Director: Fred Zinnermann
Cast: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed
Have I Seen it Before: Nope. I mean, I’ve seen that one shot any number of times, but there’s a whole dynamic movie outside of those waves!
Did I Like It: And one that really puts into sharp relief just how stupid an undertaking Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (2001) really was. The film might be a bit weighed down by the trappings of a Hollywood product of the era, but any film that tracks in the inevitability of a looming historical event and still manages to milk tension out of that dread is worth a look. Even in the film’s climactic act, the production does not cheap out on the scope of the attack. There’s a little bit of stock footage—and it works well enough—implemented, but there’s more than enough Zeroes actually being shot from the sky to make it all credible as if it was actually taking place in December of 1941.
People might get bent out of shape about Lancaster or Clift not winning the Best Actor Oscar that year, but I think this is another example of a great film clearing the big awards only for its best elements. The two leading men may be wielding the most dynamic acting craft then available for the screen, but they are fundamentally just accomplishing the pedestrian task of being romantic leading men.
One might even bring themselves—and apparently even the Chairman himself thought he was more deserving for later work—to say that Sinatra isn’t doing much more than being comic relief. But to watch a man whose entire iconic image is so far from a comedian thoroughly fight every instinct he must have is worthy of at least some hardware. The fact that nearly any time some one is singing in the film, he just stands there at the edge of the frame, likely seething at a bunch of amateurs taking the focus away from him only clinches the deal.