“When I grew up, everything was propaganda. We all thought that the Japanese tortured and killed people,” Clint Eastwood recently said within earshot of L.A. Times writer Bruce Wallace during the Tokyo Film Festival . “But it’s tough to swallow that everybody was that way. After all, some of the Japanese have a decent soul.”
“Some”? Eastwood is a humanist and a gentleman, but the obvious implication is that other Japanese soldiers didn’t have a soul because of their barbaric behavior on the battlefields of World War II, or whatever. I say there can be no separating or categorizing — either we’re all God’s children with souls or none of us are.
I’ve been waiting for screening invitations to see Letters From Iwo Jima since the recent confirmation that Eastwood’s second Iwo Jima film will be opening on 12.20 instead of early February. But nothing so far.