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Yar, you be here: Blood on the Sun > Customer Reviews Blood on the Sun Customer Reviews (1 - 3 of 9 Reviews)Maybe You Have to Live It to Appreciate It
In "Blood on the Sun," James Cagney plays an expat newspaper editor who discovers Japan's plot for world domination. Made in 1945, the film is a bully piece of wartime propaganda--but it also has surprising depth. It isn't PC, but it's not all stereotype either. There are some real Asians in the film, the plot is a true story, and not all the Japanese are evil. That said, yes, there are a lot of quasi-offensive squinty-eyed caucasians with fake buck teeth in the film, too. Cagney does a very good job as the editor. A bundle of self-assured energy, as ever, he nonetheless adds depth by trying to speak a bit of Japanese and Mandarin, and by doing some very credible judo. Matter of fact, his judo coach was LAPD's Jack Halloran, who also took a role in this flick and went on to become a regular Hollywood character actor! The movie is filmed almost entirely in sets at the studio, which is unsurprising. Nevertheless, it looks fairly good. In fact, the "expat bar" set is a faithful reproduction of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed bar at the old Imperial Hotel in Tokyo! Cagney was just coming off an Oscar and just out of contract with WB Studios. Here, he and his brother produced, and they did a decent job. In short, the films hold up. Not a major classic, but an exciting potboiler! And as a correction to various reviewers, the film takes place neither in "post-WWII Japan" nor "The 1920's" but in the 30's. As a personal aside, I served many years as a US diplomat in Communist China--another ruthless east Asian dictatorship. Maybe some other viewers will find the Jpaanese officials in Blood on the Sun to be too fake, smarmy, and banal. I found them pretty realistic! Post WW2 anti-Japanese flick
The pugnacious James Cagney stars in this very heavily propagandized 1945 flick "Blood on the Sun". Cagney plays Nick Condon the feisty and successful newspaper editor of the Tokyo Chronicle in the 1930's. Cagney receives a document spelling out the militaristic intentions of Japan formulated by Baron Tanaka. The plan calls for the conquering of China as the initial step towards world domination. When Cagney's top reporter and wife are murdered by the Japanese secret police, he realizes his own life is in danger. With the aid of the exotic looking Sylvia Sidney, playing a Eurasian Chinese sympathizer and double agent, he endeavors to deliver the document to the American embassy in Japan. The movie amateurishly portrayed the Japanese, who were heavily made up Caucasians, stereotypically as nearsighted, bespectacled, bucktoothed yellow demons. I suppose the world climate at the time demanded this type of treatment to our hated enemies by Hollywood. It was a bit too thick for me however America will be crushed, never to rise again
Based on a true story, BLOOD ON THE SUN is an entertaining little stewpot of a movie. James Cagney plays Nick Condon, managing editor of the Tokyo Chronicle. It's 1920-something and the United States and Japan share an uneasy peace. That peace threatens to be broken violently when the "Tanaka Plan," a Japanese government document outlining a blueprint for world domination, falls into Condon's possession. Condon has to get the document out of Japan and announce its contents to the world, the Japanese have to stop him. When I first saw BLOOD ON THE SUN I shrugged it off as a piece of late-war propaganda. There ARE a lot of stereotypical portrayals and attitudes coursing through this one- the Japanese are portrayed for the most part as buck toothed, diabolical schemers. Cagney is attacked from behind twice in this movie. The officials present trumped up charges in their attempt to stop his muck-raking ways. The outrageousness of a foreign correspondent stealing and threatening to publish a secret state paper seems lost on this movie. Then I did a computer search of "Tanaka Memorial" and had a chance to read the document in question. If it's not a forgery (the Japanese government claimed it was), it dwarfs the movie's presumptions. As a side note, the web site I visited informs us that the Chinese, and not a crusading American editor, originally released the document. As usual, Cagney is a bundle of energy and is great fun to watch. I've read that he took judo classes in preparation for this part, and it seems he's doing a lot of his own stunt work. Sylvia Sydney plays Iris Hilliard, Cagney's love interest and someone interested in the document as well. Soon after her character is introduced we learn she is half-Chinese, which should alert us to the fact that she isn't quite as sinister as she appears. The Chinese were our allies during to the war. They were the good Asians. Another fun character in this one is Capt. Oshima (John Halloran), one of many Caucasian actors partially hidden behind false teeth and taped eyelids. Oshima is a menacing, murderous, towering brute of a cop. Symbolically he's the first to attack the American Cagney with a karate chop from behind, a blow that knocks Cagney out. Later, when the gloves are off and the two square off against each other in a fair fight the results are decidedly different. Wiard Ihnen & A. Roland Fields won a little statuette for Best Art Direction for their work on BLOOD ON THE SUN. The sets do look pretty good. BLOOD ON THE SUN is in the public domain, so anyone can copy and sell it. If you get the Delta version be warned that their logo will appear periodically in the lower-right hand corner. They've included a short documentary (still photos with a voice over narration- yawn) and an intro and outro by Tony Curtis. Unforgivably, Curtis tells us in the intro that Cagney plays a newspaperman "right after World War Two." It may seem a minor point, but couldn't somebody on the set have reminded him that the movie took place after World War One?
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