The Purple Heart was a very good movie for the times. The people who brand it "sappy" and "propagandistic", or the brain dead person who chortles about "patriotic lunkheads" enlisting in the armed forces because of this movie were not alive during that period. They know nothing about the horror of total war. The survival of this nation was in doubt, and men were dying or being captured by sadistic Japanese who murdered them while in captivity. Every parent dreaded the telegram delivery boy, thinking what it might mean. Ever heard of the Bataan Death March? This movie was a fact based story about captured Americans from the Doolittle raid, in which several American Airmen were tried as War Criminals, and some of them were executed. Such a show trial was not repeated, but it showed the beastiality of the Bushido warriors. Japan should hang it's head in shame. The performances were dead right for war time, and Dana Andrews was superb, there were few cliches, it was mostly truth. Mr Bartalotti was right, there was a great deal in a short time. A True achievement. For the silly few who worry about propaganda, remember we were at war, and remember Pearl Harbor.

The Purple Heart is a fictionalization of the mock trial that several of the Doolittle Raiders went through in 1942 after they were captured. Fortunately most of the men involved made their escape good. Still Dana Andrews and his intrepid crew paid with their lives.

As you see the Japanese were most concerned with where those bombers came from so they could take steps. Wouldn't do to have these people back again.

In point of fact that first raid, the damage was negligible, but the propaganda value was enormous, especially since it involved the losing of that oriental face.

Andrews and his crew are accused of deliberately choosing civilian targets to bomb, of machine-gunning civilians including women and children. But the Japanese are willing to let it all slide if the Americans fess up where they came from.

Mind you these are the same people who killed millions of Chinese citizens with bombing and with more up close and personnel methods of death and destruction.

It must have driven the Japanese high command to a frenzy when FDR was asked where the raiders came from and he replied it was from a secret base in Shangri-La.

The American public did not know the Holocaust until after the concentration camps were liberated, but we knew well what the Japanese did to American and other allied prisoners. Surrender was not in their Bushido code and they responded in kind.

Ironically enough American bombing by 1944 included all kinds of civilian targets. Japanese cities were primarily made of wood and they went up in flames if you dropped lit matches on them. More people were killed in Tokyo than were killed in both nuclear explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Had the Japanese won and had captured such Army Air Corps folks like Hap Arnold and on down, they would have been put on trial and that's a certainty.

Lewis Milestone who directed and got an Academy Award for the anti-war All Quiet on the Western Front directed this dated flag-waver. Good in its time and for its purposes, but not for today's audience.

To borrow a couple of adjectives from its own theatrical trailer, this is one of the most "original" and "gripping" movies about WWII, made by Hollywood's 'Chronicler Of War' par excellence Milestone. It deals with a group of eight American airmen who bail out over China after having bombed Japan; betrayed to the enemy, they find themselves on trial for murder – to which reporters with Communist sympathies from various countries are "invited" to perform jury duty! – since the Japs claim that their targets had been hospitals (which they're ready to corroborate by means of newsreel footage depicting the carnage, even if jury members readily admit amongst themselves to be fake!) rather than munitions factories as the Yanks assert. However, despite the physical and mental torture to which the latter are subjected, all doesn't go smoothly for their accusers: first an opportunistic Chinese Governor, who's a prime witness, is assassinated (by his own upstanding son) in the courtroom and, then, when the Japanese Navy and Military (represented by the wily yet over-confident Richard Loo) themselves lock horns over the means of transportation used by the Americans (which would imply that one or the other was slack in its defense duties!). Being a wartime production, the tone is heavily jingoistic: peppered with homespun recollections of the prisoners' lives back home and displays of camaraderie every time one of them returns from his 'cross-examination', to say nothing of defiance in the face of their impending execution. Milestone's handling never strikes a false note throughout and has selected a sturdy cast besides: led by decent captain Dana Andrews (though the actor preferred to conceal his own operatic background for fear of being typecast, we do get to hear him sing here albeit in unison with his fellow soldiers),Italo-American Richard Conte, youngster Farley Granger and tough-but-compassionate Sam Levene. That said, the film is equally notable for its moody lighting (by top Fox cinematographer Arthur Miller) and inspired art direction (with proceedings mostly confined to the courtroom, prison cell and interrogation room).