User Reviews

If you are doing a movie about war, during a time when war is pending (or hanging about/over your head), you can expect it to try to bring people together. To give a sense of nationality so to speak. But this also is a movie that is artistically done and has a story that it wants to tell you above all.

I had the pleasure of watching this at the Festival in Berlin and we had a long introduction. And most of it was focused (no pun intended) on the lighting of the movie. When you have a black and white picture this is extremely crucial and the filmmakers did know that. Framing wise you cannot fault it and there are some fine performances within this movie. There are better war movies indeed, but this did not only copy (it's lighting style), but gave others reasons to copy from it after it was released

What scholars claim to be the first true Japanese war film (a sort of 'All Quiet on the Manchurian Front') might be best appreciated today by students of early cinematic wartime propaganda. Most of the foreground is stale, State-approved, mildly xenophobic melodrama, devoted to the day-to-day life and camaraderie among a group of front line troops in China prior to an ill-fated scouting mission in enemy territory. The script manages to embrace pacifist and pro-military sympathies at the same time, showing a mission doomed to failure carried out by soldiers of rare (i.e. unheard of) nobility and devotion: these boys die with the Emperor's blessed name on their lips, and a parting cry of Banzai! for their comrades-in-arms. The film (shot on actual battlegrounds) renders the more mundane details of infantry life with simple, unaffected realism, but it's too bad the same can't be said for the characters and dialogue.

One of the few pre-WW2 Japanese films to get any English language circulation, this is still not exactly easy to come by. The team's work is not widely know, though their The MAID'S KID got some circulation in the fifties.

This one is a war movie fielding largely indistinguishable soldiers who go out on a five man patrol encounter the enemy and return individually. There is a enough combat zone detail to make it look convincing and its dark, leaf patterned images are not unlike The SAGA of ANATAHAN, suggesting a common reference point.

While the work is minor, it has a restraint which does impress.

Like all war pictures, FIVE SCOUTS offers its audience an image of soldiers that fit into the jigsaw puzzle of national identity. American war movies give us an image of men doing dirty work that has to be done. This picture offers us an image of professional soldiers. This movie, in contrast, promotes a view of Japanese soldiers as dedicated professionals: dedicated to their profession, their military unit and its traditions, and to each other.

The way they handle this professionalism is not in the American style, which has been almost set in stone since the silent version of WHAT PRICE GLORY and THE BIG PARADE. In America, the drama is about how individuals fit into the military with its General Issue equipment and rules. FIVE SCOUTS does not concern itself with those issues, but with how professionals work under pressure. Only recently, with last year's LONE SURVIVOR, has the audience been given a similar view of the American professional -- Navy Seals.

Besides some fine and understated performances, this has some wonderful by Saburo Isayama. His work is particularly fine in the moving shots, whether it an elevator shot of the camp site or the moving shots covering the soldiers running to do their duty.

The more casual moviegoer will see this work as propaganda and little more -- slick, professional propaganda, to be sure, but something to glorify the soldier and get those recruits in. There is, undoubtedly, an element of that. However, it is also a fine movie with a distinct viewpoint.