Midway (1976)

Directed by Jack Smight. Starring Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, Hal Holbrook, Toshirô Mifune, James Shigeta, Edward Albert, Glenn Ford, Robert Wagner, Clyde Kusatsu, Christina Kokubo, Robert Webber, John Fujioka, Dale Ishimoto, Cliff Robertson, Kevin Dobson. [PG]

Big-name cast collects a paycheck and little more in this curious war epic misfire. As advertised, it’s a recreation of the events leading up to and during the pivotal Battle of Midway, a turning point for the Allied forces in the Pacific theater of WWII, but it’s mostly just dutiful recitations of dialogue against a mixture of real war footage and refurbished stock shots from earlier movies out of both Hollywood and Japan such as Tora! Tora! Tora!, Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, and Hawai Middouei Daikaikusen: Taiheiyo No Arashi. Filling the spaces in between military strategist speeches and reheated spectacle is a thin soap opera about Navy officer Heston’s son being in love with a Japanese girl whose family has been interned in a concentration camp (don’t get your hopes up for a sobering, intimate account of this sad chapter in U.S. history—it’s background noise only). If director Jack Smight could make it all move, or if Donald Sanford’s screenplay gave us fleshed-out characters to really care about, it might have worked as something suitable for a wider audience besides military history buffs who don’t care so much for truth/facts (they must exist, or else how can one account for the film’s box office success?). Robert Mitchum and James Coburn make cameos, and several soon-to-be-famous faces appear briefly (Tom Selleck, Pat Morita, Erik Estrada, Sab Shimono, etc.)

42/100