Back when Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu was barely out of diapers, and Clint Eastwood was the star of the TV series Rawhide, Frank Sinatra made None but the Brave. After bullying the likes of Lewis Milestone, Robert Aldrich and John Sturges, Sinatra stepped into the director's chair officially for this one time. What made the film unique was that it this was a World War II film alternating between the American and Japanese soldiers. Nothing was said that wasn't expressed in films like All Quiet on the Western Front and almost every film that followed. Based on what little I knew about film at the time, I was excited to see a film that looked at war from the point of view of both "our side" and "the enemy", overlooking the cliches of cast and characters one expected from a Warner Brothers production, albeit a co-production with Toho. One might further argue that Sinatra's film was essentially redone, reduced to a cast of two in John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific and as the multi-million dollar extravaganza Tora! Tora! Tora!. None but the Brave is currently available as a French DVD, and is on VHS in the U.S.

Babel wasn't created in a vacuum. If Gonzalez Inarritu hadn't made it, someone else would have made a similar film. For all I know, someone may have already made that film. Someone well-versed in film history could rattle off the dozen or so films and filmmakers which paved the way for Babel as neither its structure nor its Third World point of view are new. It is for those reasons that Gonzalez Inarritu and Gardels have made statements that I question. In its own way, None but the Brave looked at how people are divided by language and culture, using the Hollywood template of the war film.

Speaking of Third World points of view, for those not humor-impaired, let me recommend this film which illustrates what Thais really think of Americans and the French.