Customer Reviews

Purple Heart

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Dana Andrews is excellent as the Captain of a downed Army Air Corps B25 bomber over Japan. These US Flyers are captured and put on trial in a civilian court in front of the international press for suppossed "crimes against humanity". The Japanese secretly torture the Airmen one by one trying to discover if they came from a land base or a carrier. The story basically revolves around whether or not the American Airmen will tell the Japanese what they want to know. The final minutes of the film are quite stirring. The film music master, Alfred Newman did the score for the film and cleverly chose not to use very much underscoring music until the final scene in the film. Although the music he uses is borrowed and not original his adaptation of it is powerful!

The movie is a bit dramatic at times, but those who have studied the Doolittle raid and the treatment of the 8 men captured know it does not tell the American public enough about the terrible way humans treat other humans. If the Americans had been able to know how badly their prisoners were being treated, the Japanese Island might not be there today. Read Four Came Home for the best view, or study other exerpts of various items on the internet. I am writing about Dean Edward Hallmark, a graduate of Paris Junior College and one of the three who were executed.

Most reviews miss what was for me, as a child, the most inspiring portion of the film. I would choke -up at the final scene, when the crew having decided to not tell the details of the raid leave the courtroom to face death, marching down the hallway with smiles on their faces to stirring music. It still grabs me today.

Although AMC has the gall to call it "racist propaganda" and portray the Japanese as vicious, Japanse veterans from WWII all tell the same story: how they were, themselves, beaten by their officers, and how they were taught that the Americans were lower than animals, and no cruelty was considered unfit for the Americans.

The movie intimates the brutality and does not show what the Japanese actually did to these brave airmen.

Japanese wartime mentality was animalistic. The rape of Naking, as well as the treatment of American POWs are just two examples of the brutality of these people pre WWII.

Gen. MacArthur, though widely criticized for not prosecuting the Emperor, who had full complicity in war crimes and in the war of aggression, used Hirohito to bring peace. He brought over missionaries and set them up as school teachers, and did an amazing job in de-militarizing the Japanese people and bringing peace to a people who were raised on pagan Emperor worship. He changed their society from the ground up.

No Hollywood movie, thus far, has truly shown how brutal and animalistic the Japanese military were, and this movie is no exception. They did a mock trial and executed these brave men.

For AMC to call it racist propaganda because the judges cheered when news that MacArthur had left Corigidor shows only that they care more for political correctness rather than factual correctness.

don't miss this movie. Never forget what foreign aggression did to our nation while sleeping peacefully on a December Sunday morning, in 1941. Don't forget the bravery of the Doolittle raid, nor of the countless sacrifices made by young men to stop imperialistic barbariansism.

This is an inspiring movie to ALL Americans at this stage of the war vs Japan...in reality, three [3] of the captured USAAF crew were beheaded, others tortured unmercifuly...3 survived at war's end...with the release of, "The Purple Heart" at Christmas time [1944] well after the Gen Doolittle raid in April 1942, it hit home and in our hearts to the heroics of our courageous United States Army Air Force and Naval Forces in harm's way...this movie depicts Japan for all of her quick grabs in the Pacific War; yet, Japan was wide open and vunerable to air attack...it helped lift our morale to perservere, sacrifice and no more surrenders, ultimately paving the way for Japan's unconditional surrender forevermore in Aug/1945...it was NOT a propaganda movie; conversely, a cornerstone film for total victory over Japan who was our most formidable and cunning enemy we ever faced on the sea and on the land...Dana Andrews stirring lecture to that Japanese judge rang true as the "USAAF will blackened your skies, day and nite we'll come to burn your cities to the ground and wipe your dirty little Empire off the face of the earth"...that was a TRUISM and justly so...sadly, today's liberal Americans can't relate or comprehend to just what a UNITED effort it took to bring the Japanese Militarists to extinction in Aug/1945...the Japanese got what they readily deserved with A-Bomb interest...this movie was a harbinger of what was to come to the home-islands of Japan...WW2 was a great American lesson to America's enemies...I loved this wartime 1944 film about wartime April/1942....SSGT CHRIS SARNO-USMC FMF

This spirited, splendidly acted film personifies everything that was good about WWII movies made during WWII. It's all here--heroism, ethnic diversity, caring, one-for-all/all-for-one, good guys, bad guys, no ambiguity. ...It seems quite unsubtle today, but for its genre, it's at or near the pinnacle shared with such other made-during-WWII greats as "Gung Ho," "Wake Island," "Guadalcanal Diary," "30 Seconds Over Tokyo," and "Bataan."

One of the greatest WWII movies ever made.We need this on DVD. The best part is when Dana Andrews tells the court "We'll come by day and we'll come by night. Thousands of us and we won't stop coming till we wipe that dirty little empire off the face of the earth." What could be more inspiring. Please put this out on DVD as a collectors edition.

Despite what the Blame-America-First crowd might say, Uncle Sam doesn't sit around twisting his beard and hatching racist hegemonistic plots against nations populated predominantly by non-White peoples. The Japanese enemy has pretty much been given a relatively free ride due to the mind-numbing atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis in carrying out their Final Solution. But Allied prisoners had a 99% chance of surviving their stint in a German POW camp. Only 58% survived the Japanese camps and those that did had been reduced to mere skin and bones. The Japanese culture is not hung up on the value of a single human life, especially an enemy who has "dishonored" himself by surrendering. Anyone who thinks that the portrayal of Japanese in "The Purple Heart" is over-the-top American Jingoistic blather should talk to an Allied survivor of a Japanese POW camp. This is a well made, well acted film and an extremely effective piece of propaganda, aimed right dead-center at a more-than-deserving target.

In my quest to see all of the great old films of WWII made in the 1940's, I bought this one and I'm glad I did!
It's very different from the "typical" battle-action films; this one is set mainly in Japan where American Army Air Corps pilots are put on trial for "war crimes."
In the course of their imprisonment, they are tortured to confess to crimes they didn't commit.
They have no real lawyers.
The Geneva Convention is never mentioned.
They go bravely and proudly to their deaths by execution.
All of it highlights not only the humane treatment we give enemy combatants now at Guantanamo Bay but also the fanatical aim of world domination of today's Islamofacist enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan is exactly like that of the Shinto/Bushido Japanese that we vanquished in WWII.
This movie is really a must see that acurately portrays the enemy in wartime as truly evil with none of the moral equivalence that we get from Hollywood and the Media these days.

purple Heart is a great movie from WWII. It characterized the American fighting spirit and what seperated us from our enemies at the time. A really great film from Holloy Wood.