Tora! Tora! Tora!
Short description
Tora! Tora! Tora! dramatizes the events leading up to the Japanese attack on the United States naval base at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The film follows the breakdown in relations between the two countries and the intelligence failures on the American side, as warnings from intercepted messages and radar sightings fail to reach the commanders who could have acted on them. It is told from both the American and Japanese points of view, covering the planning of the operation as well as the response to it. The title comes from the code the lead Japanese pilot used to signal that surprise had been achieved.
Richard Fleischer directed the American sequences, with Kinji Fukasaku and Toshio Masuda handling the Japanese scenes. For Fleischer it was the thirteenth of twenty-three films he directed in chronological order, following Che! and preceding 10 Rillington Place. The screenplay was written by Akira Kurosawa, Hideo Oguni and Ryūzō Kikushima. Martin Balsam, Sō Yamamura, Jason Robards, Joseph Cotten, Tatsuya Mihashi and E.G. Marshall appear among a credited cast of 104.
A joint American and Japanese production made for around 25 million US dollars, the film returned roughly 30 million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 7.5 from 40,000 votes, while on TMDB it has 7.2 from 623. A critics' rating of 6.1 from 30 reviews places professional assessments below the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- War veterans from both sides consulted on the filming, including Minoru Genda, the direct author of the Japanese attack plan, whose name does not appear in the credits.
- A U.S. anti-submarine aircraft carrier Yorktown (CV-10) stood in for the Japanese aircraft carrier. American T-6 Texan trainer aircraft, fitted with false fairings, were used as Japanese combat aircraft.
- One of the alternative titles for the computer game "Fire Shark" is "Tora! Tora! Tora!".
- The Curtiss P-40 fighters taking off in the film were real, while dozens of others, destroyed on the ground, were fiberglass mock-ups.
- The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress crash landing was genuine footage of a real plane and a real, un-staged accident.
- The film's title is a code phrase that was transmitted at the start of the attack and indicated that the complete surprise of the attack, which the Japanese had hoped for, had been achieved. Translated from Japanese, the phrase means "Tiger! Tiger! Tiger!"; however, it can also be interpreted as a code phrase derived from "totsugeki (突撃) – raigeki (雷撃)" ("torpedo attack").
- Akira Kurosawa initially directed the Japanese part of the film, but after two years of unproductive work, he was replaced by Kinji Fukasaku. Only one minute of Kurosawa's footage made it into the final cut.
- The film was shot on two sets – separately in the USA (directed by Richard Fleischer) and in Japan.
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