WHEN you have seen the movie, “Wake Island,” you will realize that finally, and it’s about time, Hollywood has gone to war. Up till now the movies have been fighting a limited dream war of their own: one which took place in some conquered nation, and showed any one of fifty Hollywood stars outwitting and escaping the Gestapo. At best this movie war was exciting—“Underground”—or mildly charming—“The Pied Piper.” At worst, and in either case, it overestimated the comic capacities of the Gestapo and grossly underestimated its capacity to think and to kill. At its prettiest moments—“Mrs. Miniver”—it showed the heart of England’s aristocracy to be with the poor people. At its lowest point, the man of the United Nations, Leslie Howard in “The Invaders,” was portrayed as a passive, able-to-take-anything flimsy intellectual who could only be aroused when the Nazis tore up his Matisse. And in “The Pied Piper” there is a Nazi general who gives his captives a sumptuous meal and free passage across the Channel. With appalling thick-skin, the movie “To Be or Not to Be” facetiously thought that Nazi-dominated and cholera-ridden Poland was a world of laughs.
The picture these Hollywood morale-builders gave the millions of movie goers was dangerously misleading and almost entirely negative.
If the idea had been to soften up the people with bright adventure dreams, the movie industry couldn’t have done a better job.
“Wake Island,” I hope, will mark the start of a new attitude. There is no fantasy in this war. Here the enemy kills unmercifully and unerringly and with no questions asked. The side that is prepared with the most men and guns and planes is the side that usually wins, and it is a larger issue than the escape of one gallant soul from the Gestapo. The 478 Marines and the 1,100 AFL construction workers on Wake didn’t have a chance of coming out alive. After the first surprise attack on December 7, they had six five-inch guns and four planes left to fight with. The Japanese sent over wave on wave of bombers, destroying everything, and were ready to land on December 11. So the Americans played dead while the Jap fleet was sucked in to 4,700 yards, and the Americans opened fire, sinking four Jap ships and wiring the War Department to “send us some more Japs.”
The enemy finally got the island on the 21st.
Director Farrow and writers Burnett and Butler stuck close to the facts. Only about a third is fiction but it is a costly third. It represents the human element, the often tried Sergeant Flagg and Corporal Quirt comedy skit, the stooge saying “sez you” and the smart aleck saying “sez me.” There are two pairs of these in “Wake Island.” So strangely enough, great human tragedy, of which Wake had plenty, is missing. When Sergeant Quirt dies in this it’s no sorrow; you know he’ll be back in the next one. Then there is the odd type of Hollywood thinking, which imagines that a funeral is moving even if you hardly know who died, and has the bad taste to try to draw tears with a letter announcing the death of a soldier’s wife you haven’t seen.
Nevertheless this movie, a human slaughter house, neither under- nor overestimates the factors involved in this war. The main point about it is that it is war at last and adventure no longer.
September 7, 1942