Design for Death (1947)

• 59%
• 1947
• Documentary
• Richard Fleischer

An Academy Award winner for best documentary, the film opens with a notice that..."Exhibition of confiscated Japanese film material authorized by permission of the Alien Property Custodian in the public interest under License No. LM 979"...and was assembled from hundreds of captured newsreels, historical dramas and propaganda films. While revealing the steps that Japan took that led to Pearl Harbor, it goes back 700 years to the feudal caste system, a peasant revolt suppressed after the Samurai murdered over 40,000 people, to Admiral Perry forcibly opening Japan to foreign trade, to the perversion of converting the Shinto religion of nature-worship to that of a fanatic state creed that preached the Japanese were a Master Race and the Emperor was a sun-god to be blindly obeyed. The film carried no credit for a director, while Richard Fleischer shared the Producer credit with Theron Warth.