Tuesday, November 21, 2006
I read the credits for The Battle of Midway days after the DVD was on its way back to the Netflix warehouse, so unbeknownst to me Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell both have voice-over dialogue in this John Ford WWI propaganda piece. Too bad! It would have been the second most interesting thing about the 18-minute film. The best part being the final intertitle that reads "300 Japanese Aircraft Destroyed" while a hand paints a "V" in bright red paint across it--which looks a hell of a lot like blood. Get it? Victory spelled with blood? Maybe not.
I was loath to watch this movie, but as it turns out I would have anticipated it with interest if only I had done some superficial research before I screened it. Not only would I have known that there was a reputable cast and crew behind it (yes, Gregg Toland is an uncredited cinematographer, per IMDb), but I would have had a better sense of the danger during the actual shooting. Ford is out there shooting real battle scenes, not picking up stock footage from some nameless soldier drafted to the field. In many shots you can see the camera shake as the bombs rattle the ground (or ship deck, etc.) around it. From that angle, there are a few amazing images of ships and land structures that lay victim of the bombings. The most memorable instance is towards the end as thick, black smoke snakes through the top layer of the blue sky. It's an incredibly surreal moment of chaos and peace in one shot, of an ordinary day gone terribly awry that reminded me of this:
That's some heavy punctuation to follow my otherwise light observations, so I will continue, however briefly, and say as a pseudo-historian I am grateful for this live, historical footage. Sure, it's propagandistic, but the images seen by themselves have meaning, and provide even more context for an event in history that is slowly dying out of collective memory.
Next up in the Ford Movie Marathon: 3 Godfathers (1948).
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