My information about 30 seconds Over Tokyo is that when it was made - 1944! - the material was still not greenlighted to be used (remember, the Japanese had taken many of the Raiders prisoners, and the American public was quite upset about executions), and quite cleverly, Mervin LeRoy was going for a "newsreel-look" in these scenes. But that's just what I read somewhere.
But interesting enough, our old friend John Ford was aboard that ship - for the OSS - and when his Navy friends heard he just won the Oscar for How Green Was My Valley when they were at sea, they had a special flag made for him - with an Oscar on it. The flag was up when Doolittle started that day.
Posts from itdo in thread „War Movies“
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I think they even used the same combat footage for Chuck Heston's crash scene in "Midway" which was already seen in "Wings of Eagles", when a crippled Wayne watches the planes come in. They were really cheap on "Midway" - for the credits they even used a shot from the 1944 Van Johnson movie "30 Seconds over Tokyo" - and made it look like it was real newsreel material. Well, but then it had a lot of stars in it - so maybe there just wasn't enough dough left for the action scenes.
