‘Hell in the Pacific’ (1968) proves that it isn’t always necessary to have brilliant dialogue in order to have compelling film. It was an amazingly powerful experiment in how a story can be formed in the absence of conventional narrative coherency. Powerful acting from Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin, creative direction from John Boorman, brilliant cinematography by Conrad Hall.
I also had something of a history of media technology realisation moment. Because Paul and I watched ‘Hell in the Pacific’ in VHS standard format I was reminded that early VHS releases of motion pictures almost never came out in ‘letterbox’ format. Most early VHS releases (back in the dark days before DVDS) were edited with the standard dimensions for a television screen in mind, rather than the standard for a film screen, resulting in visually non-sensical moments during the film--moments of scenes displaying part of a nose or ear, rather than the two faces confronting each other from opposite sides of the screen.
It is easy to take for granted how well some directors/cinematographers make use of the full frame of the film . . . until a third of the image has been arbitrarily lopped off from both sides of the picture! Hell in the Pacific is certainly a film that I will need to watch again, in a proper format. Brilliant concept, acting and filming (from what I could see of it).
