FirstWitch A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Lucia Ayala It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Geraldine The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

dougdoepke Unlike boilerplate propaganda films of WWII, this one has some complexity. I suspect Washington DC was smelling victory in 1943 and was correctly concerned with post-war occupation and how the American public would react. Thus, as other reviewers point out, the enemy is depicted as Japan's medieval warrior society and not the Japanese people as a people. The movie's propaganda aspects center on familiar stereotypes (cruel soldiers and inhumane policies), but more importantly, these ugly aspects are also portrayed as the result of a conditioning process (Taro), and not the result of some genetic, sub-human flaw as in typical propaganda films of the time. This distinction opens the possibility that a reformed social order with better values and socializing process can produce a more modern and democratic people better attuned to Western ideals (Tama, Reo, & the early Taro). The end result thus suggests that the Japanese people may be human after all, yet suffering from what may be termed a "social disorder"-- A disorder that a good dose of American-style democracy can remedy under an astute post- war occupation regime, such as Gen. MacArthur's turned out to be. Now, no matter how self- congratulatory these political assumptions may be, the result turns out to be shrewdly visionary in an historical sense.Of course, this is a pretty heavy load for what is essentially an RKO programmer. Nonetheless, the subtext plays out in a screenplay more shaded than most. I suspect audiences expecting something more typically simplistic were a bit put off by the ambiguities. Still and all, there are familiar American stereotypes to anchor the audience—the good-hearted Irishman (O'Hara), the competitive sportsman (Lefty), and the enterprising reporter (Sara). Revealingly, they're shown as getting along quite well with those liberally minded Japanese who will share power during the post-war period.This mixture of crude stereotype along with the more subtle humanizing aspect creates a rather awkward combination that doesn't work very well for the movie as a whole. Perhaps this is why the film remains pretty obscure in movie annals. Nonetheless, two episodes remain memorable for me. It's easy to overlook architect O'Hara's passing observation about sturdy Western construction materials. These, he points out, can withstand natural calamities that Pacific islands are prone to, such as earthquakes and floods, better than traditional, less substantial, Japanese materials. To me, this illustrates the potentials of a genuinely cooperative internationalism outside this particular one-sided context. Also, the central action scene of a gangly American boxer (Ryan) vs. a Japanese martial arts expert (Mazurki) may not be very convincing, but it certainly is eye-catching.Now, I'm in no position to judge the historical accuracy of the events depicted here and claimed as fact-based by the prologue. Nonetheless, the movie remains an interesting one for its generally humane message in a time of real war.

funkyfry Considering that this is blatant propaganda – basically it is to Japan what "Hitler's Children" is to Germany, and from the same director – it's a somewhat difficult film to evaluate today. I end up going on the negative side – I really don't think that for anyone other than people like myself who are interested in propaganda as a subject that there is very much of value in this film at this point. But I do think that for war-time American audiences it wasn't a rip-off; it did provide a varied entertainment vehicle with surprising elements like a young Robert Ryan boxing against a Sumo wrestler and a fairly interesting love story between the secondary American characters (Gloria Holden and Donald Douglas).The most striking thing about this movie is how hard it strives – like "Children" – to establish the humanity of the Japanese characters before showing how fascist systems of thought dehumanize them and make them capable of doing unimaginable deeds (this film implies that babies are being thrown into some kind of pit and shows children being separated from their mothers so the Japanese army can have their way with them). Unfortunately this effect is greatly damaged by having non-Japanese actors for all the major roles. This isn't a practice that I think deserves the kind of blanket-condemnation that it's received lately. I don't think it's inherently racist to have an actor portray a role that's not of their racial type – Lon Chaney's appearance in "Shadows" is no more racist for example than Denzel Washington's appearance in "Much Ado About Nothing." We should not dismiss the artistic validity of a performance simply because the actor is playing outside his native racial heritage – to do so is far too limiting for actors and shows a lack of imagination on the part of audiences. But in this case I just feel that given how sensitive the material is – Japan's atrocities in China and the Pearl Harbor bombing, for example – it would be highly preferable to have actual Asian-American actors in the roles. And I think this would even have strengthened the film's function as propaganda at the time of its release both here and abroad. And the final nail in the coffin is the fact that they picked Tom Neal ("Detour"), an unimpressive actor with no screen presence and a distinctly European face that simply defies all putty and paint and never convinces. Usually in these kind of films I start to ignore the racial difference regardless of how European the actor looks – for instance Boris Karloff was convincing in "West of Shanghai." But Neal is not a good enough actor to make us want to forget that he's playing outside his racial type because he's also playing outside of the range of his talent. J. Carrol Naish shows how it's done – his performance as the father, Reo Seki, is very subtle and accomplished and we stop thinking about any racial difference within minutes because of the skill with which he fills out the role. So there's a strong contrast here within this movie that really damages whatever is left of its dramatic strength. But it really would have helped as well if they had selected an actor for Taro Seki who had a somewhat less distinctive face without quite as strong a jaw as Neal.I did think it was pretty surprising that the narrative so completely abandoned Taro Seki (Neal)… I kind of kept expecting it to make a hero out of him again in the end somehow. Instead the film shifts to the point where Reo Seki is someone we can relate to more than the son who seems to be so American at the beginning of the film. So the movie benefits by not being as predictable as it could have been. It really allows Japanese culture to emerge with some dignity. Too bad they felt they had to fill it with absurd elements. For example in one scene when Japan declares war on China, a man with a rather comical but somehow scary Asian face (Paul Fung, apparently) jumps out and the American characters say something like "oh no, it's the Samurai Sword dance!" just as he starts to twirl and pounce ridiculously around the room. In another scene Japanese soldiers hand out opium to small Chinese children instead of bread.It would be really fantastic if the movie actually was what it appears to be – an exploration of how good people become evil people under the influence of fascist ideology. Some of the early scenes like the one where Taro Seki takes his girlfriend (Margo) to a baseball game that's interrupted by military drills and an instruction that "everything you see on the field should be viewed as military preparation", seemed to promise such a movie. But in reality it's a bit more ambitious than it probably should have been in terms of humanizing the Japanese, producing a film that from today's eyes (at least, mine) appears even more bizarre than some of the more one-sided propaganda films from the period simply because it's trying to do so much but then betrays that attempt whenever necessary or even perhaps convenient. The director, Dmytyrk, actually got in trouble later on in the 50s for some of the things he did in these films and in some of the films he made after the War ended. In this film for example we have a sympathetic Communist figure in "Boris" (George Givot). Dmytryk always had big ideas but his style of directing is very straightforward and in this particular film there's not much personality to distinguish it from your run of the mill B propaganda picture, except perhaps the attention that's been paid as I said above to keeping the humanity of the Japanese front and center, and this goes for both negative and positive portrayals of the characters.

arwebevenstar Well, where do I start? I would like to point out some erroneous statements by the first viewer commenting. He states that the introductory statement says it is "100% true" and "authentic". Actually, its says "true-to-life", which I would construe to be similar to today's films saying that the movie is "based on...". It states that the film is not biographical, but the incidents depicted did occur. We know from historical works that the Japanese were responsible for many atrocities in China, especially Manchuria...the giving of opium to the starving villagers, the bayoneting of infants and toddlers, the raping of Chinese women and the setting up of houses of prostitution to "service" the Japanese Army & so on. So as Hollywood has always done, they take real facts and fictionalized & personalized them to give them more impact. A statement by the previous commenter, about how all the major roles were played by white actors, while actors of Japanese heritage played lesser/support roles. Well, as far as I can tell by cast listing, there were no Japanese actors in the movie. Philip Ahn (Korean descent), Benson Fong and the other Asian actors are Chinese ancestry. J. Carroll Naish had played other Asian characters throughout his career. Tama was played by Mexican-American actress, Margo (married to Eddie Albert).Tom Neal makes a very strange Japanese, even for the time...For a propaganda film, it is more even handed in its portrayal of the Japanese characters and the upheaval in Japanese society then many war films of its day. There are two story strands, the brutalization of Taro, from a americanized frat boy to a murdering martinet and the humanizing of his father, Reo Seki, who comes to see the loss of son and his son's happiness in marriage to Tama, a farmer's daughter and the destruction of the rigid social order of his beloved country... The Russian is portrayed positively; the German a bit dismissively; and the three Americans (woman reporter, the male engineer, the baseball coach), are all different faces of American society: the brave American (the woman reporter); the status-quo American (the engineer) and the "ugly" American (the baseball coach).

John Today (even in 1943) this film is very racist dealing with Japanese son educated in US goes back to Japan and takes part in atrocities there and in China. The whole China sequences are very grisly and actually disturbing, such as nailing the baby to the door by his/her pigtail along with the usual raping and pillaging of the Chinese countryside. They even keep the Chinese drugged up with free heroin handouts from trucks that pull into the villages. There is just one "good" Japanese character in the movie, the female secretary who works for an American architect caught in Japan with some Western reporters when WW2 finally erupts. But then these characters get tortured and sentenced to death. On the whole film it is NEVER boring...never. It has very good production and fine actors (even though Japanese are all played by white Europeans a la Charlie Chan). Now get this! RKO was asked by US government to make a picture that would portray Japanese in a real and fair way instead of the crop of anti-Japanese pictures that were made already so to stave off racial hatred toward this group. It was rampant in US (not so, for Germans though, interestingly films about Nazi's always had numerous "good" Germans, never in propaganda Japanese films who were usually portrayed as sub human hordes.)Anyway this was Hollywood's answer to the problem. Unbelievable! Film though is considered an excellent yet hysterical example of WW2 propaganda at the time.