Abstract
The “five” of the title of Mark Harris’s excellent book are A-list feature film directors who volunteered to shoot footage for the armed services during World War II. Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler were all too old, too established in their careers, and completely inexperienced in the ways and wiles of the military when they enlisted and offered to help the Office of War Information document both the European and Pacific theaters. They just were not the types of theaters they were familiar with. Nevertheless, off they went into the fierce and often terrifying world of war. Each was changed forever.
Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, presents a vivid picture of the adventures, at times dangerous, often heart breaking, nearly fatal, and on occasion humorous of the five disparate personalities, all of whom were honored by their profession and stood among the giants of the industry.
Through exhaustive research and examination of original documents and footage, Harris constructs a mostly chronological and location-based study of why and how these particular five chose to go to war, and the repercussions of their individual missions. There are other major filmmakers represented as well: Darryl F. Zanuck, David O. Selznick, Jack Warner, John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and writers James Agee, Eric Ambler, and Irwin Shaw among them.
Harris’s clear conversational style offers a wealth of personal anecdotes as well as history, served up with enough inside film industry references to satisfy both academic and casual readers. With the history of American film becoming more widely taught outside of strict film school curricula, Five Came Back is a welcome addition to the expanding bookshelf.
As Harris relates, there was a good deal of resentment on the part of career officers who saw recently commissioned Hollywood directors as parvenus, and yet the five directors approached their assignments with enthusiasm and vigor, certain that their contributions would be welcomed and valued. They were also accustomed to being in charge, accustomed to being deferred to, and not accustomed to hearing the word “no.” They saw their military counterparts as bumbling, the weighty bureaucracy inefficient, and knowledge of the filmmaking process cursory at best. Five Came Back is full of great stories many of which would make fine movies on their own. Assigned to the Signal Corps, Army Air Corps, and the Navy, these five shot footage from the perspective of true filmmakers, offering a look back at a time in history much less conflicted than our own.
Frank Capra, commissioned into the Signal Corps, was the commanding officer of the unit, supervising operations from Washington, D.C. He was also the director of several of the seven episodes of the “Why We Fight” series, the first of which, Prelude to War, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary of 1943.
Offering to take on an assignment at a classified location on an unnamed island, John Ford found himself in the middle of a raging fight, the result of which was The Battle of Midway, the first look American audiences had of the war in the Pacific. He was also at odds for most of the war with John Wayne, who would become his go-to star after the war, when Ford turned for the most part to making westerns. But Wayne had refused to enlist, a sore subject with Ford, even though Wayne rationalized that he would be more valuable starring in pictures that would raise home front morale.
Huston was assigned to film The Battle of San Pietro, originally intended to be shot in that small Italian village. But he arrived too late to get the footage he needed. He eventually staged most of the film at a nearby location, including shots of American war dead, which so alarmed the military brass that the film was deemed unreleasable. When it was re-cut and the offending scenes removed, journalists bought the story that it was authentic, and Huston never disabused them.
Wyler’s major project was Memphis Belle, The Story of a Flying Fortress, an intimate study of the crew of a B-17 heavy bomber that completed a remarkable 25 missions, the young men returning to the United States as heroes, going to parties, and meeting movie stars. (A fictionalized version was released in 1990.) Wyler’s next picture, a mission-centric film about a P-47 crew called Thunderbolt, had a much more disastrous result. Not trusting a cameraman to get the combat aerial footage he needed, he positioned himself and a camera belly down in the open waist of a B-25. The engine noise and the “high shriek of the wind” caused him to lose his hearing. For the rest of his life, he was deaf in one ear and had only limited hearing in the other, a fact he at first feared would ruin both his marriage and his career. Fortunately, it did neither.
The five did come back, each with his own experiences that needed to be integrated into post-war Hollywood projects. Most, with the noted exception of Capra, were tainted by the cynicism resulting from their wartime travails. Audiences were weary of war films and were more interested in the growing social realism coming from a revitalized French and Italian film industry, and bought into the anxiety expressed by the paranoia of film noir and the atomic age. The world had changed, and even home on terra firma, the ground had shifted under their feet.