-
4. Over There: Honolulu, June 26, 1945, Back to Bataan
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
4 Over There Honolulu, June 26, 1945 ■ Back to Bataan Best Years ■ 86 Immediacy What we call “immediacy,” and have defined as the intersection of the front page and movie page, contemporary trade journals, dailies, and weeklies called “exploitation ,” a more narrowly commercial construction of one of the defining practices of the years on which we focus.1 Examples of immediacy in the preceding chapter include the translation of U.S. Latin American policy into the Good Neighbor musical and, looking ahead to San Francisco and beyond, the reverberation of contemporary internationalist debates in the cautionary, historical Wilson. In chapter 2 we sought to demonstrate how total war viewed stateside—from industrial conversion to shortages and rationing, from the furlough romance to the challenges faced by the women left behind—found its coordinates in Since You Went Away, The Very Thought of You, and a host of other over-here titles projected across America. Both chapters underscore that the key to “exploitation” is currency understood as actuality and rewarded as revenue: the ring of names and places in the news is a harbinger of that of the cash register. Immediacy resonated nowhere more powerfully than in the “over-there” movie, a war-themed narrative set outside of the continental United States, whose plot engaged with combat, espionage, resistance, and/or occupation .2 This entry on Bataan (1943) from the Exhibitor makes the point: “Backed by a title that has a meaning for all America, and backed by an A-1 male cast, this should get the better money. . . . This comes late in the war cycle, which may affect the grosses, but it is crammed with exploitation angles.”3 Subscribers weighing the booking and marketing of Behind the Rising Sun (1943) read in a subsequent issue of the same publication: “Topical show has sensational exploitation angles. . . . The topic will be of interest to everyone, since it is the first time touched upon in a movie although more ‘inside stuff’ might have been included. . . . Plenty of stock news shots are pieced in nicely. The exploitation will make the difference.”4 Variety announced with its accustomed pith that “‘Exploitation Pictures’ Paid Off Big for Majors.”5 April 25, 1945–August 14, 1945 The months between the opening of the San Francisco conference on April 25 and V-J Day, August 14, were among the most ferocious of the armed conflict. Events abroad followed one upon the other with explosive speed. In Hollywood, studios raced to stay ahead of the story of war’s end, making changes during shooting, holding back releases or rushing production and exhibition schedules to coincide with breaking news, tacking up-to-the-minute prologues or epilogues onto final cuts. On April 28, just three days after the United Nations parley began, Benito Mussolini was captured and executed by Italian partisans. Two days later Adolf Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker; a week later, on May 7, Germany surrendered. The movies had anticipated these and other events of that fateful season; they had offered versions of what commentators predicted were things to come. The Führer’s end, although differently conceived, had been scripted in Hitler—Dead or Alive (1943) and The Hitler Gang (1944). The fall of the Nazi capital was the context for Hotel Berlin, in production from November 1944 to January 1945 and released two months later, with publicity that suggested that the fiction on the screen had scooped the press. Post-Hitler Nazism was foreshadowed by The Master Race, the trials of German war criminals by None Shall Escape, both released in 1944. During the fall and winter of 1944, and into the spring and summer of 1945, the bloody battle for the retaking of the Philippines was fought and finally won. On June 21 systematic resistance ceased on Okinawa. On July 16 the USS Indianapolis left San Francisco with a cargo of two atomic bombs. On August 6 the Enola Gay dropped the first on Hiroshima; three days later, the second fell on Nagasaki. A month later, audiences queued up to see The House on 92nd Street, a cryptodocumentary on the development of nuclear weapons. First Yank into Tokyo, also released in September 1945, concludes with footage of a mushroom cloud over which a voice salutes the role of the bomb in ending the war. A year later, Cloak and Dagger and The Beginning or the End testified to the arguments that raged over the horrific fallout that shrouded the two devastated Japanese cities...