Cinema: Common Sensurround

MIDWAY

Directed by JACK SMIGHT Screenplay by DONALD S. SANFORD

The most sensitive and intelligent thing about Midway is its employment of Sensurround. Since the basic idea of this sound system, first used in Earthquake, is to make the audience feel that things like bomb explosions are literally rocking the theater, it comes as a surprise that the engineers in charge have twiddled the dials on their mixing console with a delicacy that would do credit to a concert pianist fingering his way through some Chopin filigree. Especially impressive is the handling of an aircraft carrier’s flight-deck operation —from the first cough of the first motor to the roar of an entire squadron.

But man does not live by his tympanum alone, and the rest of the movie is, frankly, a mess. There was a decent impulse behind it, namely to make an hour by hour study of how the American and Japanese fleets groped their way toward the naval battle that effectively decommissioned the Japanese navy in World War II. For half an hour or so hope flares temptingly that a film first is in the making — a coherent explanation of how a complex military engagement was actually fought.

But this is precisely the sort of thing that scares moviemakers with a big bud get at stake. All too quickly they are cranking up a drearily conventionalized fiction in which Charlton Heston clenches and unclenches his jaw muscles as he tries to sort out his relationship with his son, who has inconveniently fallen in love with a Japanese-American girl the authorities erroneously believe to be a spy.

Sickening Speed. Studio stuff, location stuff, newsreel footage, model shots — even outtakes from the classic turkey Tora! Tora! Tora! — are more or less artfully blended to give a vague feeling of what a modern naval engagement must be like — the large distances separating the antagonists when they launch their planes, the sickening speed with which the flames spread when they find their targets. But there is no real sense of the flow of fortune in the battle — the camera shies away from any at tempt at analysis. The Japanese, led by Toshiro Mifune, are neatly dressed and stoic (a useful virtue if most of your dialogue has to be dubbed into English).

The Americans, led by Henry Fonda, are more rumpled and informal, but equally blessed with manly virtue. This evenhandedness, this unwillingness to question the military skills of anyone involved, of course, further vitiates the drama. Surely in this historical event someone somewhere made a really dumb boner, surely someone got hysterical, or at least lost his nerve.

On these points the movie stands mute, in the end falling back on the one thing all knew was surefire — Sensurround technology. So Midway ends not with a bang, but with more of them than you can count. Richard Schickel