Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
Short description
Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo follows Lieutenant Ted Lawson, an American pilot who volunteers for a secret bombing mission against Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor, leaving behind his pregnant wife. The operation, planned by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle, sends Army bombers to strike Japanese cities. After the raid, the crews must escape on foot toward China.
The film is based on the account written by Ted W. Lawson, one of the pilots who took part. Mervyn LeRoy directed, working from a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo, with Sam Zimbalist producing for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It was LeRoy's eighth film as director among the fourteen in his filmography, following Random Harvest and preceding Little Women. Van Johnson plays Lawson, Robert Walker plays David Thatcher, and Spencer Tracy plays Doolittle. The credited cast runs to forty-eight names. Made for about 3 million dollars, the film took in roughly 4 million worldwide.
On IMDb it holds a 7.2 rating from around 7,000 votes, while on TMDB it has a 6.7 from a much smaller group of 71 votes, a difference that reflects the far larger and more settled sample behind the IMDb figure.
What's left behind the scenes
- When Lawson's plane, played by Van Johnson (1916-2008), reaches Tokyo and the fires and smoke left by the previous raid of the character played by Scott McKay (1915-1987) become visible below, neither the flames nor the smoke were the result of special effects or pyrotechnics. A fire had broken out at a fuel depot in Oakland, not far from the filming location. The filmmakers seized this opportunity, dispatched a camera plane and the B-25 bombers used in the film to the scene of the emergency, and filmed them over the smoke and fires.
- The Japanese fishing vessels, which came under fire from American escort ships, had actually managed to send a radiogram to Tokyo, but it was ignored. The Japanese authorities chose to disregard the urgent report from "uneducated" fishermen regarding the presence of two American aircraft carriers in such dangerous proximity to the shores of Japan.
- A .50 caliber machine gun weighed approximately the same as 26.5 liters of gasoline. To reduce the aircraft's weight and thereby increase its operational range, the machine guns were removed and replaced with sticks (usually broom handles) painted black. It was hoped that the fake machine guns would deter enemy aircraft, which in turn would reduce B-25 losses during combat missions. The film was released before the war ended, so it mentioned nothing about replacing machine guns with broom handles to keep information regarding the B-25's bomb load and range secret.
- The crew of one of the planes spots Japanese fighters twice and prepares for a dogfight, but nothing happens. This is how it happened in reality. On that very day, the Japanese were planning large-scale air raid defense exercises in Tokyo, so until the very first explosions, Japanese pilots believed the American B-25s were part of the drills. Furthermore, the film's literary source states that Japanese pilots were specifically warned before takeoff that they might not recognize the American planes and react in time, because the Japanese had bombers that looked very similar to the B-25.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
