Hell to Eternity
Directed by Phil Karlson
Written by Ted Sherdeman and Walter Roeber Schmidt; story by Gil Doud
1960/USA
Allied Artists Pictures/Atlantic Pictures Corporation
First viewing/Netflix rental
[box] Guy Gabaldon: [after shooting two soldiers] I understood that double-crossing speech! These men died without any reason. I didn’t want to kill them! You want to go to your army? All right, you go, but I’m going with you to keep you honest, and you’re gonna tell those people on this island that the war is over. Now let’s move![/box]
I would have rated this a standard biopic/combat movie had it not been derailed by an interminable gratuitous striptease sequence halfway in.
This is based on a true story. During the depression, youngster Guy Gabaldon is caught stealing potatoes from a grocery store. He then gets in a fistfight at school and an older Japanese-American boy tries to straighten him out and take him to his parents. It turns out Guy has been living alone in absolute poverty. His father is dead and his mother is in the hospital. The older boy’s family takes Guy in. After Guy’s mother dies, he is adopted. Guy blends in perfectly with the family and learns to speak fluent Japanese as his adoptive parents speak no English.
Guy grows up to be Jeffrey Hunter. After Pearl Harbor, his family is sent to an internment camp where the sons enlist. Guy is drafted and becomes a specialist interpreter in the Marines.
Guy’s unit has a couple of days leave in Hawaii before they are shipped to the Pacific. Guy is quite the ladies’ man and takes his buddies (David Janssen and Vic Damone) on a spree. He manages to score several bottles of good whiskey. The men then repair to a bar where Guy makes friends with a waitress with his Japanese skills. A buddy is more interested in a supposedly cold Caucasian reporter. The men and two women repair to the waitress’s apartment where they meet her stripper roommate. It is then we are treated to a bunch of drunken leering and two stripteases. The scene seems to go on for half an hour.
Suddenly the action shift to Saipan. Guy is initially torn by his feelings about the Japanese. After a couple of battles, he becomes almost too gung ho. In the end, his Japanese skills allow him to capture more enemy soldiers than anyone in history including Alvin York. With Sessue Hayakawa as a general and George Takai as one of Guy’s brothers.
Director Karlson, always lurid, lost me with the striptease and I never really got behind the story again. The sequence was not so much offensive as really boring and pointless. It’s an interesting story and might have made a good movie in other hands.
Trailer
