Okinawa

Tonight I tried watching "Okinawa" and wow was I disappointed. While the film should have been an inspiring epic with a cast of thousands, it's a crappy, cheap little film with a cast of dozens! In other words, although the invasion of Okinawa took thousands and thousands of soldiers, the filmmakers thought they'd cleverly avoid this expense. So, they used LOTS of stock footage of the invasion and has a group of bad actors (or at least actors with really bad dialog) ham it up and pretend that a war is on....though they really do NOTHING! Scene after scene literally consist of folks talking about the war and describing what's happening!! They really do very little and the film looks almost like what a war film by Ed Wood would look like! Just terrible in every way and not worth your time or effort.

This film doesn't do justice to the Battle for Okinawa. I highly recommend "Battle of Okinawa in Color".

The battle for Okinawa in the Ryukyu Islands just south of Japan, trailing off Kyushu like a jet stream was the final battle of World War II in the Pacific. Commanding the Navy Task Force was Raymond Spruance the victor at Midway and it was the largest flotilla ever put together, over 1500 ships. Not to mention the Army and Marine forces who did the fighting on land. As this was Japan's back door so to speak they fought with ferocious intensity with full use of the Kamikaze suicide planes.

The story of Okinawa needed an epic film like The Longest Day. Instead we got a hastily put together film with a lot of cliché stock characters from war films of the era. Pat O'Brien stars as the skipper of the destroyer on which this film's story is told and Richard Denning is his executive officer.

They may be top billed but O'Brien and Denning take second place in screen time to the crew of one of the naval guns on the destroyer. The crew consists of Rhys Williams, Richard Benedict, James Dobson and Cameron Mitchell who dumbed down his command of the English language to the level of Leo Gorcey. The crew is mostly sitting around waiting for the Kamikaze attacks which they know will come.

Okinawa is not a horribly bad film, but with an epic title like that it sure falls short of the mark. The Army, Navy, and Marines who fought there deserved something much better.

Yes, it was pretty bad. Overacting and cliched portrayals of how people were in that post-war period.

Surely not a credit to the career of Pat O'Brien, the star. The lack of makeup and patched scenes of the Japanese soldiers, the poor editing (seems like scenes were clipped in this surviving version), and the corny humor probably should lower my rating even more. But I got out some nostalgia pleasure recalling a simpler time when I was a small child.

And there was one other surprise.

It was a short clip when the sailors were watching a movie aboard the ship. A spectacular blonde dancer who is not credited was singing and strutting a slit dress on a stage and the guys were going crazy. I believe it was Marilyn Monroe, perhaps her first time on film. I wonder if anyone can confirm this.

I was in the navy during the vietnam war. I was deployed to vietnam twice and served on several different navy ships. The characters in this movie would have fit right in with the rest of us.