Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo (1944)

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.

The Enemy Below (1957)

I have discovered that despite my desire to mix old and new cinema, my streaming list is mostly new fare. Shall I blame Netflix's priorities? Anyway, I browsed the few 20th-century entries and picked one almost at random from a decade I hadn't tackled in a while.

Like some other war films I've reviewed here, it keeps the plot simple, even with its loose basis on a novel and its later inspiration of a couple TV episodes. In the South Atlantic, a U.S. destroyer under Captain Murrell (Robert Mitchum) battles a U-boat under Captain von Stolberg (Curd Jürgens). Each captain is impressed at the other's tactics and struggles to work around them.