear, tense and moving script, some famous and not-yet-famous faces from the backlot and a whole lot of combat-ready B-25s together. They put viewers, then and now, right there on that flight deck, crawling down that fuselage tunnel from the B-25 tail to the bow and down there “on the deck” flying at near treetop level through hostile territory on a daring top secret quest that no one back then would describe the way we would today — “a suicide mission.”
And they made a historical drama so close to the truth and polished that it holds up to this very day.
Rating: “approved,” TV-PG today
Cast: Spencer Tracy, Van Johnson, Phyllis Thaxter, Don DeFore, Robert Walker, Stephen McNally, John R. Reilly and Robert Mitchum.
Credits: Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, scripted by Dalton Trumbo, based on the book by Ted W. Lawson. An MGM release on Tubi.
Running time: 2:18
