Midway

Midway, released in the United Kingdom as Battle of Midway, is a 1976 American war film that chronicles the Battle of Midway, a turning point in the Pacific Theater of Operations of World War II. Directed by Jack Smight and produced by Walter Mirisch from a screenplay by Donald S. Sanford, the film starred Charlton Heston and Henry Fonda, supported by a large international cast of guest stars including James Coburn, Glenn Ford, Ed Nelson, Hal Holbrook, Robert Webber, Toshiro Mifune, Robert Mitchum, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, Pat Morita, Dabney Coleman, Erik Estrada and Tom Selleck. The film was made using Technicolor, and its soundtrack used Sensurround to augment the physical sensation of engine noise, explosions, crashes and gunfire. Despite mixed reviews, particularly involving the use of stock footage and an unnecessary romance between an American and Japanese couple, the music score by John Williams and the cinematography by Harry Stradling Jr. were highly regarded, and Midway became the tenth most popular movie at the box office in 1976. Plot On April 18, 1942, a squadron of B-25 bombers from the launches a raid on Tokyo. The strike stuns the Imperial Japanese Navy and its commander Admiral Yamamoto. With hard evidence of the threat posed to the Japanese home islands by the carriers of the American Pacific Fleet, Yamamoto is permitted to use his plan to invade Midway Island. At Pearl Harbor, Captain Matt Garth is tasked with gauging the progress of decryption efforts at Station HYPO, headed by Commander Joseph Rochefort, which has partially cracked the Japanese Navy's JN-25 code, revealing that a major operation will soon take place at a location the Japanese refer to as "AF". Garth is asked by his son, naval aviator Ensign Tom Garth, to help free his girlfriend Haruko Sakura, an American-born daughter of Japanese immigrants, who has been interned with her parents, by calling in favors to have the charges against the family dropped. Yamamoto and his staff present their plans for Midway to the commanders who have been chosen to lead the attack, Admirals Nagumo and Yamaguchi of the Japanese carrier force and Admiral Kondo of the invasion force. After the inconclusive Battle of the Coral Sea, Rochefort uses a simple ruse to confirm that "AF" is Midway.