Blood on the Sun (1945)

User Rating:

6.4/10   

Director:

Frank Lloyd

Writers:

Lester Cole (screenplay)
Nathaniel Curtis (additional scenes)

Release Date:

15 October 1945 (Sweden)

Genre:

Action | Drama | War | Romance | Thriller

Tagline:

To know their secret is to court Death !

Plot:

Nick Condon is a newspaper reporter working in Tokyo who refuses to toe the Japanese line on the expansionist...

Plot Keywords:

Newspaper | Seppuku | Hara Kiri | Newspaper Editor | Japan

Awards:

Won Oscar.

Cast

James Cagney	...	Nick Condon
Sylvia Sidney	...	Iris Hilliard
Porter Hall	...	Arthur Bickett
John Emery	...	Premier Giichi Tanaka
Robert Armstrong	...	Col. Hideki Tojo
Wallace Ford	...	Ollie Miller
Rosemary DeCamp	...	Edith Miller
John Halloran	...	Capt. Oshima
Leonard Strong	...	Hijikata
James Bell	...	Charley Sprague
Marvin Miller	...	Yamada
Rhys Williams	...	Joseph Cassell
Frank Puglia	...	Prince Tatsugi

Runtime:

98 min | 94 min (TCM print)

Country:

USA

Language:

English | Japanese

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Recording)

Certification:

USA:Approved (certificate # 10705) | Canada:PA (Ontario) | West Germany:12 (f) | Australia:PG | Finland:K-16 | Sweden:15 | UK:PG

Filming Locations:

General Service Studios - 1040 N. Las Palmas, Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, USA

Company:

William Cagney Productions

Goofs:

Revealing mistakes: Right after Ollie Miller gets shot you see him stumbling to the ground. When he gets up, under his left elbow you can see carpet moving in what should be grass.

Quotes:

[first lines]
Arthur Bickett: But gentlemen, I know nothing about this article being printed. I was out of town.
Secret Police Major Kajioka: Then let me read what is printed here in your paper. "If Japan wants to control China we must first crush the United States just as in the past we have to fight in the Russo-Japanese war."

Movie Connections:

Featured in Going Hollywood: The War Years (1988)

Came Out Just In Time

The only reason this film gets as high as a five from me is because of James Cagney who made everything he was in a little bit better or appear to be so.

Blood on the Sun, coming out as it did in 1945 as World War II was ending focused on an incident from 1929. A document called the Tanaka Memorial which was purportedly a memorandum by the then Japanese Prime Minister Tanaka Giichi to Emperor Showa was leaked to U.S. media. It laid forth Japanese intentions to dominate the Pacific, Asia, and even the USA.

Problem was that when the Americans did occupy Japan, General MacArthur sent Army intelligence into sifting through Japanese files. Guess what? No Tanaka Memorial. A lot of people now consider the thing to have been a big old hoax perpetrated by the Chinese who were looking for friends back in 1929 because they rightly suspected Japanese intentions towards them.

So Blood in the Sun came out just in time as the belief in the Tanaka Memorial was still credible.

The brothers Cagney, William and James, produced this. But without the production values of the brothers Warner, this film looks like it was shot on the cheap. Jimmy Cagney played Nick Condon, a reporter who got a copy of the Tanaka Memorial and smuggled it out of Japan.

A lot of the cast played Eurasian roles and looked pretty silly too. Sylvia Sidney, John Emery and especially Robert Armstrong who may have conquered King Kong, but couldn't sound Oriental to save his life.