2-24-07, 9:26 am

Letters from Iwo Jima Directed by Clint Eastwood THE OTHER HISTORY: Letters from Iwo Jima.

If only there were more Republicans like Clint Eastwood. Apart from his transformation from cowboy in Rawhide to spaghetti western star, he has become an award-winning film director and successfully contradicted his political persona.

His latest offering is a companion piece to the excellent Flags of our Fathers, this time illustrating the other side of the story by relating the battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese angle.

It's a provocative film and is guaranteed to annoy those who were raised on the Hollywood version of history, especially gung-ho war movies with the likes of John Wayne leading the line.

As Flags of our Fathers was intended to revise our view of the famous picture featuring soldiers raising Old Glory on Mount Suribachi, so Letters From Iwo Jima contradicts the stereotypical image of the Japanese enemy.

Yes, they do shout 'banzai' before going into battle. They also exhibit the medieval militarism and emperor worship that infused their strict class codes while sharing the same paranoid prejudices of their US counterparts.

But they also share the same humanity. This might not be news for those who have travelled beyond their own backyard, but it'll be a revelation to those who think in terms of the 'yellow peril.'

The point of the film is to illustrate that the Japanese weren't all militaristic, even though, like many soldiers everywhere, the characters here believe that there's no contradiction between conviction and concern for one's country.

Eastwood contrasts the humanity shown to a frightened US soldier while two Japanese prisoners are shot by two marines. Only 1,000 of the 21,000 Japanese personnel survived.

The screenplay, by Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis, is based on letters found during an excavation of the 18 miles of tunnels that the Japanese carved out of Iwo Jima's unforgiving volcanic rock.

Unlike Flags of our Fathers, which revealed the war in flashback, Letters from Iwo Jima has the soldiers revealing their past during the battle, especially the vivid correspondence of the commanding officer Lt General Kuribayashi. Played with some distinction by Ken Watanabe, Kuribayashi had travelled in the US before the war. He not only had friends there, he understood that they could commit vast industrial resources to the war.

When he arrives at the island and abandons traditional methods of defence such as digging trenches on the beaches, he gets up the nose of the other commanders, like Lieutenant Ito (Shidou Nakamura).

The point of the exercise was to win a few weeks by stalling the US armada. It meant fighting to the death, not in vainglorious suicidal practices. They held the line for a month and killed 8,000 of 110,000 US marines.

Central to the film are former baker Saigo (Kazunari Ninomiya), who wants only to live to see his new-born child, a former policeman Shimizua (Ryo Kase) with something to prove and LA Olympic equestrian champion Baron Tishi (Tsuyoshi).

Letters from Iwo Jima portrays their stories while they prepare for the attack and during the fighting. It is an intimate epic that highlights incidental details such as emptying a shit bucket alongside heroic self-sacrifice.

With a much-reduced colour palette, it looks almost monochrome. Badges and copious bloody wounds are shown in close-up so that we have to study the details.

This is a compassionate film by a man who made his name as The Man With No Name, recognising the personal, often anonymous, tragic testimonies hidden behind the brutalities of war.

Eastwood for president? He's got to be better than the current cowboy.



From Morning Star