In Harm's Way - Otto Preminger
One of John Wayne's films that he doesn't get killed in the end, and whatever that means I don't know if it is good or bad. Yeah, he lived in The Longest Day, but it wasn't at all his movie. He's topbilled, but he shares the limelight with other top actors in that time: Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, etc. Well, I guess I merely get to appreciate a John Wayne film without expecting that he'll get the bullet in the end. Anyway, Wayne stars alongside Kirk Douglas as Navy officers seeking redemption after a blunder during the attack on Pearl Harbor. The film drags close to three hours, its first half starting from peacetime Hawaii and ending up till the Jap assault, while the other half dwells primarily with both the characters' attempt to redeem themselves. Preminger carefully restaged the Pearl Harbor attack a lot smarter than Bay's albeit he lacks the technical wiz that the latter achieved. Minor roles by Henry Fonda, Burgess Meredith and George Kennedy complements the film. Wayne, actually, towers over the entirety of the movie (also literally, he dwarfs his co-stars by a few inches), practically anything from its mushy sequences to brilliantly shot battle scenes. It's not probably the best war movie, it's idiosyncratic, but hey, it's far different from Bruckheimer's Pearl Harbor .
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