December 7th (1943)
Naval History
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1h 22m
December 7th (made in 1943) is a striking manifestation of its time, a feature-length docudrama about the bombing of Pearl Harbor that is often at cross purposes with itself in the message it means to convey.
Gregg Toland, the brilliant cinematographer fresh off of Citizen Kane, The Little Foxes and The Outlaw, was ambitious to direct and this picture is largely his work, although John Ford nominally supervised.
President Franklin Roosevelt was convinced that the 110,000 Japanese-Americans on the American west coast were a security threat, and so interned most of them in concentration camps for the duration of the war. He was equally worried about the loyalties of the 160,000 Nisei living in Hawaii, and he commissioned this film as an argument for interning them as well. But remarkably, Lieutenant General Delos Emmons, the Military Governor of wartime Hawaii, staunchly countermanded this.
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