True story / real events

My recollection is it was $800,000 back in 1954. Yes. Now Lawton tried to draw parallels between some of the characters and other characters in the story. For instance, note this shot, and then remember that it'll be repeated when the children's father, Peter Graves, is brought before the judge, so that there's a parallel visually between the real father and the phony father. This is the penitentiary in Moundsville.

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And those are the real sounds of the crickets, I believe, that you actually heard at that ranch. It's nice to see how, you know, these significant shots of John walking from place to place and how subtly that does allow him to claim the film and own it as the protagonist. You know, it's his viewpoint and his navigating the world.

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It's interesting that you mention that because in real life, Sally Jane Bruce grew up to become a teacher. That's right. In Central California, yeah. And on the other side of Billy Chapin is another wonderful child actress. Yes, Cheryl Calloway.

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And just as Antoine reads Balzac's search for the absolute, so this scene might be said to represent the moment of absolute purity in the film, children being made happy, the norm that ought to exist in the world. Robert Lacheney confirms the accuracy of the boy's exploit to raise money. The typewriter theft really happened because we had to find money to go to the movies with.

1:06:16 · jump to transcript →

But after all, there were still times where you had to pay, and so we had to find some money. But the story of the typewriter, that really happened later, when he moved out of his parents' house. He had run away from home and he was living with me. He said to me, you know, I could steal a typewriter that's in my father's office.

1:07:13 · jump to transcript →

We talk about movies for a while, but a week later, my father, who had discovered the announcement of the Film Addicts Club in L'Ecran Français, got his hands on me and turned me over to the police. The real article, not the juvenile authorities. I was spent two nights in the central police station, as the boy does in my film. Then they locked me up in Villejuif. At that time, 1948, Villejuif was half an insane asylum and half a house of correction.

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David Kalat

The new Japanese constitution placed strict limits of what the real life military could do. They could defend the country from invasion and that was about it. If you set your film in World War II, it meant your soldier characters were on the losing side of a conflict that you were now obliged to depict as deeply wrong. So a film like this created a unique opportunity to show the contemporary Japanese military doing heroic and resourceful things now in the present in a way that the audience could cheer for without any lingering traces of guilt.

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David Kalat

Again, they rebuilt the set, this time reinforcing things to be less fragile. So the cameras roll, Nakajima stomps up to the building, starts to claw at it, but the reinforced, rebuilt set doesn't break. Eventually, he succeeded in destroying the building, but it looked fake, and Tsuburaya threw most of the footage away. Instead, they shot a composite mat with Nakajima, superimposed on actual footage of the real Diet, and inserted what clips of the model they felt okay using.

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