by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Behind the Rising Sun, a 1943 RKO anti-Japanese propaganda movie that was
a follow-up to Hitler’s Children,
made earlier in 1943 and telling the story of the star-crossed love between two
German-American kids, Karl Brunner (Tim Holt) and Anna Miller (Bonita
Granville), who meet in Germany in 1933, just when Hitler took over, and go
their separate ways: though Brunner was born in the U.S. and Anna in Germany,
she considers herself American while he considers himself German and eventually
he’s indoctrinated into hard-core Nazism at the Horst Wessel School while she
plays baseball with the boys at the American Colony School. For the follow-up,
RKO assigned the same writer, Emmet Lavery, and the same director, Edward
Dmytryk, whom they’d hired away from Columbia’s “B” unit (just after his very interesting horror film with Boris Karloff and Anne
Revere, The Devil Commands), and
Lavery constructed a strikingly similar plot: the film is narrated by Reo Seki
(J. Carrol Naish, playing a relatively sympathetic Japanese role the same year
he was the evil Japanese criminal mastermind Dr. Daka in the first Columbia Batman serial) as he writes a manuscript in front of a
nice-looking white cardboard box, tied with a ceremonial ribbon, that contains
the ashes of his son Taro Seki (Tom Neal). Taro was born in Japan but his dad
sent him to the U.S. to be trained in engineering at Cornell University, and as
the film proper begins we see his return to Japan following his graduation,
where he takes a job at the engineering company owned by Clancy O’Hara (Don
Douglas) and falls in love with Tama Shimamura (Margo, top-billed), the
Japanese woman O’Hara has hired as his secretary. For the first half-hour or so
the biggest dramatic issue in Lavery’s script is whether Reo will allow his son
Taro to marry Tama even though he’s from a prestigious family and she isn’t. Then,
in 1937, Taro is drafted and sent to the Chinese front in the wake of the
attack on the Marco Polo Bridge and the subsequent Japanese siege of Nanking.
The experience of serving in the Emperor’s army turns Taro from a decent
Japanese-American boy into a fanatical servant of the Emperor and the
militarist clique that ran Japan and got the idea to declare war against the
U.S. in the first place. It also gives him a suntan; though Tom Neal’s “Asian”
makeup isn’t very convincing at any
point in the film (of all the whites playing Japanese — and they’re most of the
cast, though with so many real
Japanese-Americans in the internment camps the cast is filled out with Chinese
actors, including Benson Fong in his screen debut — only Naish is even remotely
convincing), it gets even harder to believe as his face grows darker as the
movie continues. Anyway, Taro slowly turns into a monster, getting excited by
seeing the Japanese soldiers take babies away from Chinese mothers so they can
throw them into the air and impale them on their bayonets, and on his return to
Japan telling Tama that she should consider it an honor that her younger sister
has just been sold into prostitution. As in Hitler’s Children, Emmet Lavery seemed more interested in the Axis
enemy’s sexual sins than anything else bad he could have said about them; at
one point we see an order, signed by Taro, telling Chinese women that they are
expected to service Japanese soldiers at any time.
There are a few other people
in the dramatis personae, notably
American reporter Sara Braden (played by “Dracula’s daughter,” Gloria Holden,
in a vivid performance that dominates virtually every scene she’s in), who
finds herself running afoul of the Japanese occupation of China when she’s
there to report on it, and is particularly shocked to find that nice young man
Taro Seki having become as mean and bloodthirsty as the rest of his army.
There’s also a bizarre scene in which back in Tokyo, Taro and O’Hara have an
argument, O’Hara demands “satisfaction,” and eventually they meet to fight —
only both of them are replaced by stand-ins, Taro by a heavy-set Japanese
wrestler (though the guy is nowhere near the usual size of a sumo wrestler and he fights more in the style of a U.S.
grappler) and O’Hara by his friend, baseball coach Lefty O’Doyle (Robert Ryan),
who agreed only because he thought it was a boxing match instead of what he
calls a “grunt-and-grapple” fight to the finish. Ryan had actually been a
professional prizefighter before he entered movies, and he was frequently cast as a boxer (most notably in The Set-Up, a superb film noir in which Ryan plays a fighter who’s so washed up his
manager bets against him in his latest bout but doesn’t tell him to throw it
because the crooked manager figures there’s no way Ryan’s character can win
anyway) because he knew the moves and didn’t have to be coached or trained to
look right in the ring. O’Doyle wins the fight, of course, and later the
Japanese authorities arrest him, O’Hara, Sara Braden and Tama and accuse them all of being spies: they
torture O’Doyle to death but O’Hara and Sara escape thanks to the Doolittle
raid, with blasts the prison in which they’re being held to popcorn, and to
visas secretly arranged by Reo Seki (ya remember Reo Seki?), who offers one to Tama as well, but she turns
hers down because she wants to remain in Japan and help the country recover
after it loses the war to the U.S. In the meantime Taro had transferred from
the officer corps to the air force, where he piloted a Zero but got shot down
and killed by fire from a Doolittle bomber — and in the final scene Reo Seki,
guilt-ridden over his own role in supporting the militarist Japanese regime,
commits seppuku in the classic
Japanese style.
After we watched Behind the Rising Sun, Charles commented that next to it Hitler’s
Children was a masterpiece, but in some
ways Behind the Rising Sun is a
better film; it’s certainly wartime propaganda and doesn’t pretend to be
anything else (though, ironically, it was actually made at the request of the
U.S. government to acknowledge the existence of some morally decent Japanese and not portray them as the
mindless, faceless hordes most U.S. wartime films had shown — it’s been noted
often that because the other two Axis countries were white, U.S. propaganda did depict “good Germans” and “good Italians” and
suggested that the decent people of Germany and Italy had been led astray by
unscrupulous dictators, but almost never did they give similar consideration to
“good Japanese” — instead the Japanese were generally depicted as
indistinguishable parts of the dreaded “Yellow Peril” racists in the U.S. media
had been propagandizing against for at least four decades before Pearl Harbor), but it’s shot considerably more
atmospherically than Hitler’s Children — it had a bigger budget and the prestigious Russell Metty was the
cinematographer — and one sees Dymtryk warming up for his next film, the noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet. Two years later RKO would put Tom Neal in “Asian”
drag again for First Yank Into Tokyo,
though at least in that movie the rottenness of his Asian makeup was explained
by his casting as a white man who was put through plastic surgery to look Japanese so he could infiltrate the Japanese
capital, get in touch with a U.S. prisoner and get hold of a military secret.
RKO was looking forward to the U.S. invasion of Japan and thought the title First
Yank Into Tokyo would draw people into
theatres, but after the atomic-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the
Emperor (the real one, not the stick-figure one created by Japan’s military
propagandists as an idol to be venerated and died for) ordered Japan to
surrender, and RKO had to do a little plastic surgery of their own on their
movie, rewriting it so that the precious secret Neal’s character was in Tokyo
to obtain was the triggering mechanism for the A-bomb and they could use stock
footage of the explosions for a climax. There’s quite a lot of authentic
newsreel footage cut into Behind the Rising Sun, too, and it’s some of the most interesting material
in the movie even though it reveals that in terms of shooting mass rallies and
marches, the Japanese didn’t have a director anywhere near as good as Leni
Riefenstahl. (Their best director during the war years was probably Kenzo
Mizoguchi, who specialized — as Akira Kurosawa did later — in samurai stories and other tales of Japan’s legendary past;
Kurosawa himself got his start during the war and it’s surprising, given his
stereotyped reputation as the samurai director, that at least half of Kurosawa’s films were set in the Japan
of his own time.)
