Ikari no umi

It's 1922, and the Washington Naval Conference has just cut the number of capital ships each nation can put on the water. This is hard on the naval designer in Japan, who see their latest designs sunk. One of them, Jo Hiraga, played by Denjirô Ôkôchi, announces that the war has begun. If the number of ships and tonnage is limited, designs must improve to more than compensate. He is the man to design those ships.

It's a propaganda-heavy movie, of course, and Ôkôchi will wind up the movie exhorting his students to go into battle to die for Japan. It's late in the war, and Japan was already gearing up for kamikaze pilots and "one hundred million dead" when the US Army invaded. This movie by Tadashi Imai -- undoubtedly another of the films he made in this period that he later forgot about -- is not the first of its sort; in 1942, Leslie Howard directed and starred in THE FIRST OF THE FEW, a movie about the genius of R. J. Mitchell, the man behind the Spitfire war plane. Doubtless you can think of a few.

The propaganda sticks out and overwhelms any subtleties of performance. Still, it seems competently done for its type of movie.