Le premier Américain à Tokyo

I agree that a movie -- or almost any other cultural artifact -- should be judged on the basis of the times and circumstances of its production. It's unfair to judge what people have done in the past through the prism of our own prevailing prejudices. Barbara Field, the African-American historian, was critical of Lincoln's deciding to wait until after Antietam to announce the emancipation of slaves -- this in Ken Burns' documentary on the Civil War. That sort of statement has always irritated me, brimming over with self righteousness. (I wonder how historians will judge us a hundred years from now. I hope they're kinder to us.) So I am willing to take the temporal context into account. The simple fact is that a movie that humanized the enemy would not have been made in 1945 -- or for years afterward for that matter. Steinbeck's script for "The Moon is Down" was criticized for turning a German soldier into something resembling a human being. And in "The Desert Fox" (ca. 1950) James Mason's touching performance as Erwin Rommel was blasted. In the later "The Desert Rats," playing Rommel again, Mason was forced to resort to the usual stereotype. How would you feel if you now saw a movie that included a partly sympathetic portrayal of a member of Al Qeda? Given all that, this movie is pretty crummy. The crumminess is not only in the script, although it's certainly there too, but especially in the performances, and most notably in Tom Neal's. He was out of his depth, although the part was simple enough. (He was IN his depth in "Detour".) He doesn't even get the Japanese bow right. The bow is face down, smart and snappy, in real military life. Neal bows slowly from the hips down, keeping his face up all the time, as if involved in some particularly outre tai ji exercise. The make up job is astonishing. And his speech! He evidently has a set of false teeth (all Japs are buck-toothed) which make him sound as if he's speaking through a mouth full of tooth paste. On top of that he struggles desperately to impose a "Japanese" accent which consists mostly of substituting [r] for [l] and vice versa. Let's just say he speaks his lines memorably. Sure it's a racist movie, but it WAS wartime, and it's understandable -- a lot more understandable than rounding up Japanese-American families and shuffling them off to internment camps. THAT manifestation of racism is less justifiable. But the movie is pretty bad nonetheless, unless you can enjoy it as pozlost.

(There are Spoilers) Unusual movie released on September 5, 1945 in the USA a mare three days after the war in the Pacific against Japan was officially ended with the signing of the surrender of the Japanese Empire on the deck of the US battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

The film "First Yank into Tokyo" is also the first major motion picture that has the atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in it and the development of the "A" Bomb as a major factor in it's story-line. Which gives you the impression that it was made in less then a month and quickly rolled out of the Hollywood movie assembly line to take advantage of that war ending and earth-shaking event.

The film itself is anything but earth-shaking with an unbelievable plot that has all-American collage football hero USAAF Major Steve Ross, Tom Neal,given a full make-over to look like a "Jap" as the Japanese were call back then in wartime Hollywood motion pictures. Ross is to infiltrate a Japanese prison camp outside of Tokyo and get the secret formula for an atomic device from captured US scientist Lewis Jardine ,Marc Cramer. Jardines captors had no idea that he was working on a bomb that would blow them to kingdom come in just a few short months! the Japanese thought that he was a just a run of the mill refrigeration technician and serviceman!

Ross now calling himself Sgt. Toma Tachiyama is smuggled into the prison camp, the notorious Camp Kamuri, by a friendly Korean black-marketeer Haan-Soo, Keye Luke, to get the information from Jardine and have him smuggled out of Japan on an awaiting British Sub expected to submerge outside Tokyo Bay in a few days.

Things get a little strange for Ross/Tachiyama when he not only finds that his long lost , and given up for dead, back home in America sweetheart Abby Drake, Barbara Hale, not only survived the Battan Death-March but is working in the prison camp as it's head nurse. Even worse Abby is in love with Lewis Jardine! The very man that Ross is supposed to rescue!

With all these coincidences whizzing through Ross' already battered brain the commandant of the prison camp is non-other then Col. Hideko Okanura, Richard Loo, who back in America was Steve Ross' collage roommate. Col. Okanura knows every move and gesture that he makes which in end gives Ross away as an American posing as a Japanese soldier.

The film is really hard to take even if it was released as a moral booster to whip up the American public to the war effort since the war was all but over by the time the movie even started shooting. It's depiction of the Japanese soldiers as uncivilized brutes who treated both man and women like dirt or even worse was like kicking someone when he was already down and out and no threat at all.

Ross together with his Korean sidekick Haan-Soo hold off an entire Japanese battalion in wave after wave of suicide attacks at the end of the movie. This gives both Jardine and Abby enough time to escape and both Ross and Haan-Soo eventually, off camera, end up getting killed by the charging Japanese hoards.

You can easily see why Steve Ross decided to stay and not go back home with Abby who was still very much in love with him. Having his face changed by plastic surgery he'll never look the same again; a before James Dean-like handsome looking Steve Ross or Tom Neal. With a face like that changing colors in every scene with alien from space-like almond-shaped eyes. With a face like that and what seems like a pair of badly fitted false teeth that makes it very difficult for him to speak intelligently who could blame Ross for voluntarily staying behind and getting himself killed in action!

Interesting plot, not overloaded with the usual World War 2 Era derogatory remarks about the Japanese-but not politically correct by today's standards. It is a late WW2 film piece concerning an American soldier who undergoes plastic surgery to allow himself to look Japanese and infiltrate a prison camp in order to gain information from an American prisoner being held there. Tom Neal does a good job with the role. Seeing Keye Luke in a non Charlie Chan or Dr. Kildare series was a plus for the film.

I swear when I watched this movie as a child it was called " I Was a Jap for the F.B.I." Does anyone remember that or am I thinking of something else? I remember that the main character undergoes plastic surgery and the only way the Japanese are able to discover him is by watching films of old American college football games when he played and noticed he had a habit of twiddling his thumbs which he is still doing during a secret meeting with the Japanese.

That sentiment, which came at the tacked-on ending of this strange movie, didn't turn out to be true.

This film is notable mainly for the presence of Tom Neal, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in 1965.

Neal plays Steve Ross, a soldier who had lived in Tokyo and spoke Japanese like a native. He agrees to undergo plastic surgery to look Japanese and goes undercover in a concentration camp to rescue Lewis Jardine, a scientist with valuable secrets about the atomic bomb. It's a doubly dangerous mission because Ross' old roommate, Hideko Okanura (Richard Loo) heads the camp.

The real story here is the love story between Ross and the camp nurse, Abby Drake (Barbara Hale), whom Ross had presumed dead after they left one another back in the states. She doesn't recognize him but feels sympathetic towards him.

This is a real Hollywood/World War II artifact. The set is unbelievably cheap and obvious, the concentration camp is more like a low-budget Holiday Inn, and the Japanese are Chinese and American.

There has been criticism levied at the way the Japanese are portrayed, and I like the analogy one of the reviewers here made -- would you like to see a film with a sympathetic Al Qaeda character? It's important to watch a film and see it in the context of the times. Grant you, it's a contrived plot and not particularly good.

Barbara Hale would go on to fame as Della Street in the Perry Mason series. She's still alive as of this writing and the mother of actor William Katt.

Tom Neal's private life was far more impressive than his professional one. He's okay here. These films were always made very quickly, so it's hard to criticize the finer points of his performance.

The atom bomb was dropped before the release of the film, so the studio went back and threw on another ending.

Lots of films in those days did not portray the grittiness and atrocity of the war. Most of these propaganda movies were made for general audiences and soft-pedaled some of the more horrible aspects.

It was a different time and the world was different. Today we can go to the movies or watch the news and see all the atrocity, violence, and horror we want. Whoopee.