1976 - MIDWAY, epic retelling of the navel battle via lots of stock footage

When I saw this film in the theater 47 years ago (yikes), I was fairly appalled by it.  The all star cast was for the most part doing it as a favor for producer Walter Mirsch or was filled out with the usual bunch of middle aged Universal stock players.  The film had to work in an interracial love story between a navy pilot and his Japanese girlfriend which seemed completely unnecessary.  Most if not all of the battle scenes were stock footage from various Japanese and American films about the World War II battle in the Pacific.  But most annoyingly Universal studios decided to add their technological marvel Sensurround to the soundtrack so you had to put up with your eardrums almost exploding at times.  You could barely hear the John Williams score towards the end of the film with all the Sensurround noise.

The cast were mostly people Walter Mirsch had worked with in the past, James Coburn, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Cliff 'Robertson, the list goes on.  Mirsch called in a lot of favors to pass this film off as an all star spectacular instead of some overblown TV movie of the week which it basically was.  The production even got Toshiro Mifune to appear yet again as Admiral Yamamoto.

As with all these navel films, there is a lot of pushing little model ships around on big table top maps which after a while gets completely confusing since all the little model ships look alike.  The director was Jack Smight a reliable guy that the studio could keep under their control.  But the real creators of this film were the editors, veterans Robert Swink and Frank Urioste.  They had to paste a movie together from films like Tora Tora Tora, Storm Over the Pacific, Away All Boats, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The Battle of Britain and John Ford's documentary The Battle of Midway of all things.  It's actually kind of amazing the film is as coherent as it is.

For all my kvetching about this story,  the damn movie actually didn't play that badly.  The Battle of Midway is an important historical event during World War II and a very interesting piece of history.  As much as planning and the role that navel intelligence played in the battle on the United States side,  there is no question that the United States Navy was very lucky that day.

 The film was written by  Donald S. Sanford, the running time is 131 minutes.