Anatahan

, also known as The Saga of Anatahan, is a 1953 black-and-white Japanese film war drama directed by Josef von Sternberg, with special effects by Eiji Tsuburaya. The World War II Japanese holdouts on Anatahan (then part of the South Seas Mandate of Imperial Japan, now one of the Northern Mariana Islands of the United States) also inspired a 1998 novel, Cage on the Sea. It was the final work directed by noted Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg (although Jet Pilot was released later). Von Sternberg had an unusually high degree of control over the film, made outside the studio system, which allowed him to not only direct, but also write, photograph, and narrate the action. Although it opened modestly well in Japan, it did poorly in the US, where von Sternberg continued to recut the film for four more years. He subsequently abandoned the project and went on to teach film at UCLA for most of the remainder of his lifetime. The film was screened within the official selection during the 14th Venice Film Festival (1953). Plot Josef von Sternberg directed, photographed and provides the voice-over narration and wrote the screenplay (from a novel based on actual events by Michiro Maruyama, translated into English by Younghill Kang) about twelve Japanese seamen who, in June 1944, are stranded on an abandoned-and-forgotten island called Anatahan for seven years. The island's only inhabitants are the overseer of the abandoned plantation and an attractive young Japanese woman. Discipline is represented by a former warrant officer but ends when he suffers a catastrophic loss of face. Soon, discipline and rationality are replaced by a struggle for power and the woman. Power is represented by a pair of pistols found in the wreckage of an American airplane, so important that five men pay with their lives in a bid for supremacy.