A domestic Blu-ray arrives of Mark Robson’s Korean War rumination, from the pen of James Michener and fleshed out 100% by Paramount’s crack visual effects team. Superstar leads William Holden and Grace Kelly illustrate a hard lesson of modern warfare — even in ‘asymmetrical’ high-tech combat there is no guarantee of survival. Charles McGraw, Fredric March, Mickey Rooney & Robert Strauss co-star. The old disc has the edge on extras, but this new edition corrects the aspect ratio and therefore gets our vote.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1954 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date June 20, 2023 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95
Starring: William Holden, Grace Kelly, Fredric March, Mickey Rooney, Robert Strauss, Charles McGraw, Keiko Awaji, Earl Holliman, Richard Shannon, Willis Bouchey, Teru Shimada, Dennis Weaver, Corey Allen, Gene Reynolds, Roger Pace.
Cinematography: Loyal Griggs
Art Director: Hal Pereira, Henry Bumstead
Film Editor: Alma Macrorie
Visual Effects: John P. Fulton, W. Wallace Kelley, Paul K. Lerpae
Original Music: Lyn Murray
Screenplay by Valentine Davies from the novella by James A. Michener
Produced by William Perlberg, George Seaton
Directed by Mark Robson

We reviewed The Bridges at Toko-Ri on an import disc just two years ago and wouldn’t return to it so soon, were it not for this new edition’s much-more desirable corrected aspect ratio. It’s still an impressive, star-driven movie . . . with a downbeat ending unusual for 1954.

Even the respected author James Michener trod softly on the subject of the Korean War, a seriously devisive conflict in the years 1950-1953. The movie adaptation by Valentine Davies (Miracle on 34th Street,  Sailor of the King) spells out the downside of the unpopular ‘police action’ while lauding the bravery of Navy aviators. Director Mark Robson’s ace cast barely needs direction, and Paramount’s Oscar-winning special effects are truly spectacular.

Some of James Michener’s best sellers about the South Pacific were written while on Navy duty in WW2, and several became big movies: the musical adaptation South Pacific, the bittersweet Return to Paradise and the sad epic Hawaii. All addressed recurring themes — race prejudice and the obliteration of Pacific cultures.

Former editor and Val Lewton protégé Mark Robson had a checkered directing career. His first independent effort with Kirk Douglas Champion became a big hit. Robson had just directed and co-produced Michener’s Return to Paradise, which didn’t do as well. ^*

We’re impressed that The Bridges at Toko-Ri could be made at all. The bleak ending is almost unheard of in a film with major Pentagon cooperation, about recent military events. We’re told that Paramount considered changing the ending, but that star William Holden insisted on retaining Michener’s original. Holden’s own brother had been a pilot in WW2, and was killed in combat.

Michener’s slight original book sticks closely to the personal experience of a fictionalized pilot flying carrier-based attack missions over Korea late in 1952. That personal through-line was emotionally devastating in 1955 and is still affecting now. Heaven help the good civilian soldier that finds himself asking how he ended up getting shot at in a ditch in some far-off foreign country.

The U.S. Navy cooperated as if Toko-Ri were a major recruitment booster. The Pacific Fleet provided full access to an aircraft carrier in operation. Star William Holden reportedly learned to taxi a jet plane on the flight deck, a claim that wasn’t publicity baloney.

It’s late in 1952. Navy aviator Lt. Harry Brubaker (Holden) runs out of fuel returning to his aircraft carrier and must ditch in the frigid Yellow Sea. The helicopter team of Mike Forney and Nestor Gamidge (Mickey Rooney & Earl Holliman) rescues Brubaker from the water. Harry is a reserve officer pulled back to active duty, and Admiral Tarrant (Fredric March) would like to see him renew his commission. The Admiral treats Brubaker like a replacement for the two sons he lost in WW2. He is estranged from his wife and daughter-in-law, both of whom suffered psychological damage.

Having already done ‘his part’ in the previous war, Harry resents the interruption of his civilian law career. His wife Nancy (Grace Kelly) and their young daughters rush to share his two days’ leave in Japan. Nancy doesn’t understand why Harry takes time from this break to bail out Mike Forney, who is in the brig for fighting over a Japanese woman, Emiko (Keiko Awaji of Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog). The plain fact is that Brubaker has kept Nancy in the dark about the more dangerous details of his work.

Back on the carrier, Flight Commander Wayne Lee (Charles McGraw) briefs Brubaker for a dangerous bombing raid on the Toko-Ri bridges. Harry’s dread for the mission grows when his ‘good luck charms’ Forney and Gamidge are transferred off the ship, and also when he narrowly escapes disaster in an emergency landing. A photo recon shows a formidable anti-aircraft defense over the bridges. Commander Lee reminds Harry that he can opt out of the mission, but Harry doesn’t feel he has a choice.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri was a shocker for us ’50s kids that saw it on TV in the early 1960s. Our war movie experience was mostly with morale builders starring John Wayne. Even the more realistic dramas like Henry King’s Twelve O’Clock High and William Wellman’s Battleground never doubted the absolute rightness of the fight. Korea was a different story. Howard Hughes’ One Minute to Zero made an argument for shooting Korean civilians. Ross Hunter’s ethically-challenged Battle Hymn floats an awkward religious message. Toko-Ri plays the war straight and honest, as a job that must be done. Michener’s pilot is gravely conflicted, yet doesn’t share his doubts and fears with his sheltered family.

Toko-Ri works hard to balance personal issues with high-powered air-war spectacle. The new star Grace Kelly is on screen for fewer than twenty minutes. Her Nancy Brubaker might have been a teenaged bobby soxer when Harry was flying in WWII. It’s fully credible that she could be unaware of the hazards Harry is facing. The key domestic scene takes place in a Japanese bath house. It’s certainly unusual for a Hollywood movie of the time — Nancy’s near-panicked reaction is believable. The cultural tension is interesting — bathing naked is one thing, but it’s also with a former enemy. The hotel’s bathing pool is segregated by nationality . . . when an actual bath would more likely be segregated by sex. The Yankee-Japanese interplay is friendly, but kept to a minimum.

The on-ship drama is also good, even if Fredric March’s Admiral Tarrant seems too psychologically damaged for command. Having lost his family life to war tragedy and Navy realities, Tarrant’s fixation on Harry Brubaker doesn’t seem healthy. The adaptation makes Harry Brubaker his own man, making his own choices. He serves on patriotic principle, and Tarrant’s arguments don’t induce him to go career-Navy.

Contrasted with Harry Brubaker is Charles McGraw’s Commander Lee, a professional ‘thirty year man’ fully committed to the program. Lee is a capable officer doing a tough job, not a cigar-chewing, Commie-hating Sam Fuller invention.

The movie also stresses that Harry Brubaker is no Rambo. He has no combat experience outside of flying. The show expresses the ‘I’ve got your back’ commitment of the armed forces: when a comrade is in trouble and needs help, one doesn’t make excuses. Harry all but worships his air-sea rescuers, and Mike Forney’s emerald green scarf and hat reinforce the good luck angle.

Aviation specialist Beer Barrel (Robert Strauss) directs the crucial deck landings with his signal flags. That essential skill makes him nearly untouchable: everyone looks the other way when he sneaks golf bags full of beer back on board. The show also acknowledges that sailors like Mike Forney get involved with Japanese good-time girls. We don’t need a depressing exposé like Shohei Imamura’s Pigs and Battleships to understand what that’s all about. The local women greeting the ship’s shore-leave Romeos can’t all be ‘steady girlfriends.’

The Navy realism is quite good, even if many public address commands heard on the deck are dumbed-down for the benefit of the audience. The candid radio chatter exchanged in flight is also bogus — the North Koreans and Chinese would be listening to every word spoken. Tarrant says a particular harbor can’t use tugboats, a line that’s contradicted when we see tugs docking the carrier — but that detail supports an important scene with Charles McGraw’s Commander Lee.

We’re also told that the specific jets flying the bombing raid are wrong — they don’t carry large bombs. The attack sequence is in every other way impressive. Audiences in 1955 felt they were watching ‘the real thing.’ We were conditioned to morale boosters in which a single bomb might sink a battleship, followed by a pilot shouting a snide remark: “Sayonara, sucker!”

Let’s digress with the special effects!

Paramount’s effects department fully deserved its Oscar for Toko-Ri, although the award went to the studio, not the effects experts themselves. One impressive shot shows Brubaker’s plane making a short-deck landing and almost hitting a heavy vehicle used as a barrier. It’s a John Fulton special: the entire plane is a model optically matted into the shot.

Another shot impresses us even more: our first sight of the title bridges is a high-altitude viewpoint advancing over a pointy mountain top. Even on Blu-ray we must look twice to realize that the whole thing is a matte painting trick, a multi-plane animation move with the mountains painted on different sheets of glass. It’s like something from a Powell-Pressburger film. The painting is just sensationally good. Proof of this is in the film’s trailer, which uses a flawed alternate take with a telltale wiggle.

The studio certainly didn’t go cheap on the special-effects raid. To represent the canyon with the target bridges, a vast ‘miniature’ landscape was constructed outdoors. These miniature shots are photographically identical to the full-scale aerial photography, filmed with jets from the San Diego Naval Air Base. Over the giant landscape miniature large models of jets ‘fly’ on wires, exactly as A.D. Flowers and Logan Frazee did for the airplanes in 1941. Hiding the shiny wires is a tough job that involves trial and error. I was told that one technique to reduce the ‘shine’ was to etch the wires with acid. That roughed up the reflections but also made the wires more prone to snapping. They are detectable in only one or two angles.

Filming in slow motion smoothed the action and added scale to the pyrotechnics. The plane models zoomed down the wires while the pyro technicians set off the squibs and Roman-Candle fireworks to represent the anti-aircraft defenses. The bridges had to be rigged to blow up as well. For pilot POVs, a 35mm camera was ‘flown’ down the same path, perhaps suspended below stronger cables. Other down-views blur past the exploding bridges. Many audience members believed they were seeing the real thing.

In ’54 the salient precedent for this raid sequence was the equally breathtaking bomb run in MGM’s Thirty Seconds over Tokyo. Both raid sequences succeed by adhering to an important design idea: the camera angles are restricted to what chase planes might see in a real raid. Forty years later, CGI enabled spectacular action to be tracked with ‘digital cameras’ that could be anywhere and do anything. Thus we got a Pearl Harbor battle that looks like a video game. By sticking to credible camera views, the Toko-Ri raid almost fools the eye.

Most of the Toko-Ri raid is first-generation work. They ran multiple cameras for every take, and finished visuals could be seen the next morning in dailies. The full effects unit likely attended dailies, pooling ideas for improvements. Showcase sequences of this kind became a great source of pride for studio effects teams, who almost never got their names in the credits. When one of those spectacular runs became a ‘keeper’ it was likely a time to serve drinks.

Other isolated miniature shots are the best of their kind as well. Brubaker must ditch his plane twice, once in the sea and once in a dry ravine. Yes, we see flashes of the wires pulling the jet models, but the crashes look great — the aluminum wings warp and buckle with each bounce, as might those of a real jet. When the editor cuts directly from the model to a medium shot of William Holden in the cockpit, the match is excellent.

On an uneventful mission Harry Brubaker would drop his bombs, finesse a smart landing on the carrier and enjoy a steak dinner. But every combat aviator knows how badly things can go. If Harry avoids burning up in a crash, he might still get poked full of holes by peasants uninterested in his reasons for dropping bombs on their country.

The bad news for Brubaker comes with a dull ‘clunk’ heard as a piece of flak hits his jet’s fuselage. From that point forward Harry is just plain out of luck, the one guy in a hundred who gets the raw deal: “What am I doing in a ditch in Korea?” Harry is given time to verbalize his anxiety, which I suppose helps keep popcorn-munchers with the program. Some momentary rah-rah vengeance is afforded when the particular Koreans that shoot at our downed pilots are chopped into hamburger by ground support propeller aircraft. Their deaths are not given a human value equal to that of our beloved Navy flier.

The film’s inter-cutting of authentic naval footage, Japanese location scenes with doubles and process work back in Hollywood is extremely good. For the film’s most dramatic transition, former editor Mark Robson uses a very long dissolve that holds the image of a corpse for an extended beat. Straight from the stylistic playbook of George Stevens, and used to strong effect in his A Place in the Sun, these extended lap dissolves required a very clean optical camera setup.

William Holden is in top form in this first of two ‘Bridge’ war movies, the second of which would make him a very rich man. Holden brings everything Brubaker needs: integrity, frustration, vulnerability. Grace Kelly comes off as perfection, as usual. It’s not really fair that Nancy Brubaker is chastised for sniping at Harry’s errand to spring Mike Forney from jail — many military wives are kept ignorant of everything. Fredric March looks the part of a poised but weary Admiral, giving us confidence in the Navy’s resolve if not the war’s aims. Coming across extremely well in a handful of scenes is Charles McGraw’s Commander Lee. His scenes with Holden and March are excellent — they directly confront combat leadership issues, where decisions cost men’s lives.

The second surprise standout in the cast is Mickey Rooney, who at this point in his post-MGM career was spinning his wheels in films and TV projects that didn’t always reflect his talent. Rooney’s Mike Forney is an eccentric hothead, not Andy Hardy in a green top hat. The fact that the tough little copter pilot is the one stuck in the ditch with Brubaker doubles our anxiety. Earl Holliman is fine as well, as the rescue frogman emotionally attached to Forney.

Back in that clothing-optional bath in the Japanese hotel, should Harry Brubaker have been suspicious of the Japanese father that joins them?  The un-billed Teru Shimada is best known as Mister Osato, the duplicitous Spectre agent in You Only Live Twice. Shimada is in dozens of Hollywood films. He followed Sessue Hayakawa to Hollywood just as sound came in, and spent the war interned in a relocation camp.

The Bridges at Toko-Ri ends identically to the short novel, with Admiral Tennant asking ‘Where do we get such men?’  The question doesn’t seem to be ‘why did Harry have to buy the farm?’ and it’s certainly not ‘what am I going to tell Nancy?’  When Tarrant’s own boys made the supreme sacrifice he didn’t rearrange his career to tend to his own wife. Even now, few military-themed movies do more than give dependent survivors a flag and send them on their way. Tarrant’s vaguely self-serving question ‘Where do we get such men?’  begs for an answer. Not that Robert Altman’s Korean war comedy M*A*S*H has a higher moral purpose, but its sincere Father Mulcahy’s comeback hits it right on the nose: “He was Drafted.”

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of The Bridges at Toko-Ri is an excellent encoding of a handsome production given A+ treatment at Paramount. The picture is rich and detailed, with excellent color values. Old TV presentations (and the 2001 DVD) were not very attractive — this is a huge improvement.

Kino has made the disc a must-see item by encoding it in its proper, original 1:85 aspect ratio. The import Blu-ray from 2021 presented the show at a full-frame 1:33, which loosens up the compositions, showing more area above and below. There’s no debate about the rightness of the 1:85 crop; the film studios had all changed over to widescreen formatting the previous year. The argument that open-matte framing lets us see ‘more’ will only appeal to fans that want to replicate the TV experience circa 1966. The proper format saves several shots, including the traveling matte of Brubaker’s jet almost hitting the tow vehicle — in open-matte we can see that the nose wheel doesn’t touch the deck.

War movie experts Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin get the commentary nod for almost every military, combat and service-themed disc that Kino releases. The offer their expected friendly and informative track, discussing the book, the creative personnel and the film’s stellar performers.

Now that Toko-Ri is here in correct widescreen I’ll not likely be watching the previous disc — except that I’m in no way letting loose of it, either. Among the extras on the 2021 [Imprint] edition is one of the best commentaries I’ve heard for a war film. Noir expert Alan K. Rode is also a former Navy officer, and his fascinating audio track critiques the film shot-by-shot in terms of Navy realism. We’re told where Seaton and Robson fudged details of Navy life, but also where they got both letter & spirit correct.

Younger audiences might relate to Toko-Ri through its appropriation by two later classics of pop filmmaking. George Lucas used cutting patterns from this movie and the English The Dam Busters to give his X-Wing attack on the Death star a classic war-movie feel. I recognize three quick cuts of Navy fighters diving at about a 45-degree angle — two or three X-Wing shots in the Star Wars sequence do the exact same thing.

In scene in a hotel lobby, Admiral Tarrant yaks about the important Toko-Ri mission with the wife of one of his officers. Did Red spies overhear and rush extra armament to Toko-Ri?  Harry & Nancy’s subsequent bedtime discussion of the ‘secret’ mission surely inspired Zucker, Zucker and Abrahams’ manic 1980 spoof Airplane!  Robert Hays’ anxious flier rattles off the full plan for the attack on ‘Macho Grande’ — and then won’t relate some innocuous detail, because it’s all top secret!  The joke of course also references movies that simplify warfare by exaggerating the importance of a single mission — like blowing up a bridge. A key sequence in Apocalypse Now makes an issue of this war movie convention, by presenting the goal of holding the Do Long bridge as a Lewis Carroll-like absurdity.

Kino’s foreign-sourced package artwork for Toko-Ri is a real head-scratcher. Not only does it display Air Force jet fighters, the only star who looks like himself is William Holden. Fredric March could be Martin Balsam, and Mickey Rooney just looks strange!

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Bridges at Toko-Ri
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent the right Aspect Ratio, finally
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Steve Mitchell and Steven Jay Rubin>
Trailer
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case in card sleeve
Reviewed: July 18, 2023
(6962toko)

^*  Return to Paradise with Gary Cooper seriously needs a Technicolor remaster — an unseen version exists that is ten minutes longer than the unimpressive presentation seen on TCM.

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Here’s Illeana Douglas on The Bridges at Toko-Ri: