TO THE SHORES OF IWO JIMA

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 318, 27 July 1945, Page 19

TO THE SHORES OF IWO JIMA

(U.S. Navy-Warner Bros.) |F you want to gain some idea of what war in the Pacific is like, make an effort to see this picture if you are given the chance: I mean if it is generally released (I saw it at a special preview), It is not a feature; just a 20-minute or so record, in colour, of tthe toughest fight ever waged by the U.S. Marine Corps. Human ingenuity and skill have gone into the assembling and editing of the film taken by the cameramen with the invaders of Iwo Jima, just as human skill and ingenuity went into the plan‘ning and execution of the attack itself --the gathering of the great armada of ships, men, and material, the dovetailing of the various operations, and so on. But the chief impression likely to be left on you is.one of inhumanity. Hollywood has never been able to contrive war scenes like these, and yet there is a sense in which Hollywood war scenes appear more real than this actual record of events. There are times-for instance. as you look down from a plane on the serried pattern of wakes left in the sea by the hundreds of landing barges, and as you watch an artillery duel at night-. when you feel you are looking at an impressionist painting by a madman, This film makes plain what other documentaries have suggested: that modern mechanised war, in its final analysis, has gone beyond human drama and even beyond individual heroism, and has become cataclysmic in scope-a machinemade inferno of destruction in which the activities of the human creatures in. volved are as irrelevant and as imper. sonal as the scurryings of a nest of slaters disturbed under a board. When the medievalists imagined hell, they could have been thinking of Iwo Jima. |