James Michener's The Bridges at Toko-Ri told the dour story of yet another clash between East and West, to add to the dozens in his Tales of the South Pacific.  Immediately after the Korean conflict, Paramount put together this exciting aviation film, with a suitably dour tone that was the only possible way to approach the recent police action.  However, with Grace Kelly and William Holden in a clinch on the posters, the picture had no trouble becoming a boxoffice smash.  The spectacular, academy-award winning special effects helped too.

The movie has great action backing up its denial melodrama.  Full Naval support was apparently granted.  The aircraft carrier footage is authentic and the flying scenes some of the best and most accurate.  The editing in the raid on the bridges  ¹  is first-class, including some repeated shots of diving jets, whose cadence was copied for the Death Star sequence in Star Wars.  The large-scale model planes, pulled on wires through a hail of miniature explosions, looks thrilling in most shots.  When a very large miniature of a plane is made to crash in a gulley, its alloy wings convincingly buckle and shimmy.

If The Bridges at Toko-Ri were made today, there'd be all kinds of script concessions to make sure audiences knew that the filmmakers were sensitive to both sides of the story.  What makes the movie fascinating now is the story it doesn't tell.  The Koreans fight back with guns and cannon.  Apparently there is little aerial resistance, and the Navy planes have complete control of the skies.  In Korea, there was often no military target to be had except for the hidden Communist troops themselves, but here we have a clear objective, a cluster of impressive bridges in a country that barely has railroads.  Now, anyone who exercises any judgement can tell who the underdogs are in this situation: daily raids bomb the bejesus out of the Koreans, using technology most of them probably don't even comprehend.  But when they have the nerve to shoot back, they become the Evil Villains.  It's always been difficult to make bombing missions into heroic efforts, both in movies and for real.  Usually the raids are justified as direct retribution for 'barbaric' onslaughts elsewhere.  Toko-Ri makes them realistically remote and emotionally isolated, but can't avoid creating the impression that American rage against the Koreans basically boils down to, "How dare you duck when I throw things at you."  ²

But tragedy and irony are very well conveyed by the finale where Brubaker actually has to fight in the mud like an enlisted man, instead of push buttons and return to a steak dinner on his ship.  His, "Why me?" is a line meant to impress the average American viewer, but Brubaker already knows he's screwed five ways from sundown: every combat aviator is aware that once he's lost his wings and his guns, he's plumb out of luck.  Like the possibility of burning up in a crash, it's equally obvious that he might get poked full of holes, by peasants who aren't going to be understanding about his reasons for dropping bombs on their country.  ³

Paramount's DVD of The Bridges at Toko-Ri is a solid presentation of an action favorite.  The movie is presented flat 4x3, but looks far better matted off to 1:78 on a widescreen television: there's always acres of space below the action, and the picture would have been sharper and bigger-looking if presented 16x9, in adapted 1:66.  ⁴  There are several thousand original Technicolor movies, and so far only a handful have been restored from their original 3 strip negatives.  The picture looks good, even if it has not been restored from Technicolor sources ... purists might have a problem with the contrast and grain levels.  If it were made a few months later, Toko-Ri would almost certainly have been a VistaVision movie.  The punchy soundtrack has not been remixed and retains its always-good mono mix.  A trailer is included.  In what might be a case of Paramount following the good lead of Anchor Bay, the insert slip contains a reproduction of the film's poster art.

Footnotes:

1. this raid was lampooned in the 1980 comedy Airplane, of course, as "The Raid on Macho Grande" which as we all know, made a posthumous hero of George Zip.
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2. apologies to Matt Groening, from whence this gag was taken : his comic strip "Life in Hell".
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3. In LA there were a series of 'computer school' TV ads that showed a computer professional slamming the door on a data processor, and turning his attention away from the minimum wage grunts surrounding him,spoke to the camera:  "Do you like pushing buttons, but not getting your fingers dirty?" he said, and proceeded to outline the benefits of becoming a skilled computer person, an 'officer' who doesn't have to work in the 'grunt' data entry trenches.  The ad pretty much sums up what military PR people told us the modern army would be like.  Sam Peckinpah disposed of the issue of the perks of an officer's commission in a brief scene in Major Dundee, where Lt. Brannin is found roasted alive by the Apaches: "It goes with the pretty girls and the pension."
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4. You have to look at pictures from 1953 to 1955 individually to figure out how they were expected to be seen.  If the titles are arranged in a narrower rectangle than the 1:37 film frame, as in Toko-Ri, then it was meant to be matted.
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