December 7th (film)

An edited version of 32 minutes length, which removed a long introductory segment and a shorter epilogue, was given limited release to specific audiences but won the Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject) in 1944.

A Private Joseph Lockhart, at the aircraft warning system, detects a fleet of airplanes approaching, but he is assured by an officer that they are probably American planes returning from a training mission.

Civil defense measures, starting with a proclamation of martial law on the islands by Territorial Governor Joseph Poindexter, are also displayed, although some parts of images are blacked out and marked "Censored."

Children (the large majority of whom are of Asian or Pacific heritage) are shown participating in air raid drills and donning gas masks.

We next see Uncle Sam ("U.S." played by Walter Huston) in a house on a hilltop in Honolulu, dictating a letter to a "Miss Kim" for a recipient named "Jonathan."

Accompanied by montages of workers harvesting and processing these commodities, U.S. launches into extended discussion and praise of the importance of these crops to Hawaii and how they've allowed for the transformation of Honolulu into a modern city, with schools, museums, libraries, and houses of worship "representing all denominations."

A montage of buildings and signs in Japanese, accompanied by increasingly dissonant and fast-paced music, illustrates the growth of the economic and cultural impact of these workers and their growing families.

Although he claims not to "sort out who's loyal and disloyal," he goes on to note the number of parents who apply for their American-born children to receive dual citizenship with Japan.

Mr C states that Washington is well-aware of such espionage but goes on to rebuke Uncle Sam for trying not to offend Japan and for not providing President Roosevelt and Secretaries Stimson and Knox "with good-sized clubs to back up their words with action."

Uncle Sam settles down to sleep but has uneasy dreams in a mixed montage of some previously seen shots with images of war, Hirohito, Hitler, and Mussolini.

The dead sailor turns to walk through a military cemetery and is joined by the ghost of an American soldier (Paul Hurst) killed in World War I.

The film concludes with a narrator naming countries in the Allied powers as the camera tracks across their various flags, ending with an airplane writing a giant V against the sky.

By the autumn of 1941, Ford had recruited other talent from the motion picture industry to work in his unit, including cinematographer Gregg Toland and editor Robert Parrish.

By February 1942, about two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Hawaiian airfields, Ford and Toland had started filming scenes of salvage, repair, rebuilding, and the fortification of Oahu and Honolulu.

[3] Called away to film other military operations, in particular the Doolittle Raid on Tokyo and the Battle of Midway, Ford left Toland in charge of the project that would become December 7th.

Before leaving, Ford had already worked on drafts of a script with writers Laurence Stallings and Frank Wead, as well as apparently the Private Lovett who had first detected unidentified aircraft approaching island on December 7.

Toland and his crew returned to Twentieth Century Fox studios in Hollywood in July 1942 and continued to shoot additional scenes and edit the film until February 1943.

By October 1942, Toland had been rewriting the script along with screenwriter Samuel Engel and shooting the prologue scenes with Walter Huston and Henry Davenport.

[3] In October 1942, despite objections from Donovan and others, Navy Undersecretary James Forrestall invited Lowell Mellett, head of the Bureau of Motion Pictures in the Office of War Information (OWI) to review an early rough cut of December 7th.

In consultation with screenwriter James McGuinness and editor Robert Parrish, Toland and Ford eliminated the fictional prologue and epilogue and made some adjustments to the depiction of the attack and its immediate aftermath, resulting by May in the 32 minute version.

A bit later, Ford was able to obtain permission for a special viewing of the film by members of the Motion Picture Academy in order to make it eligible for an Oscar nomination like the one given to The Battle of Midway.

[4] The other nominated documentaries were: Children of Mars, Plan for Destruction, Swedes in America, To the People of the United States, Tomorrow We Fly, and Youth in Crisis.