AFI's celebration of Dalton Trumbo prompted me to give this some priority, a few months after my last war film viewing. The casting of Robert Mitchum and the direction of Mervyn LeRoy helped intrigue me.
The reportedly mostly true story follows Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle (Spencer Tracy) and his men on the first U.S. Air Force mission of retaliation for Pearl Harbor. The titular period of bombing comes in the middle of the piece, after much preparation. What follows is an effort to stay alive after crashing in China, in an area pretty well hemmed in by the Japanese.
As war flicks go, it doesn't offer much in the way of violence. When the bombing occurs, we see actual footage from an arguably serendipitous oil fire in Oakland. Apart from that, there are the post-crash injuries. As for nonviolent action, you may or may not enjoy the fairly long view from the cockpit.
Mainly, it's a drama. First we have a lot of loving interaction with wives before the mission. I appreciate a relatively strong female presence, but some viewers think the scenes bog down the gestalt with unimportant details (the Wikipedia summary doesn't even mention them). Later, Ted Lawson (a fine Van Johnson) thinks hard about whether he'll get to -- and really want to -- see his wife again after his critical injury.
The Chinese people are depicted without caricature. After all, they want to help the Americans. I'm not sure how friendly they were in reality, but it makes for a nice change of pace for the time.
TSOT must have done something right with the drama, because I never got bored. I suspect that I have Trumbo's script to thank in large part. Hopefully, you'll feel the same way or better about it, but I can't promise.
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