Charlton Heston as Captain Matthew Garth | Directed by Jack Smight | 1976
Some war films are about battles; Midway is about the decisions made before the battle begins. Directed by Jack Smight and released in 1976, it recreates the Battle of Midway of June 1942, the turning point of the Pacific War, in which American forces, outnumbered and outgunned, sank four Japanese aircraft carriers and changed the course of the Second World War. Charlton Heston plays Captain Matthew Garth, a fictional naval officer at the centre of the American effort — a composite character who allows the audience to follow the intelligence work, the planning, and the sacrifice through a single pair of eyes. Surrounded by an extraordinary cast playing real historical figures, Heston provides the film’s human thread.
The cast list reads like a history of Hollywood itself: Henry Fonda as Admiral Chester Nimitz, Glenn Ford as Rear Admiral Raymond Spruance, Robert Mitchum as Admiral William Halsey, Hal Holbrook as Commander Joseph Rochefort, the codebreaker whose team cracked the Japanese naval code, and Toshiro Mifune as Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto. James Coburn, Cliff Robertson, Robert Wagner, and Robert Webber fill out the American command, while James Shigeta and others play the Japanese officers. Into this company steps Heston’s Garth, an intelligence officer on Nimitz’s staff, a former aviator, and the father of a young pilot, Ensign Thomas Garth, played by Edward Albert. Garth’s personal story — his son’s romance with Haruko Sakura, played by Christina Kokubo, a Japanese-American woman whose family has been interned — gives the vast historical canvas a private, emotional focus.
The film’s first half is largely about intelligence: the painstaking work of Rochefort’s team, the arguments about whether the Japanese target is Midway or somewhere else, and Nimitz’s gamble in trusting a codebreaking hunch over conventional wisdom. Heston excels in these scenes. Garth is not a man of grand speeches; he is a staff officer who reads reports, asks questions, and carries messages between brilliant, stubborn men. Heston plays him with a quiet professionalism that suits the material: he listens more than he talks, and when he does speak, it is to clarify a decision rather than to dramatise it. It is a different kind of heroism from his epic roles, and it suits a film that is, at heart, about competence under pressure.
The second half turns to the battle itself, and here Smight makes a controversial but effective choice: much of the combat footage is genuine Second World War film, supplemented by sequences from earlier Hollywood war films, colourised and integrated with new material. Purists have criticised the patchwork quality, but the effect is powerful: audiences see real aircraft, real ships, and real explosions, rather than studio models. Garth, who has argued his way onto the carrier Yorktown, joins the air attack, and Heston’s final scenes — flying a dive bomber, wounded, refusing to abandon the mission — are played with the same stoic determination that defined his best work. The fact that Garth is fictional does not diminish the sequence; his death stands in for the many real pilots who did not return from Midway, and Heston plays it without sentimentality.
The film also deserves credit for telling the story from both sides. The Japanese sequences, with Mifune’s Yamamoto as a thoughtful, reluctant strategist rather than a caricature, give the battle its full context: the Japanese plan was ambitious and, in its own terms, logical, but it depended on surprise, and surprise was exactly what American codebreaking had taken away. Smight, who had replaced John Guillermin as director during production, keeps the two narratives balanced, cutting between American planning rooms and Japanese bridges with a clarity that many later war films have struggled to match. John Williams’s score, written between his work on Jaws and Star Wars, adds a sombre grandeur without tipping into jingoism.
Midway was a commercial success, helped by the Sensurround sound system that had made Earthquake such an event two years earlier, and it remains one of the most accessible introductions to the Pacific War for general audiences. Historians have pointed out its simplifications — Garth’s composite nature, the compressed timeline, the invented romance — but the central facts are sound: the codebreaking, the ambush, the loss of the Yorktown, and the destruction of the Japanese carrier force all happened essentially as the film shows them. For viewers who want to understand why Midway mattered, the film remains a useful and entertaining starting point.
Within Heston’s career, Garth is a fitting counterpart to his disaster-film professionals. Like Stewart Graff in Earthquake or Alan Murdock in Airport 1975, Garth is a man doing a skilled job in a crisis. But here the crisis is historical rather than fictional, and the stakes are not a single building or aeroplane but the fate of a war. Heston’s ability to anchor such a large ensemble — to be the audience’s guide through a complex story without overshadowing the real figures around him — shows a generosity as a performer that his reputation as a monumental leading man sometimes obscures. He was willing to be one officer among many, if that served the story.
It is also worth noting how well the film balances spectacle with restraint. The battle scenes are exciting, but they are never allowed to overwhelm the quieter moments in briefing rooms and on carrier decks, where the war is actually decided. That balance is rare in war cinema, and it is one reason the film still plays well today.
For Past Tunes readers, Midway is a reminder that the 1970s were not only the decade of dystopias and disasters, but also a decade in which Hollywood still made large, serious war films for mass audiences. Heston’s Garth, a father, an officer, and ultimately a casualty, embodies the film’s central idea: that history is made not only by admirals and generals, but by the staff officers, codebreakers, and pilots who carry out their orders — and sometimes do not come home.