Movie-A-Day: Destination Tokyo – Or, the power of Hollywood war propaganda

Starring: Cary Grant, John Garfield, Alan Hale, John Ridgley Director: Delmer Daves Year Of Release: 1943 Plot: During World War II, the submarine the USS Copperfin sails under secret orders to Tokyo. Their mission is to put men ashore who will gather information vital to the first air raid on the Japanese capital. The sub must face Japanese airmen, sickness and the fears of the new crewmembers, in order to ensure the Doolittle raid’s success.

When people talk about propaganda, they normally concentrate on the Nazis and the communists and tut about how it tried to brainwash the populace. Less mentioned is that the Allied forces weren’t really all that different, we just had a different philosophy and we didn’t call it propaganda. Indeed back then that word didn’t have the negative connotations it has now, and was just seen as governments or other organisations trying to spread fertile messages that would grow in the minds of those that heard them.

However after the war, largely due to the Nazi propaganda machine, it became a pejorative terms. However there’s little doubt that during the war, the Allies engaged heavily in propaganda and did it knowingly. In fact, it was the American propaganda that demonised the Nazi propaganda and made that word seem like something evil and cynical.

For example, Frank Capra made several films under the title ‘Why We Fight’. Capra had seen Leni Riefenstahl’s German propaganda film Triumph of the Will, and had been challenged by the way it was incredibly rousing, even though it espoused a philosophy he loathed. Capra came up with the rather clever trick of appropriating a lot of the tricks of Nazi and Soviet propaganda but used them for pro-American war documentaries. However his masterstroke was to actually include bits of the enemy’s propaganda footage but recontextualise it for the Allied side. He simultaneously spliced in bits of particularly outrageous Nazi propaganda without changing it, to show how evil these people were and how they were brainwashing the German population (it really was trying to have your cake and eat it, but it worked).

However Capra didn’t make the films just because he fancied supporting the war effort, he was hired to make them by the US Government, who wanted him because they felt the director of Mr Smith Goes To Washington understood “the heart and soul of American audiences.” Almost from the day of Pearl Harbor, the American government realised they needed to sell the war to the population. While a direct attack on US soil made war inevitable, the extent of the battle wasn’t. Until December 1941, America had been fairly isolationist, but now the government had to convince Americans not only that they should fight back against the Japanese, but also go to war in Europe, ally with the hated Soviets and that normal people should buy war bonds to help pay for all this – and of course they also needed lots and lots of new recruits.

They knew that while speeches and posters may have worked in World War I, now it was film that would have the greatest impact. As a result, not long after US involvement in WWII began, the government went to Hollywood both to sell the studios on supporting the war, and also to try and borrow their personnel to make propaganda movies. It wasn’t a tough sell, as many of the studios were owned by people whose families were already caught up in Hitler’s anti-Jewish mania and were more than keen to support anything that was anti-Nazi or anti-Japanese.

As a result the likes of Frank Capra went off to work for the government, Hollywood stars were drafted in for war bond tours (indeed, Clark Gable’s wife, Carole Lombard, became the first woman to die in the continental US as part of the war effort, when her plane crashed while returning from just such a bond tour), some stars went to fight themselves, and the studios quickly began ramping up the production of movies that didn’t just support the war, but acted like recruiting posters for the military.

Destination Tokyo is one of those movies, and isn’t really that shy about saying so. By today’s standard the movie seems slightly awkward, blatant and faintly ridiculous, but it’s actually subtler than it seems. Like many of the other Hollywood war films, which were made while the country was still fighting, it actually walks a fairly tricky tightrope.

Those still at home wanted films that buoyed their spirits, so anything that was just a constant succession of people dying in pointless ways was out. However they also needed movies that confirmed the feeling that it was both worth fighting and also that those who were in battle may face immense danger, but did so with bravery, courage and a resolution they were doing the right thing. The result is that the films live in a slightly odd netherworld, where war seems dangerous but not terribly so. In Destination Tokyo, they spend far more time singing carols, getting their hair cut and generally doing male bonding and wistfully talking about how they’re fighting for their families back home, than they do actually facing the Japanese – in fact being on a submarine largely seems like jolly good fun and a great way to test you manliness. In these films, people always die trying to do something brave, with their deaths always carefully made to seem as if it’s tragic bad luck (wrong place, wrong time) rather than be
cause the other side is good at killing Americans.

Just as much time is spent denigrating the Axis powers as promoting the Allies, and to modern eyes it’s undoubtedly done in racist terms. The Nazis are evil, but they’re white and so still human, with the majority of the German population presented as having been twisted into something wicked by Hitler. However no such apologies are made for the Japanese, who are seen as pretty much subhuman monsters, with the reasoning seeming to be that they’re not white and therefore not the same as ‘us’ (after all, the US rounded up Japanese-American families and put them in internment camps, but didn’t do the same with German-American families).

Destination Tokyo is full of this, taking certain aspects of Japanese culture and deliberately twisting it, or otherwise dehumanising the enemy. For example, after Cary Grant has given a speech about how the ‘Japs’ raise their kids from birth to be evil killing machines, he finishes off by saying, “There’s lots of Mikes dying right now. And a lot more Mikes will die. Until we wipe out a system that puts daggers in the hands of five-year-old children.” It’s a less than subtle call to arms while simultaneously making the enemy out to be monsters.

Perhaps most jaw-dropping to modern ears is when Cary Grant is talking about love. He speaks about how Americans love their families, before going on to say how in Japan, women are just for work or sex and nothing else, and that the ‘Japs’ don’t understand the way American love their woman, ‘in fact in Japan there’s no word in for it’. This tendency to make out that Asians were somehow subhuman and immune from normal human emotions was a favourite trick of Allied propaganda, and also re-emerged during the Vietnam War as an easy way to dehumanise the opposition.

These films really are quite fascinating as historical documents, even if they’ve somewhat lost their power to entertain (not completely, as they’re still quite stirring – and quite frankly any film that can make appendicitis one of its centrepiece action sequences, as Destination Tokyo does, must get some plus points). Although the Americans never quite reached the heights of propaganda that the Nazis did (their propaganda movies are something to behold in their stirring, authoritarian patriotism and vilification of any opposition), but there’s no doubt they engaged in it in ways it would be difficult to do nowadays without huge opposition.

Under the circumstances of the early 40s it’s easy to understand why both made movies designed to sway the feelings of the populace, and now it’s undoubtedly interesting to look back on – if only so we can more aware of when people try to do it, often in more subtle ways, today.

NOTE: Destination Tokyo is currently only available in the UK as part of the Cary Grant Signature Collection box set.

TIM ISAAC

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