Reviews

I can't stop watching this. Somehow, someway, this thing has wormed itself into my brain and won't let go. It's just so compelling in how bizarre and misguided and deliriously stupid it is on so many levels (you could write an entire dissertation on this movie's very very very very bad and weird but also complicated views on race).

At one point, during the third act there's a bit where a belly dancer appears flailing a pair of katana around much to the voracious delight of a bunch of drunk Japanese soldiers. I kinda wish the rest of the movie had kept that energy because it would've been a hell of a lot more entertaining, if still not approaching anything "good".

First Yank Into Tokyo is every World War II Allied propaganda cliche and trope distilled down into a sub-90 minute runtime and executed with a B-level budget. Melodrama? Check. Yellowface? Check. Richard Loo? Check. Cheap standing backlot sets only mildly repurposed to try and fit their new exotic setting and stretching suspension of disbelief in the process? Check. (An Imperial Army compound looks suspiciously like a swanky mansion in Pasadena.) A plot constantly having to be rewritten and revised to keep up with the actual progress of the still-ongoing war? Check. Woeful misunderstanding/misrepresentation of wartime Asian governments, people, and culture both allied and enemy? Double check. Just plain old fashioned racism? Check.

This movie is weird. It's plot is about an American Air Force ace (Tom Neal of Detour fame) who gets what can best be described as yellowface surgery to infiltrate a Japanese prison camp to rescue a scientist with the Manhattan Project. We're told that our all-American hero (he plays football and everything) is uncannily good at imitating Japanese language and mannerisms to the point of being able to fool any native. Said chameleon-like ability involves Neal speaking in a bizarre pseudo-racist caricature of what a stroke victim with dementia and a speech impediment thinks a Japanese person sounds like. It'd be offensive if it wasn't so damn weird, whatever Neal's trying to do it just sounds like he has a bunch of cotton stuffed between his gums. Even weirder, it's a put-on that almost none of the other "actual" Japanese characters (most of whom are at least played by actual Asian actors) attempt; they just sound a bit stilted and day "excellency" and "honorable" a lot.

"More weird than offensive" is really an aphorism that can apply to this whole movie. The movie has such a strange take on race that one wonders if it was an attempt to be avant-garde, however unlikely that is. We're told repeatedly that Neal's surgical procedure is irreversible, a fact that is treated as some great tragic sacrifice, that this handsome square-jawed Caucasian will have to spend the rest of his life looking Japanese. Not "being" Japanese, but just "looking" Japanese is a fate worse than death - Neal chooses to die an extremely avoidable death and effectively abandon his true love to fate just because he can't stand the idea of going back to America looking Asian. "Whenever she looks at me, she'll just think of the other Japs, the ones who hurt her," he says with all the gravitas he can muster, as she is literally begging him to shut up and come with her.

Of course Neal isn't ACTUALLY Japanese, as the movie is quick to remind us. Again. And again. After all, what gives him away to his fellow whites is not his obviously fake forehead or eyelids, but his air of compassion and humanity literally all other Japanese are devoid of. The movie reiterates again and again how the Japanese are soulless, lecherous, ruthless monsters who will stop at nothing to conquer the world and can't be reasoned with even by superior American post-secondary education. That the film ends in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (the first time said event had ever been discussed or shown in a movie) and a heroic overture with a narrator declaring that "man can once again live in peace", this film just screams the exterminationist rhetoric most other WW2 films just hint at. Funny how as much America (somewhat rightfully) lambasted Japan for its racial supremacist and genocidal tendencies, it seems more than happy to coopt that very same rhetoric for its own ends.

Which brings us to possibly the film's only real artistic or historical significance; the character Haan-Soo (played by the ever-underrated Keye Luke). Haan, a Korean black marketer and secret agent of la resistance, is the film's only real positive Asian presence, insofar as he's the only significant non-white character to not be characterized as "kill this person, they are insane and irredeemable, kill them all". Haan deliberately plays on racial stereotypes as a willfully subservent, bootlicking handyman to cover for his clandestine activities. Like Neal, he's wearing a racial mask, hiding his true intentions behind broad stereotypes to ingratiate himself among his enemies. Haan is a million times more interesting a character than Neal, least of all because he's one of the only on-screen, wartime acknowledgements of Korean involvement in the Allied cause, albeit in a roundabout and heavily fictionalized way. It's also the one place where the movie's racial politics approaches some degree of nuance, possibly unintentionally. To the average American (especially pre-war), there was no meaningful difference between a Japanese or Korean (assuming they even knew there was one), they were all just "Oriental" and "foreign" and lumped together. But in this movie, where to be Asian is a fate worse than death, Haan is an unambiguously positive presence. The fact that the Japanese characters are played by exclusively non-Japanese actors, effectively one massive act of racial masking, just adds to this unintentional metatext.

Speaking of Japanese characters played by non-Japanese actors, Richard Loo is someone who really gets the short end of the stick in retrospect. An actor known for playing precisely one very specific type of character in one very specific circumstance, the man just oozes character actor charisma. "Sleazy Japanese officer" might've been his type, but damn if he wasn't good at it. Self-assured, menacing, treacherous and completely devoid of sympathy; he leans on every stereotype and beat you'd anticipate and you end up kind of loving him for it. It's kind of telling that along with Keye Luke, he ends up giving the most compelling performance in the whole movie. Our "heroic" leads might be blander than soggy saltines, but at least we have Loo and Luke there to ham things up and actually, y'know, act.