Plot
Narrated in English by a Japanese officer named Kuroki (in the form of a journal he is writing for his wife), a platoon of Japanese soldiers is stranded on an island in the Pacific with no means of communicating with the outside world. Lieutenant Kuroki (Tatsuya Mihashi) keeps his men firmly in hand and is supervising the building a boat for their escape.
An American C-47/R4D transport plane is shot down by a Japanese Zero, which in turn is shot down by an American F4U Corsair, on the same island with a platoon of U.S. marines led by Captain Dennis Bourke (Clint Walker), Sergeant Bleeker (Brad Dexter) and 2nd Lieutenant Blair (Tommy Sands). Confidant to Bourke is the chief pharmacist mate (Frank Sinatra). As both sides learn of each other's existence on the island, tension mounts resulting in a battle for the Japanese boat. The vessel is destroyed and a Japanese soldier is seriously injured. Calling a truce, Koruki trades the Americans access to water in exchange for a visit from their doctor to treat the wounded soldier, whose leg has to be amputated.
The truce results in both platoons living side by side, although a line is drawn forbidding one from encroaching on the other's side of the island. At first, there is some clandestine cooperation and trading and earnest respect and friendship. When the Americans establish radio contact and their pick-up by a US naval vessel is arranged they demand that the Japanese surrender. As the Americans proceed to the beach, the American captain orders his men to shoot to kill. They are ambushed by the coerced Japanese platoon, who presumably were also unwillingly acting on orders to shoot to kill. The Americans were given no option, but to retaliate in self-defense that results in an ensuing bloody and pointless firefight during which all the Japanese (including Kuroki) and most of the Americans are shot dead. The medic, Bourke, Bleeker, Blair and Ruffino are the only survivors of the skirmish. They move onto the beach and wait to be rescued up by the American naval vessel, stationed just offshore. Kuroki's final narration calls what he is to do "just another day." The film ends with a long shot of the island, superimposed with the words "Nobody ever wins".
Read more about this topic: None But The Brave
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)