It's the beginning of December in 1941, and the Americans around the military post in the Philippines breathe a sigh of relief as the Japanese emissary to the United States talks about peace. Fay McKenzie gets off the ship and attracts the vulpine attentions of Army privates Don Barry and Alan Curtis. She makes a beeline to tubby Maynard Holmes. He is her brother. Soon she's working for kindly Rhys Williams, who offers free beer to all Americans at the bar he and Dutch Sig Ruman run. It looks like business as usual, with the three privates getting into trouble. What no one knows is that Williams and Ruman are German spies, preparing for the Japanese invasion of the islands. They know that the Japanese are about to attack Pearl Harbor.
This is probably the first fiction film to mention Pearl Harbor, made possible by Republic's, well, call it 'efficient' process: dust off an old script, make a few changes, and give it to director Joseph Santley to direct, and ship it to the theater 162 days after the event. It's certainly not great film making, and the story is full of the sort of cliches that make cynical watchers like me raise my eyebrows eighty years later. Yet there is no disputing the sheer competence of everyone involved, nor the indisputable power that such a movie would have had at the time. Then everyone took a week off and went on to the next movie. It was the third of five movies that Santley directed that year, the fourth of nine that Barry would appear in.
This is probably the first fiction film to mention Pearl Harbor, made possible by Republic's, well, call it 'efficient' process: dust off an old script, make a few changes, and give it to director Joseph Santley to direct, and ship it to the theater 162 days after the event. It's certainly not great film making, and the story is full of the sort of cliches that make cynical watchers like me raise my eyebrows eighty years later. Yet there is no disputing the sheer competence of everyone involved, nor the indisputable power that such a movie would have had at the time. Then everyone took a week off and went on to the next movie. It was the third of five movies that Santley directed that year, the fourth of nine that Barry would appear in.