December 7th

This was solid. Recently I have taken an interest in both the propaganda films and wartime documentaries of World War II from both sides. I especially wanted to see this, since I love Ford's 'They Were Expendable' so much. Definitely worth the effort to find if you have a similar inclination for the material.

I have always wondered if a truly 'objective', 'unbiased' documentary can be made. Simply the decisions a director makes in what to capture and what not to makes such a gesture impossible, doesn't it? I especially feel this is the case when it comes to nationalistic documents, such as this.

I have NO idea what its competition was, but this deservedly won Ford an Oscar for Best Documentary: Short Subject--this was a fine work he was well to be proud of.

Though technically a docu-drama, this is really more of a conspiratorial retrospective on just how the Japanese managed to catch the US military on the hop, disastrously, on this fateful day. Its narrated, of sorts, by way of a supposed conversation between a notional Uncle Sam (Walter Huston) and Mr. C (Harry Davenport). They start off by extolling the virtues of the multi-national/ethnic population that has revolutionised the economy of Hawaii, especially with sugar cane and pineapples, but gradually start to take a more menacing tone about those 157,000 who make up around a third of the population and who have Japanese roots. Were they all just proud of their provenance and their Shinto religion, or were some part of a network of fifth c...