In Harm's Way (1965) from Tuna

In Harm's Way is a 1965 Otto Preminger film starring every actor alive at the time:  John Wayne, Kirk Douglas, Patricia Neal, Paula Prentiss, Jill Haworth, Dana Andrews, Burgess Meredith, Franchot Tone, Slim Pickins, James Mitchum, George Kennedy, Barbara Bouchet, Larry Hagman, Carroll O'Connor and Henry Fonda.

The film opens the evening of Decenber 6, 1941, at a dance in the officer's club at Pearl Harbor. We meet a few of the characters, most notably Barbara Bouchet, whose husband is aboard ship. She is a party girl, dances seductively, then leaves with another officer. The two go to the beach, she skinny dips, followed by a cut to them waking up under a blanket on the beach, with all the Zeros in the world descending on them. Wayne is the commander of a battle wagon, and one of the few to get his ship out of the harbor to relative safety, only to be hit by a torpedo.

The Duke's arm was broken in the raid but, more important, he deviated from standard procedure and was made to ride a desk as his penance. While doing so, he meets his son whom he has not seen since a divorce when the boy was a small child. The son is now a Jr. officer but, raised by his wealthy mother, is a snob and a politician, who wants to ride out the war as a journalist and a staff assistant to a congressman-turned-officer. The son is dating Jill Haworth, a young nurse, but his intentions are anything but honorable. The Duke himself meets Hayworth's roommate, Patricia Neal, and they start a romance. For the rest of the film, Wayne struggles to get a shipboard command back, which will then allow him to win WW II by himself.

While this was a late entry into the WW II genre, it was a good one. The story, based on the novel Harm's Way by James Basset, is far more complicated than my summary implies, and completely fills the 167 minutes of running time. The complex plot was very much in line with other WW II films, and Preminger's trademark epic scope was very much in evidence, as the entire film was shot on location, and battle scenes were filmed aboard genuine naval vessels. That was all fine but for me the real strength of the film was in developing characters and relationships, thus making it much more than a mere historical reenactment.