December 7 was par for the course as far as World War II propoganda films go. I found it interesting that some of the shots were framed with captions, to give a newsreel feel for these "actual" events. But whatever actual footage was used in the film was overshadowed by the narrative. They took the event of Pearl Harbor and recreated what they could while creating a story of triumph over adversity on the part of the Americans - to boost morale. The lines of what is fake and what is factual are blurred by how slanted the story is. Yes the Japanese military was our enemy in WWII, but the narrator spent too much time painting them as "dirty Japs". The voice over of "General Tojo" taking stock of the destroyed U.S. ships was laughable. That was clearly an American doing a bad impression of a Japanese accent. But, played over footage of an animated transmission tower sending out this voice triumphantly over Japan (with an ominous looking dragon statue in the background), it is displayed as the truth. The lines between fact and fiction are also blurred when we see the soldiers "fighting" the Japanese planes. They shoot and shoot at the sky, but it seems like they're shooting at nothing at all.
Most of the film was geared towards tugging at the heart strings, i.e. shots of little Hawaiian children having to duck in trenches during drills and having to put on huge gas masks, the beautiful Hawaiian landscape being torn up. The film at this point is blatantly "rallying the troops" to get back the evil force that corrupted "America's Eden". A very interesting part of this sequence was the coverage of the Japanese American shopowners taking down all signs of Japanese culture, language, etc. out of shame (or at least that is what teh narrator tells us). Someone nowadays can't watch that without thinking about the Japanese interment camps during WWII. But this film shows a different attitude towards Japanese Americans - not one of distrust, but one of pity that they have been driven into shame by the Japanese military. One wonders if this film really did arouse patriotism in the hearts of people in the 40s, or did anybody notice the glaring propoganda.
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I felt that December 7 gave a interesting biased account for what happened in Pearl Harbor that day and in the days that followed, but it would have been better to go for a more unbiased slant or to focus more on one particular area or person invovled in the attack at Pearl Harbor. (Even better, to have done what Clint Eastwood did with Iwo Jima: create two separate films detailing both sides of the event.) As an audience member, it was humorous to see how biased the film really was in showing the tough, proud Americans and the supposedly scheming Japanese - but it makes me wonder if audiences back in the 1950s took this film to heart. Nowadays, we are so cynical - smarter, even? - that we must question everything.
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