Blood Oath
The war crimes trial and other events portrayed in this film are based on the recollections of Captain John Williams, the Australian prosecutor during the war crimes trails on Ambon and on official records. The trial was a significant one for Australia, convened due to the fact that three-quarters of the Australians captured on Ambon died before the war's end. Most of the Japanese characters are based on real Japanese soldiers. Ninety-three Japanese soldiers were tried and four were executed for their mistreatment of soldiers and civilian prisoners. (Note: John Williams is the father of the film's writer/ producer, .),Captain Ikeuchi: I know nothing of any executions!,Featured in Blood Oath: Behind the Scenes (1990),Bryan Brown portrays a military lawyer prosecuting the garrison of a Japanese POW camp where 800 Aussie soldiers were killed during World War Two. Of course the whole notion of a war crimes trial is totally ridiculous, but director Stephen Wallace ignores the built-in ambiguities of the post-war legal inquisition to offer, instead, a holy crusade against the enemies of freedom, with enough courtroom histrionics to make Perry Mason blush: emotional outbursts; surprise witnesses; flashback re-enactments and so forth. The script makes no attempt to understand the enemy: most of the Japanese are inscrutable monsters, led by George Takei, who gets star billing with a five-minute walk-on role, presumably to lure the unwary Trekkie into seeing the film. The other villains are (predictably) the American overlords, represented by Terry O'Quinn, wearing sinister Douglas Macarthur-style sunglasses and making ominous references to a New World Order. The film is based on a true story, but the subject of war crimes and punishment deserves a deeper, more substantial treatment than this handsome, high-minded piece of fluff.,