Blood on the Sun – ‘Did Six Years in Shanghai Myself….’

Re-watched the old James Cagney movie Blood on the Sun (1945) the other night. It’s an interesting relic for a number of reasons (including Cagney’s judo expertise):

• Lester Cole, the main scriptwriter on the movie was a victim of McCarthy’s anti-communist witchhunts – Cole had been a member of the CPUSA;
• The Tokyo Imperial Hotel bar seen at the start of the movie (and screengrabbed below) is apparently an exact replica of the actual bar situated in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. As the movie was filmed in 1944 obviously it was all shot in California;
• Several of the foreign hacks in the movie make reference to having been in Shanghai (the movie is set just before the Pacific War) and Cagney’s character says he did six years in Shanghai himself. The move between Shanghai and Tokyo was a pretty common one for journalists at the time. I don’t think Cagney’s character, Nick Condon, is based on any one particular hack, but rather an amalgam of a bunch of them from the time;
• Cagney works on the English language Tokyo Chronicle, which is a version of the actual Japan Advertiser, founded by Benjamin “B. W.” Fleisher, a Missourian, in Yokohama in 1909. A bunch of great American journalists worked on that paper including Fleisher, Carl Crow, George Sokolosky, Edward Hunter and Victor Keen.