It is curious why Zamperini's B-24 wasn't equipped with such an emergency radio.
Posted on 12/27/2014 6:33:18 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Let’s imagine, for a moment, that “Unbroken” had been directed by somebody who wasn’t Angelina Jolie. It easily could have been. This tale of wartime adventure and survival, adapted from Laura Hillenbrand’s nonfiction bestseller, definitely called for a big-name Hollywood director, but it would have been highly plausible – maybe more plausible – as a project for Ron Howard or Ridley Scott or Steven Spielberg or Clint Eastwood than as the second film for the star-turned-director best known as the female half of the world’s most famous celebrity couple. Would it be getting less attention if one of those guys had made it, or more respect? Both, perhaps? How is our perception of the film being shaped by the unique fame and unique cultural status of its director, and by our desire to project meanings onto her unusual career transition?
I totally understand, and share, the longing to believe that Jolie can step behind the camera and compete with the big dogs in a nearly all-male field, at a level where making a movie is a lot more like running a small company than like painting a picture. Let’s be clear about this: She can. “Unbroken” is a rousing old-fashioned yarn with numerous exciting set-pieces and an uncomplicated hero you root for all the way through. It’s entertaining throughout and made with a high level of technical skill. If made 40 years ago, it would have been a leading Oscar contender and a huge hit, whereas today it’s a bit “meh” in both categories: It will likely get several Oscar nominations but won’t win anything big, and it might have trouble attracting eyeballs in the overcrowded holiday season.
We can say the gender of a filmmaker doesn’t matter or shouldn’t matter, but we aren’t even close to that place yet. There are still almost no women among A-list Hollywood directors; even Kathryn Bigelow makes her films relatively cheap with independent financing. Ava DuVernay, whose civil-rights drama “Selma” also comes out this week, may be the next one. If any female movie star of anywhere near Jolie’s prominence has gone on to direct major films … well, no one has and there’s no clear parallel. (Yeah, Ida Lupino made one movie, and there are a few examples in European cinema. The point stands.)
The aura of specialness around “Unbroken” has provoked various unhelpful reactions that have little to do with the film itself. On one hand, there is boosterism and solidarity: An awesome breakthrough for women! On the other, there’s sneering condescension: Not bad, for a privileged girl working with play money. A fairer way of framing Jolie’s blow for gender equality is to say that she has succeeded admirably in making an old-fashioned adventure movie just as capable and unmemorable as if one of those old dudes I mentioned above had made it. Indeed, Clint Eastwood – with whom Jolie worked in “Changeling” – is pretty much the obvious career model, and “Unbroken” is almost exactly like one of the proficient and pointless middlebrow dramas Eastwood has been making since he quit acting.
According to some reports, the story of real-life World War II hero Louis Zamperini, played by fast-rising British star Jack O’Connell in “Unbroken,” was considered possible fodder for a Hollywood feature as long ago as the late 1950s. Indeed, it might have fit better in that era than in this one, considering that Zamperini’s saga is like a one-man display of How America Won the War. A kid from Southern California whose Italian immigrant parents spoke no English, Zamperini emerged from teenage delinquency to compete in the 1936 Berlin Olympics (the same games in which Jesse Owens won several gold medals) as a long-distance runner. In the war, Zamperini survived a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean, spent more than six weeks adrift in a lifeboat and endured several years in an especially brutal series of Japanese POW camps.
How to understand Zamperini’s stranger-than-fiction true story, either in life or in the movies, is open to debate. We could say that some people find reserves of courage and strength within themselves that most of us don’t possess (and will never have to search for), and leave it at that. There’s no moral to be found there, necessarily: Zamperini was young and strong and lucky, and outlasted circumstances in which thousands upon thousands of other strong young men died. If his story appealed to Hollywood filmmakers, first of all, because it’s a rip-roaring adventure that keeps shifting from one episode to the next, like an Indiana Jones movie, there was also another reason. It can be described in platitudinous terms as being about the resilience of the human spirit, while none-too-subtly making the point that human spirit runs just that little bit stronger in Americans than other people.
It’s almost surprising that a version of “Unbroken” wasn’t made around 1959, with Tony Curtis playing Zamperini and someone like Stanley Kramer directing the film. But it didn’t happen and the whole story receded into history for many years. Zamperini attended the 1998 Winter Olympics in Japan, meeting with some of his captors from the POW years. That brought his story back into the media spotlight and eventually Hillenbrand, the author of “Seabiscuit,” figured out that Zamperini was still alive and wrote a best-selling account of his adventures, which in turn became a hot Hollywood property. (Zamperini died last July, at age 97, but not before he had seen an early cut of Jolie’s film.)
As a movie, “Unbroken” is entertaining enough, but feels a bit like an afterthought. It has terrific cinematography by Roger Deakins and a long-in-development script whose credited writers include Joel and Ethan Coen, Richard LaGravenese (“Beloved”) and William Nicholson (“Gladiator”). It has airplanes and sharks and roaring crowds above swastika banners, and a sadistic Japanese soldier (the notorious Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe, a real-life war criminal) played with lubricious zeal by Japanese rock star Miyavi. Some people have claimed to raise various political objections to the movie, but I can’t get interested to that degree. My problem is that “Unbroken” melts into every other POW movie, and every other lifeboat movie, that I’ve ever seen. A week after seeing it, I’m not sure whether I’m remembering “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” or “Life of Pi.” O’Connell is meant to make a vigorous impression but just comes off as another square-jawed, pseudo-Nietzschean hero. I’m pretty sure I’ve gotten him mixed up with Hugh Jackman in “The Wolverine,” which is more worth watching in any case.
Your dam has a lawn?
I was thinking of the Warsaw Ghetto. There a small number of Jews tied up 36 German officers and 2,054 men. It is estimated that 300 German soldiers were killed.
The men in these Japanese camps were so brutalized, I am surprised that they just didn’t turn on their captors and attempt to exterminate as many Japanese as possible.
I’m reading the book and just got to chapter 34. I saw Franklin Graham on Greta last night and got the impression that the movie ends when he comes home. Graham said that there’s a documentary that covers his conversion, work with Billy Graham and then his work with troubled youth. That’s the movie I want to see.
[[Too much was devoted to the tedious time in the life boat after their B-24 crashes at sea (why was there no emergency radio provided?)]]
I don’t know, maybe for the same reason that decent, working engines weren’t provided? I’m thinking that WWII-era radios were large and clunky, and that equipping every liferaft with one might have been prohibitive with respect to cost and weight.
Anyway, here is the operator’s manual for a B24. I didn’t see anything about an emergency radio in it.
[[During the opening ceremony, Zamperini and a Japanese athlete were shown nodding at each other. The Japanese athlete was the prison camp tormentor, Mutsuhiro “The Bird” Watanabe! What? Later in the prison camp, out trots “The Bird” and nothing is made about the Olympics encounter.]]
Watanabe didn’t compete in the 1936 Olympics and the actor that played the Japanese athlete wasn’t the same actor that played Watanabe. Source: IMDB
Someone else will have to address your questions about the coal operation.
I saw it on Christmas as well. Although Zamperini live an extraordinary life, Angelina missed many opportunities to make the movie live up to those experiences. The movie was a long and some sequences could have been cut after the first showing. Relating more info about Zamperini’s interactions with his fellow POWs would have been helpful and showing more of what the other prisoners went through would have been good. It’s possible that the recounting the POWs true feelings about their captors would not go over well in such a PC world, even though this was during the war and we did hate the enemy.
The abuse depicted in this movie doesn’t live up to what went on in the PI, it appears. But it is a decent movie. I believe it’s PG-13 so the violence is toned down.
More about liferaft equipment (it WAS an interesting question).
“When Zamperini’s B-24 went down in the shark-infested Pacific Ocean, he and two crewmates (pilot Russell Allen “Phil” Phillips and Francis “Mac” McNamara) had to survive with only the supplies that had been stashed in the pockets of a pair of small life rafts. It wasn’t much. The military would soon add many more pieces of essential equipment to these emergency rafts — sun tarpaulin for shade, bailing bucket, mast and sail, sea anchor, sun ointment, first aid kit, puncture plugs, flashlight, fishing tackle, jackknife, scissors, whistle, compass, Gibson Girl radio transmitter, and even religious pamphlets for morale. But Louie, Mac, and Phil would not enjoy the benefits of these future additions. They had no knife, almost no food, and no navigation equipment whatsoever.”
In 2005, I spoke to the gentleman who was a ground crew chief for my late dad’s England-based B-17 bomb group base. He told me two interesting things: 1) That Stalin stopped working on the bomb after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and 2) Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved close to a million Allied lives. I believe him.
I was very surprised to see the lack of emergency preparation for these flight crews. I read that the B-24 Liberator had a center-line ventral catwalk just nine inches wide making it almost impossible for the flight crew and nose gunner to get from the flight deck to the rear when wearing parachutes.
You seem to have a real insight into what went on.
It is curious why Zamperini's B-24 wasn't equipped with such an emergency radio.
I’m learning a lot about this for the first time. A hand-powered, floating survival radio seems like it would be a must-have for water survival. Being that it weighed 33 pounds, I suppose that weight would be a factor. However, those bombers carried way more than that in bomb tonnage.
I would loved to have seen this as a three part miniseries on Television.
Part one His youth and the Olympics.
Part two the war experience up to the liberation of the camps.
Part three post war focusing on his redemption.
But no one asked my opinion.
Having recently read Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermath, the portrayal of Japanese cruelty fell utterly short of the horror that these men endured. A PG13 rating is no excuse for downplaying the utter inhumanity of the Japanese POW experience.
The struggles these men faced returning home after experiencing the depths of depravity was the story. Like Ira James, the hero's welcome they received only increased their survivor's guilt and exacerbated their PTSD. Most never recovered. People are not comic book heros and world war is not a black and white battle between good and evil; they are flawed human beings who struggle to make sense of a world gone mad. The most vivid lesson from all the POW accounts that I have read is that many who died simply lost the will to live and those who made it found a reason to live. There were the faintest glimmers of this is the movie, but nothing that a general audience would catch.
The old English teachers adage, "show, don't tell'," was usurped in this movie. It was replaced with, "Please, tell me something!" Ultimately, the movie's problems are more of an indictment of current society 's shallowness than a simple cinematic failure. Our society as a whole is (quasi) illiterate, emotionally dysfunctional and spiritually lost. One could describe the Mona Lisa as a picture of a woman without eyebrows, but is hardly does justice to the topic.
The paltry two-line reference to Louis's faith and his reconciliation with his captors was less than trite. I found the real life footage at the end of the movie to be the best part. Given the man's incredible life story, the shallow treatment of his character and his faith that drove his eventual recovery is inexcusable. I hope you are correct and that many will read the book. Maybe it will prompt some to seek the Truth.
I’m just 4 chapters into reading the book so it’s hard to comment.
Roosevelt and Stalin agreed that Russia would enter the Pacific Theater 90 days after VE Day, whenever that might be (at Yalta...).This was one agreement that Stalin adhered to.
Thanks for your comments. I did find the life raft sequence tedious and the POW experience was too low-key. Maybe someone else will do the story right and get to his life after war. However, this guy lived a life worthy of a mini-series. I did not know that Bird was the other Olympian. It’s a shame that so many significant details were not brought out in the movie.
I read the book and saw the movie. It’s a fine movie, and makes no difference who directed it. Something tells me the criticism of the movie is mainly because of who directed it. I am no fan of Brad Pitt, the atheist little creep, but his wife is a good actress, who was brought up Christian and hopefully one day will return to the faith. In the book there is mention of Pappy Boyington, who was a POW in the same camp as Zamperini. I didn’t see this in the movie. I have always thought a movie about Colonel Boyington’s time as a POW would make a hell of a movie. If Zamperini was put through hell because of his notoriety as a track star, you can imagine the hell that Pappy Boyington went through for shooting down all those ZEROS! I read an interview by him a few years ago and he was asked about his time as a POW. He said it was not exactly a picnic but it probably added two years to his life. The interview said how was that possible. Pappy said “well hell it was two years I couldn’t drink”!!
The "Bird" as played by Takamasa Ishihara:
Thanks for the correction. I figured that would have been a very weird coincidence.
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