December 7th, 1941. A date which will live in infamy. The Japanese Empire deliberately and maliciously altered the course of wartime propaganda, and a future Michael Bay movie [[[link Pearl Harbor]]], with a calculated attack upon Pearl Harbor. With this, Americans demanded swift action be taken – our fictional characters must start punching the Japanese in their faces. This is easier to do in a way than vilifying the Nazis, as anti-Japanese sentiment carries a great degree of racism to it, something Americans of the ‘40s were very comfortable with.
It took the East Side Kids until May 22nd of 1942 to release their response, leaving behind whatever it was Mr. Wise Guy was about (I forget) in favor of meanness towards Tojo. The resulting Let’s Get Tough! is a fascinating glimpse into the kneejerk, militant, xenophobic attitude many Americans took in response to a surprise airplane-based attack upon our native soil…You know, something wholly limited to the ‘40s, which you’d never see paralleled recenty [cough cough!].
But while today we may retain a sickening amount of hatred for all Muslims everywhere, our attitudes towards the Japanese have evolved mightily (their culture’s recent embrace of insanity helps). No matter, it should at least be interesting to visit the rage-filled flailing of our former generations…
Stroking that patriotic fervor most decidedly, Let’s Get Tough! opens with endless stock footage of our soldiers marching off to war, in the most geometric patterns possible. It occurs this imagery is no different than what Riefenstahl was putting forth for her German overlords, though naturally Monogram cannot match the Nazis’ foremost propagandist. The only thing making this “good” and that “bad” is the U.S. won the war, which therefore makes it morally superior. Okay, a “Daily Show” attitude to the so-called Greatest Generation’s propaganda is overly-cynical; we’d’ve never won the war had we stopped to question our own racism!
No matter, the East Side Kids witness this footage, and are overcome with an instant avalanche of anti-Jap sentiments. (The word “Jap” is used about 100 times in Let’s Get Tough!, with a casualness one hardly ever hears applied to a slur.) The East Side Kids swear to enlist, in spite of their “youth.” For these movies continue to insist they are but lads, even though all are around 21 – and indeed, many of the series’ actors would soon actually join the armed forces. But let’s allow this series-wide conceit to continue ad infinitum, resulting in the Kids’ rejection from every branch of the Armed Forces: the Army, Marines, Navy, to hell with the Air Force, they never tried that one! All this despite a professed, repetitive insistence that they will “knock off about a million Japs.” (As ever, the best “East Side Kids” moments are the context-free gags they dream up. I don’t know why I just wrote this parenthetical.)
Restrained from taking their Yellow Peril enthusiasm abroad, the East Side Kids resolve to fight the good fight on the home front, and instantly target a shopkeeper of presumably Japanese descent – because, you know, he’s got non-round eyeballs, and is vaguely East Asian, and acts as broadly ethnic as all minority actors had to in 1940s Hollywood. Unprovoked, the East Side Kids patriotically demolish his merchandise, and even throw eggs – “Yellow on the inside, like you filthy swine.” (The racist sentiments in Let’s Get Tough! are astonishingly pervasive, even while it seems – for now – the writers knew nothing nastier to say about the “Japs” than they are “yellow” – it’s the same “skin color alone is worthy of mockery” attitude which informs all the jokes about token Scruno.)
Romantic subplot interlude, for there is always a romantic subplot: Danny’s older brother, as usual, romances a gal named Nora (Florence Rice). This time, Danny’s brother Phil (Tom Brown) is in the armed forces, as keen on nipping the Nips as any. Or he may be a spy, as we vaguely learn later on, for Monogram never had a handle on subtle plot threads – I’ve grown accustomed to this, and mostly second-guess these subtextual points, little things like “character motivation” they never adequately address. Oh well.
Totally contextless interlude, for 60 minutes of xenophobia are hard to fill up: Glimpy (Huntz Hall, “East Side Kid”) takes a violin lesson from a profoundly short man (Jerry Bergen). It seems Hall had learned how to amusingly play music poorly. This is the best part of the movie.
But enough of that, with a burning desire to “kill a million Japs” the East Side Kids return to Keno’s store to destroy whatever they missed the first time around – and now I realize that “Keno” is the man’s name, and not another forgotten ethnic slur. Only it turns out Keno is already murdered, the Kids’ job done for them. God bless America!
The police take the East Side Kids in, the police today represented by Officer Stephens (Robert Armstrong, fallen quite a bit since King Kong). And while there is much discussion about the fact that being Japanese automatically makes someone anti-American, in a gloriously ad hominem sort of way, it seems the Kids weren’t wholly in the right to commit felonious property damage and assault. For you seen, Keno was no “Jap,” but a “Chinaman.” Well golly gee whiz! Not only is this the first time the East Side Kids learn there is more than one sort of Asian (but no more than two!), but I’m damned sure it was the first time audiences and screenwriters learned it too! (Compare that to this millennium’s “Where is Iraq, why should we care, and how often should we bomb it?” sentiment. Oh right, and Africa’s a country…in, like, Australia, or someplace. Ignorance!)
Let us leave the East Side Kids to their dated civics lesson, complete with an extended unintentional misinterpretation of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. (According to which, via Monogram, a “colored” person like Scruno has 3/5ths the rights of a “normal” person – I am serious! When badmouthing the Japanese fails them, East Side Kids can always fall back on good, old-fashioned Jim Crow!)
Anyway, it’s time to meet a real Jap! Behold Joe Matsui. Now, since he is Japanese, he is automatically a devious spy, intent upon the mass genocide of all North America. He himself admits this, Matsui cackling in a Fu Manchu fashion that would’ve been considered outdated one year prior, before the attacks. (Matsui is played by Philip Ahn, a Korean, ‘cause not like it matters, and besides a real Japanese actor would be unemployable anyway by this film’s admission.) Also here is Gabriel Dell playing a grotesque German stereotype, so we get all our bases covered.
The East Side Kids, again roaming freely and unsupervised, head to Matsui’s pawn shop to raise the money for a “good cause” – this unstated “cause: involves raising the $ to buy Keno’s widow flowers, because “the Chinamen are our friends.” For convoluted reasons (read: inept filmmaking), they manage to switch a pen with Matsui – and inside it is a slip of paper in “Jap” writing.
A few detours later, and the Kids return to Matsui’s to get this writing translated, their mania for wrecking Japanese furnishings temporarily curtailed. Here, Matsui’s father realizes the paper is one of his spy ring’s secret missives. The Nip jig is up, a minor problem upon the old man’s head for the first time in his entire life – he kills himself! Right then and there, in front of the six “minors!” The East Side Kids were never remotely this violent, but it’s “OK” because he’s Japanese. (And this assumption that all Japanese commit ritualistic hari kari the instant minor problems arise, this is a strange notion. At least it indicates the filmmakers are doing something akin to research now.)
The Kids summon officer Stephens, intent to provoke more “Japs” into suicide. Returning to Matsui’s, seemingly the old man is alive again. “Good guys” leaving, it turns out this was a lifelike marionette employed by Matsui, with remarkable success – What the hell books on Japan were these people reading?!
Spending a little more time with the spy ring downstairs, we learn even the Japanese cannot refrain from referring to each other in ethnic slurs. I swear, they talk of themselves as “filthy Japs!” Why is every movie I watch so irredeemably racist?!
Okay, so it turns out these generic spies are in fact the historical Black Dragon Society – though far be it from Monogram to spell that out clearly. These guys were a WWII espionage cabal in the U.S., on top of being a paramilitary, ultra-nationalist right-wing party in Japan. They appear here in response to the FBI’s apprehension of some Black Dragons in March of ’42, the event which gave Sam Katzman’s directionless xenophobia a target (he also produced a Bela Lugosi vehicle that year, creatively called Black Dragons, to similar effect).
Okay, so the East Side Kids are growing suspicious, as you do when witnessing unmotivated suicide. They post Scruno (Ernie Morrison, by the way, a good sport) to stand guard outside “Tojo’s” store – and even get in an in-joke shot at Junior G-Men, an earlier Little Tough Guys vehicle. Humor! Then Scruno, the point man, gets his traditional one-unbelievably-racist-line-per-entry: “I may be a Junior G, but I’m also an SBB. A Scared Black Boy.” Yowzers!
Their “SBB” given this demeaning, almost slave-like task, the noble Caucasian East Side Kids head over to Nora’s, for further help translating that danged slip of paper. Ever so casually she announces “I know a Jap I used to go to high school with” – and Nora isn’t even shown as being a militantly vitriolic character! It’s just that shrugged-off! Okay, so Nora leaves to go find her good friend “Jap,” as the non-Scruno East Side Kids stay back to eat food, for no reason.
…Okay, one reason. In another ineptitude-based switcheroo over at Matsui’s, Glimpy now has a different violin case all of a sudden – a violin case filled with magnesium (with which the Black Dragons intend to blow up the United States). Said magnesium sets fire to the family stove. Admittedly-amusing comedy comes from the Kids’ attempts to put a magnesium fire out with water. Rather, it spreads unabated like the U.S. fire-bombing of Tokyo and – Too soon?
Meanwhile, Nora’s “Jap” happens to be Matsui, for reasons of plot contrivance and because it’s not like there are Asian actors looking for work in Hollywood or anything. So she gets kidnapped, becomes a standard damsel in distress – Hmm…maybe I can add “sexist” to Let’s Get Tough!’s list of ideological problems. (At least it is competent as a film – same as one could say of, oh, The Birth of a Nation.)
Now again suspecting sabotage, the East Side Kids head back over to Matsui’s – where Scruno reports on the “suspicious” activity he saw there. Apparently, some people are Japanese. That is all he reports, and that is enough! The Kids sneak into the spy lair’s endless catacombs, though it’s all too dark to parse out what is happening. Rather, choice dialogue shall have to suffice:
Scruno: “Man, I’m too hip for that jive.” Okay, maybe that one didn’t sound clichéd until the 1970s.
Also, one of the increasingly-numerous Japanese spies is knocked out: “You’re one Rising Sun that’s not gonna rise.” Hey, a joke! An actual honest-to-Ba’al joke about Japanese culture. It’s still horribly insensitive, but it’s something more than simply “Jap chaps are yellow devils.”
Like any good secret society, the Black Dragons are holding some diabolical ceremonial meeting – which our heroes sum up as “Jap Halloween.” Tasteful. They disguise themselves in the ceremonial robes – Reason # 1 why movie villains should not meet in generic robes. The ritual proceeds, the dozens of Japanese present (really probably Korean actors) literally worshipping Emperor Hirohito as a god. With the bad accents, bad dialogue, etc., is at feels like Kim Jong-Il in Team America; World Police…only without, you know, the intentional irony. “We must strangle our rightful enemy – democracy.” That’s right, evil is simple.
Ah hah, but soon the Kids are found out. Americans kids in the central ceremonial chamber! What a loss of face! Rather than, erm, fighting the kids, instead the Japanese all react by…committing hari kari! Yes, they kill themselves en masse! There are some lies you can base a story around, and others than just make everything seem like arbitrary abstraction. This is the latter. And that is how Let’s Get Tough! ends, largely forgoing the need for a capper joke, for isn’t the sight of countless deceased foreigners joke enough?
“When we are dealing with the Caucasian race we have methods that will test the loyalty of them. But when we deal with the Japanese, we are on an entirely different field.”
- Attorney General Earl Warren (future Chief Justice of the Supreme Court)
Executive Order 9066 was authorized on May 3, 19 days before Let’s Get Tough!’s release. Nonetheless, it’s almost certain the film was made prior to this declaration, and its attendant Civilian Exclusion Order No. 346. Still, it stands as a monument to public sentiment at the time, of America’s profound subjugation of the Japanese race during WWII. I am talking, of course, of Japanese internment camps, which Let’s Get Tough! indirectly supports through its depiction of the Japanese as a wholly alien and untrustworthy (suicide-prone) foe. (To a much, much lesser extent, the U.S. also rounded up a few seditious Germans and Italians, and, just for the hell of it, some Jews.)
This whole chapter in U.S. history is lamentable, but ironically that lends Let’s Get Tough! value beyond its status as a disposable, cheap little Monogram wartime comedy. It is instructive to bear witness to outdated, forgotten attitudes, especially those which arise under times of national duress. While surely it is unlikely American misconceptions of Japan will ever exactly mirror what we saw in 1942, it helps to identify where our current shortcomings may lie.
Related posts:
• No. 1 East Side Kids (1940)
• No. 2 Boys of the City (1940)
• No. 3 That Gang of Mine (1940)
• No. 4 Pride of the Bowery (1940)
• No. 5 Flying Wild (1941)
• No. 6 Bowery Blitzkrieg (1941)
• No. 7 Spooks Run Wild (1941)
• No. 8 Mr. Wise Guy (1942)
• No. 10 Smart Alecks (1942)
• No. 11 'Neath Brooklyn Bridge (1942)
• No. 12 Kid Dynamite (1942)
• No. 13 Clancy Street Boys (1943)
• No. 14 Ghosts on the Loose (1943)
• No. 16 Million Dollar Kid (1944)
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