For several weeks following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Japanese warplanes and destroyers pummeled a small U.S. Marines airfield on Wake Island, a coral atoll 2,300 miles west of Honolulu. Eventually, the Japanese overran the place. This 1942 drama co-written by W.R. Burnett (High Sierra, The Great Escape) and Frank Butler (Going My Way), and directed by John Farrow (The Big Clock, Hondo), tells a somewhat fictionalized story about those harrowing days and the men who endured them. Brian Donlevy stars as the commander of the island's forces, a compassionate but strong-willed leader tasked with shaping up a ragtag crew of guys who've had it easy for a while and don't know what's about to hit them. Macdonald Carey plays a saintly pilot who loses his wife at Pearl Harbor but sticks around to continue the fight. Albert Dekker's prickly civilian contractor makes a nice foil for Donlevy, but the most surprising casting is the pairing of Robert Preston and William Bendix as a pair of squabbling puppies, brothers-in-arms always arguing about something but with a shared, unmentioned affection. The film is built around available archival footage of WWII dogfights and anti-aircraft guns blazing, etc. Plenty of war movies have done this, but it's a tricky business both because of the lower, grainier quality of actual war footage and because editing the real and the dramatized together can be artificial and disorienting. Both of those problems are going on in Wake Island, with a few scenes that prove hard to follow. Despite that, there's a lot to like about the film's tone of increasing fraternity between the men who survive days upon days of destruction and keep their wits and decency intact. The action sequences (those that don't involve archival stuff) are remarkable, with countless explosions, mayhem, and destruction going on. We also feel the island's isolation and vulnerability, a victim of the larger military's inability to help so soon into the war. Strongly recommended. (T. Keogh)