Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

CLINT EASTWOOD’s purple patch continues with Letters From Iwo Jima. The iconic American director gave new life to the war movie with Flags of Our Fathers. Now he provocatively tells the bloody World War Two end-battle from a Japanese perspective. Particularly Saigo, Nishi and Shimizu, who are grunts, and General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who was the real Japanese soldier in charge on the island. (Sadist Lieutenant Ito represents the uncompromising kamikaze, suicide bombing view.) Kuribayashi is an urbane, perceptive man who spent time in America before the war. Watanabe, wasted in the condescending, muttonheaded The Last Samurai, puts in an exceptional performance. It’s not quite Burt Lancaster’s magnificent The Leopard, but a sense of history, culture and mortality moves through Kuribayashi.

Ataturk said “There is no difference between the Johnnies and Mehmets to us.” In Paths of Glory Kirk Douglas’ Colonel Dax enthuses how compassion is man’s noblest impulse. “Their mothers’ words are our mothers’ words,” two Japanese soldiers confer reading a dead American troop’s letter from his mother. Letters eloquently captures these feelings, conveys the commonality of the soldier. Literature has trod here before. As have World War One films Paths of Glory, All Quiet on the Western Front and the sodden Europudding Joyeux Noel. A companion piece to The Fog of War, Letters is iconoclastic, daring turf.

Letters resonates with the wisdom and humility of wise old men. Not just Eastwood (I can’t wait to see his film about Iraq), but late legendary nonagenarian production designer Henry Bumstead. Eastwood brilliantly drains the screen of colour, shooting with a palette so desaturated it’s almost black and white, capturing the harshness of Iwo Jima. There are vivid, visceral explosions of colour, blood red and explosion orange.

» Illustration by Lyndon Barrois.