The Battle (also known as Thunder in the East) is a 1934 Franco–British co-production English language drama film directed by Nicolas Farkas, and starring Charles Boyer, Merle Oberon and John Loder. It was adapted from a 1909 French novel by Claude Farrère entitled La bataille.

Plot

In 1904 during the Russo-Japanese War, a Japanese naval officer gets his wife, played by Merle Oberon, to seduce a British attaché in order to gain secrets from him. Things begin to go wrong when she instead falls in love with him.

Cast

Production

This was first released as a French-language film entitled La bataille with many of the same cast members, but with Oberon's part played by the French actress Annabella. In the United States, the English film was released in August 1935 under the title Thunder in the East. The English version was revived in 1943 under a new title, Hara-Kiri, and changes were made that transformed the film into an anti-Japanese wartime propaganda film. The primary changes were a foreword relating to Pearl Harbor and Japanese perfidy, as well as an epilogue about the cowardice of hara-kiri.