Ana-ta-han

The story of this Japanese Von Sternberg is based on true events. Von Sternberg shot the film in Japan, but in a studio hermetically sealed off from the outside world. When critics asked him why he travelled to Kyoto to shoot this film, set on an island in the Pacific (Ana-ta-han in the Mariannas), and hadn't just stayed in Hollywood, the old master answered: 'Because I am a poet.' He probably also had more prosaic reasons, because the film was financed by Japanese industrialists. And of course Von Sternberg, like so many makers of Japonaiseries, was looking for the idealised Japan, that he would not have been able to find in reality. The film tells the story of a group of Japanese marines who were washed ashore on the island in World War Two after a shipwreck. They manage to keep themselves alive, but because they have no contact with the outside world, the end of the war passes them by too. Keiko, the pretty young wife of a planter, turns the head of several marines and ensures dramatic conflicts in the group. The woman manages to escape the terrors of the island and finally brings the news that the war is long over. The film was received with mixed feelings at the time. It was probably too soon after the end of the war and the mood was still too anti-Japanese to receive an honest judgement on the film that Von Sternberg manfully claimed as his best. GjZ