Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

          Representing a great opportunity for historical spectacle that was sacrificed on the altar of its own leviathan scope, Tora! Tora! Tora!was conceived by Twentieth Century-Fox chief Daryl F. Zanuck as a companion piece to his epic war movie The Longest Day (1962). Whereas the earlier film was a star-studded reenactment of the D-Day invasion, focusing primarily on the heroism of a successful Allied assault, Tora! Tora! Tora! paints across a bigger canvas. The picture follows both American and Japanese forces before, during, and after the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941. Zanuck’s intentions were basically honorable, since he put together a coproduction with a Japanese team that was responsible for portraying their country’s soldiers in a humane light; Zanuck even hired the great Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa to develop and direct the Japanese half of the picture, although Kurosawa was replaced once production got underway. Journeyman Richard Fleischer, an efficient traffic cop not known for his artistry, handled the English-language scenes.

          Yet Zanuck’s overreaching vision of an opulent super-production almost inevitably generated a bloated movie in which hardware overwhelms humanity. The leaden screenplay, credited to Larry Forrester and Kurosawa allies Ryuzo Kikushima and Hideo Oguni—and based on two different books—is a dull recitation of names and dates without any memorable characterizations. In the American scenes alone, venerable actors including Martin Balsam, Joseph Cotten, E.G. Marshall, Jason Robards, and James Whitmore get lost amid the generic hordes of men in military uniforms wandering through command centers and battleship bridges. In the admirable effort to explain how and why the Japanese military caught American forces unaware, the movie provides dry description when it should provide intense drama—paradoxically, trying to do too much led the filmmakers to do too little.

          Nonetheless, the movie gets exciting whenever it departs from its inept attempts at personal interplay and focuses on battlefield spectacle. Employing a huge assortment of boats and planes (plus a whole lot of pyro, of course), Fleischer stages lavish scenes of wartime destruction, all of which are jacked up by composer Jerry Goldsmith’s invigorating music. Thus, it’s no surprise that the lasting legacy of Tora! Tora! Tora! is as a stockpile of endlessly reused footage—according to Wikipedia, clips and outtakes from this film appear in Midway (1976), The Final Countdown (1980), several TV episodes and miniseries, and even Pearl Harbor (2001). So, if you’re a military-history buff, you’ll probably find a lot to enjoy in Tora! Tora! Tora!–otherwise, you might have a hard time trudging through the movie’s 144 impressive but inert minutes.

Tora! Tora! Tora!: FUNKY

The Pursuit of Happiness (1971)

          The Pursuit of Happiness is yet another middling drama about angst-ridden ’70s youth culture that ends up feeling less like a sensitive tribute to a thoughtful generation and more like a condescending satire of mixed-up kids. Gangly Michael Sarrazin plays William Popper, a New York City college student from a privileged family. He lives with hippie activist Jane Kauffman (Barbara Hershey), and he uncomfortably straddles her world of ideals and his family’s world of Establishment values. Driving in the rain one night, William accidentally hits and kills an old woman who steps into traffic. He’s arrested. William’s sensitive father, artist John Popper (Arthur Hill), arrives on the scene to help William through his legal troubles, but the family’s stern lawyer, Daniel Lawrence (E.G. Marshall), drips contempt for William’s screw-the-man attitude.

          Ignoring Daniel’s advice to keep his mouth shut, William makes a scene during his first hearing—he gives a naïve speech about how the legal system isn’t interested in empirical truth—and gets thrown into prison. All of this confirms William’s impression that society is broken; as William whines at one point, “There’s a nervous breakdown happening in this country, and I don’t want to be part of it if I don’t have to.” Also thrown into the mix is William’s loving but racist grandmother (Ruth White), the personification of small-minded Old Money.

          Based on a book by Thomas Rogers and directed by Robert Mulligan (To Kill a Mockingbird), this picture means well but undercuts itself. William isn’t truly an idealist; rather, he’s a slacker uninterested in committing to anything. Thus, when William breaks out of prison and tries to flee the country, his actions don’t seem charged with us-vs.-them significance. Sure, the filmmakers communicate the central idea that William resents the game he’s being asked to play (feign adherence to Establishment values, and you can get away with anything), but William is so passive that he’s the least interesting person who could have taken this journey. Sarrazin’s perfunctory performance exacerbates matters, as does the blunt screenplay. The movie also leaves several promising storylines unexplored, so characters including a crusty detective (Ralph Waite), an imprisoned politician (David Doyle), and a mysterious pilot (William Devane) pass through the story too quickly. Each of them, alas, is more interesting than the protagonist.

The Pursuit of Happiness: FUNKY