by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran Charles an old movie from the DVD backlog, an item
from a four-film “James Cagney Collection” put out by American Movie Classics
in the good old days when they were actually a classic-movie channel. Actually
these boxes were merely slapped together from familiar public-domain titles — I
got one on Cagney and another one on Vivien Leigh, which was billed as a
“Classic Hollywood Collection” even though all four of Leigh’s films it
contained were British productions — and the movie we ran last night was Blood
on the Sun. This was a film from Cagney’s
short-lived stint as an independent producer with his brother running the
company’s business end — it was actually billed as a “William Cagney
Production” — and it was made in 1944, though not released until 1945. From the
era and the title one could probably guess this was a piece of anti-Japanese
World War II agitprop, and you’d be right. Directed by Frank Lloyd (a prestige
director from the 1920’s and 1930’s whose star had fallen by the time he made
this film) and written by the usual committee — Frank Melford, “idea”; Garrett
Fort, “story”; future Hollywood 10 blacklistee Lester Cole, “screenplay”; and
Nathaniel Curtis, “additional scenes” — Blood on the Sun dealt with a supposed plan for Japanese world domination
drafted by prime minister Gai-Ichi Tanaka (John Emery, Mr. Tallulah Bankhead
and one of many white actors “yellow-face” cast as this film’s Asian characters
— one wonders why the Cagney brothers didn’t at least cast real Asians like
Philip Ahn, Keye Luke or Richard Loo as the dastardly Japanese, but maybe they
were simply too busy playing dastardly Japanese in other war films) in the
1920’s for the Japanese to achieve world domination, starting with China and
then conquering the United States.
The Tanaka Plan really existed but its
authenticity has been called into question: it was first published (in Chinese
translation) by a Chnese Communist publication and its first English-language
appearance was also in a Communist paper (in the U.S.), and modern historians
generally agree it was a Chinese Communist forgery (much like the British
secret service had forged the infamous “Zimmermann Telegram” in 1917 in which
the Germans supposedly promised to restore California, Nevada, Arizona and the
other territories Mexico had lost to the U.S. in 1848 to Mexico if they entered
the war on the German side and launched a sneak attack on the U.S.) — though as
Charles pointed out there really was a “Tripartite Pact” among the Axis nations
in which they agreed to divide the world between them, with Germany ruling
Europe, Italy ruling Africa, Japan ruling Asia and Germany and Japan splitting
the U.S., with Germany getting the eastern two-thirds and Japan the western
third. Anyway, Blood on the Sun
features James Cagney as Nick Condon, editor-in-chief of the English-language
paper Tokyo Chronicle, who as the
movie begins has already written and published a story exposing the existence
of the Tanaka Plan even though he doesn’t have the document itself and he’s
merely reporting his sources’ information as to what it contains. That’s
enough, though, to provoke the Japanese government into trying to suppress the
paper, including physically roughing up its distributors and crashing the
office of Nick’s scaredycat publisher, Arthur Bickett — and it’s also enough to
provoke Nick into seeking out the actual Tanaka document and getting the
signature of at least one of the participants in drafting it to establish its
authenticity before he high-tails it back to the U.S. and publishes it as a
warning to his countrymen of what they’re in for in the next world war. The
time frame of this movie is a but unsettled because the Tanaka Plan first
appeared in the 1920’s, but the film clearly takes place in the 1930’s after the Japanese have launched their imperial campaign
by attacking and conquering Manchuria.
Through a series of events that don’t
gel all that well into a coherent plot line and seem to have been aimed more at
giving James Cagney’s audiences what they expected —lots of fights (apparently
Cagney studied Japanese martial arts so he could look convincing doing his own
stunts), lots of confrontations and lots of “You dirty rat!”-style snarling —
than actually telling a story, Cagney recovers the Tanaka document from fellow
correspondent Ollie Miller (Wallace Ford) and his wife Edith (Rosemary DeCamp),
only to lose it again when Japanese agents break into his room, where the
Millers are staying, and kill them (though for some reason the Japanese create
a cover story that the Millers are alive, well and sailing on the Japanese ship
that was supposed to take them back to the U.S.). Nick gets a personal
interview with Tanaka himself, and also gets to encounter General Hideki Tojo
(Robert Armstrong), the actual prime minister of Japan during World War II.
Armstrong slathered on so much makeup to look like Tojo, including a set of
false teeth to give himself Tojo’s famous jutting jawline, that he couldn’t
speak intelligibly on screen and had to post-dub all his dialogue. The main
intrigue involves the budding romance between Nick and Iris Hilliard (Sylvia
Sidney, in her first movie in four years), an enigmatic half-American,
half-Chinese woman (whose “yellowface” is at least marginally more convincing than most of the cast’s even though
one can’t help but wish the Cagney brothers could have got Anna May Wong to
play this part) who’s initially on the side of the Japanese — she actually
lifted the Tanaka document from Nick’s room after Nick had hidden it behind a
picture of the Emperor (which the Japanese agents wouldn’t touch, but Iris
could because he wasn’t her
Emperor) — but ends up on the good guys’ side and paired up with Nick as the
two leave for the U.S. (hopefully not on a Japanese ship!) at the end.
The one good Japanese in the dramatis
personae is the old Prince Tatsugi (Frank
Puglia), who was at the Cabinet meeting when the Tanaka Plan was approved but
thought it was a bad and ridiculous idea that would only lead Japan to defeat
and disaster. He agrees to sign the Tanaka document Nick is smuggling out of
Japan even though he’s well aware that he’ll be executed once word gets out
that he was the one who authenticated it. Blood on the Sun is an O.K. movie that could have been considerably
better — the cinematography by Theodor Sparkuhl (an actual refugee from Nazi
Germany whose name originally had an umlaut over the “u” — later, when he fled
Germany for France, it acquired an accent over the “e” but lost both
diacriticals when he settled in the U.S.) is properly noir-ish and atmospheric (though the print we were
watching was a lousy public-domain copy that made the images even darker than
Sparkuhl and director Lloyd no doubt intended) and the action is decently
staged (though had this been made back at Warner Bros. with Michael Curtiz directing
the film would have been better paced and more exciting than it is). Its plot
is weirdly reminiscent of other movies, including Humphrey Bogart vehicles like
The Maltese Falcon (not only the way the
actual Tanaka document gets passed around but the moral ambiguity of Sylvia
Sidney’s character) and Casablanca
(Cagney gets to deliver a speech to Sidney that sounds an awful lot like
Bogart’s lament that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill
of beans in this crazy world, even though unlike Bogart’s Casablanca character he does end up with the girl), and a movie that reminds you
so much of other, better films is a movie that’s almost doomed to be
disappointing.
