by Mark Harris
The stern eye of the Production Code as well as the studios’ collective fear of giving offense meant that controversial material was systematically weeded out of scripts before the cameras ever rolled. It also meant that even the most highly praised and successful studio directors were treated as star employees rather than as artists entitled to shape their own creative visions. When a filmmaker’s work reliably struck a chord with audiences, he was rewarded with larger budgets, access to the best of his studio’s contract stars, and a greater, though not unchecked, ability to pick and choose from among those properties that his bosses wanted to turn into movies. But there were limits, and political self-expression was one of them; no movie under the banner of a studio would ever reach American theaters unless the head of that studio was comfortable defending every frame and every line—and ideally, not a frame or line would need defending in the first place.
Sooner or later, every working director in Hollywood would find himself on the losing end of an argument about the content of one of his movies, fighting against a litany of often self-imposed restrictions about what couldn’t or shouldn’t or mustn’t be said. In 1938, none of them was powerful enough to override the caution of the motion picture industry’s leaders—certainly not John Huston, who was still trying to break into the business, or George Stevens and William Wyler, who were still working their way up. Even Frank Capra and John Ford, who were already near the top of their field, knew that on this subject, the men in charge were immovable. Over the course of a career at Fox that had begun well before the dawn of the sound era, Ford had earned the trust and respect of his bosses, most recently Darryl F. Zanuck, who had overseen all production for the studio since its 1935 merger with a rival company called Twentieth Century Pictures. Ford’s public identity as a director had not yet been fully formed—the remarkable run that would firmly establish his reputation not just within Hollywood but with the American public would begin at the end of 1938 with the shooting of Stagecoach. Thus far, the reputation he had built steadily over the last fifteen years rested most firmly on a film that Fox and most other studios in Hollywood had declined to make because of its politics. In 1935, he had gone to RKO to shoot The Informer, a dark, unusually atmospheric melodrama about a man who sells out his friend to the police during the Irish rebellion. The film was close to Ford’s heart—he had gone to Ireland as a young man in 1921 to visit relatives and support the IRA—and, although it was not a major hit, it greatly elevated Ford’s status with critics and within the industry, winning him his first Academy Award for Best Director.
But if Ford imagined that the acclaim he had received would somehow result in greater clout or creative freedom back at Fox, he was soon disillusioned. Three years after The Informer was released, he saw Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion, one of the first French-language films to win widespread attention in the United States. He was astonished by the power and the frankness of Renoir’s drama, which portrayed officers, including one explicitly identified as Jewish, who were being held as prisoners during the First World War. Ford was moved by its portrayal of personal nobility in the face of a catastrophic clash of nations. It was, he said, “one of the best things I have ever seen.” But when he tried early in 1938 to get Zanuck interested in an American remake, he was rebuffed so firmly that he was dissuaded from pressing his case further. The idea of pursuing a more socially or politically committed cinema, was, he felt, futile; no film with a strong political perspective would be able to surmount the studios’ fear of being labeled interventionists, or the antipathy of the censors and what he disdainfully called the “financial wizards” to making waves. “If you’re thinking of a general run of social pictures, or even just plain honest ones,” he complained, “it’s almost hopeless.”
In 1938, Ford began to do offscreen what he was not permitted to do in his movies, and walked onto the stage of Los Angeles’s Shrine Auditorium to speak at an Anti-Nazi League rally for the first time. He was not going out on a limb alone. The league was only two years old, but its membership already included hundreds, soon to be thousands, of actors, directors, screenwriters, and public intellectuals, a broad mix of Democrats, Socialists, and Communists. But Ford was particularly fearless about speaking out. “May I express my wholehearted desire to cooperate to [my] utmost ability with the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League,” he said that fall, when Dies’s new congressional committee started to go on the attack. “If this be Communism, count me in.”
That rhetorical flourish spoke more of Ford’s long-standing detestation of bullies like Dies than of his own political sympathies. A lifelong Catholic, he had little in common with the Popular Front leftists—many of them Jewish, many of them Communists—who were among Hollywood’s most active anti-Nazi leaders. In a letter to his nephew, he had recently written of his conviction that “Communism to my mind is not the remedy this sick world is seeking.” Although he didn’t identify his politics publicly, in the same letter he described himself as “a definite socialistic democrat—always left,” and that was, at the time, accurate.
Ford was a deeply divided personality. On sets, he could be a sadist, often singling out a cast or crew member for abuse or humiliation. But in the public sphere, he would frequently become affronted at an unfair or lopsided fight and take a stand, always preferring David to Goliath. In 1936, incensed at the studios’ antiunion policies and firm in his belief (which was tinged with some unseemly precepts about Jews and money) that “the picture racket is controlled from Wall Street,” he urged his colleagues to make common cause with Hollywood’s trade unions, and became one of the founding members of the Screen Directors Guild. A year later, he joined the SDG’s first negotiating committee. And as the Spanish Civil War pricked Hollywood’s conscience, Ford helped found organizations like the Motion Picture Artists’ Committee to Aid Spain, which eventually boasted a membership of fifteen thousand; he also served as vice chairman of the Motion Picture Democratic Committee, an anti-Fascist, pro-Roosevelt group that was heavily involved in California state politics.
At the Shrine Auditorium on the day Ford spoke, the subject was Hitler, although Dorothy Parker, who presided over the rally, refused to use his name, referring to him only as “that certain man.” The theme of the day was twofold: the evil of Fascism abroad, and the possible menace of Nazi cells within the United States. An audience of four thousand listened as the Anti-Nazi League’s special guest speaker, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, warned via audio hookup from Carnegie Hall that “America is not free from . . . Nazi activity,” which was then a common it-can-happen-here refrain in newspapers and radio broadcasts. For many in Hollywood, fighting Hitler was a good cause, but not yet a crisis. For Ford, though, the rally’s message was resonant, and the threat felt immediate. It was not premature to imagine a day when the United States would have to defend itself.
Over the last ten years, Hollywood had not made many war movies, and even those that showcased the excitement of combat or of aerial derring-do tended to emphasize above all the grave human cost of military conflict. “War itself is so ugly and so terrible,” said the French writer André Maurois that year, “that I do not believe it is possible to see a representation of such life without wishing never to live it. The difficulty is not to give a war film the character of a great adventure—a characteristic which modern war does not have.” The trauma of what was then still called the Great War was still fresh, and the loss of more than 100,000 American soldiers in just a year had left the United States deeply averse to the idea of military involvement a continent away. The First World War had been a subject for movies as early as armistice, and in 1928, Ford had made it the backdrop of one of his most moving silent films, Four Sons, about brothers from Bavaria who end up fighting on opposite sides. But no movie had defined World War I for American audiences more than Lewis Milestone’s 1930 masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front, an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s widely read novel. The film had affirmed and reinforced the public’s perc
eption of the war as a descent into carnage that had robbed every nation that fought in it of a generation of young men, all for a tenuous peace that few believed would last. Almost ten years later, it remained for many in the industry Hollywood’s last and best word on the subject.
George Stevens had been thirteen when the United States entered the war in 1917; as a child, he had read daily reports of the deaths of American boys just a few years older than he was. Twenty years later, he shuddered at the prospect of another costly war—and like many Americans, the conflict in Europe felt remote to him. Stevens had no old-country roots anywhere; he had grown up in California, his parents were stage actors, he had cut his teeth directing slapstick shorts when he was barely out of his teens, and show business was the only life he had ever known. Though he was, at thirty-four, a laconic and introverted man who was sometimes teased on his sets about the expression of impenetrable, stone-faced preoccupation that he tended to wear like a mask, most of the dozen features he had directed for RKO were loose, energetic, and joyful. Under contract to the studio, he had distinguished himself as one of Hollywood’s most adroit up-and-coming directors, a filmmaker who had a confident light touch and a gift for bringing out strong work in his actors. He’d made a critically praised literary adaptation, Alice Adams, and a hit musical, Swing Time, and he was a particular favorite of actresses, including Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck (with whom he had made Annie Oakley), and RKO’s most important female star, Ginger Rogers, whom he had just directed in the sparkling comedy Vivacious Lady.
As he watched Ford and many of his fellow directors begin to immerse themselves in a kind of activism that might eventually lead to American intervention in Europe, Stevens felt his own consciousness begin to stir with a growing sense of alarm. As a filmmaker he believed, for the first time, that he had a duty to make a movie that engaged with the world’s dangerous realities, and he thought the hits he had delivered for RKO had earned him the right to make a passion project. In 1938, he had one in mind: an adaptation of Humphrey Cobb’s novel Paths of Glory, the bleak and harrowing story of three French soldiers during World War I who face a court-martial and death sentence for cowardice when they refuse orders from their superiors to advance in an attack that they know amounts to a suicide mission. Like All Quiet on the Western Front, Cobb’s novel was a mostly apolitical indictment of the brutality of war, which it depicted as a vicious game in which vain old men with little at personal risk heedlessly send young soldiers to their deaths.
Stevens later said that his own position regarding the possibility of another war was vague and uninformed; like many Americans who were old enough to remember doughboys being gassed in the trenches, he imagined at the time that an American move against Hitler’s reinvigorated Germany could lead to unimaginable loss, and that the United States would do better to turn away from the nightmare that Europe was becoming. He thought Paths of Glory could serve as both a reminder and a warning. But his pitch to make the movie was rejected repeatedly by RKO’s production chief Pandro Berman. “He [said], ‘You can’t make that picture,’” Stevens recalled. “And I said, ‘Why the hell can’t we?’” When Stevens pressed him, Berman first said that his resistance was not ideological but financial: Foreign markets were extremely important to the studios, and he believed that France would not only refuse to show Paths of Glory but might boycott all RKO product in retaliation. “Well, don’t run it in France,” Stevens replied. “This is a picture for the rest of the world.” But another delegation from the studio then approached Stevens and said flatly, “It’s an anti-war picture.”
“Yes, it’s true,” Stevens said. “It’s an argument against war.”
“Well, this is no time to be making an anti-war picture,” they replied. “War is in the offing.”
“I said, ‘What better time for an anti-war picture?’” Stevens remembered decades later. “And they said, ‘What about Hitler? If somebody doesn’t fight Hitler, what will happen?’ . . . It was another eight years before I [understood] that. I got all the way to Dachau before I could say that we should’ve fought Hitler three years before the development . . . that brought [us] into it.”
At the time, though, Stevens didn’t recognize what he later viewed as his own naiveté; he just felt thwarted.* And more than that, manhandled, especially when RKO swiftly steered him toward the property it had decided should be his next film: Gunga Din. Stevens was given a budget of nearly $2 million—the largest the studio had ever approved—to film Rudyard Kipling’s rousing story of the glory and the valor of the British Empire in India, and the film proved to be tremendously successful with audiences, who loved seeing Cary Grant in uniform and Sam Jaffe play an Indian. The movie, which was released in early 1939, raised its young director’s profile considerably, and was mostly well received by critics. Stevens gave little thought to its pro-war subtext while he was making it. But decades later, his verdict on Gunga Din was close to that of the critic for the Bombay publication FilmIndia, which called the movie “Imperialist propaganda.” “The film is delightfully evil in the fascist sense,” said Stevens. “It celebrates the rumble of the drums and the waving of the flags. . . . I really got that film done just before it would have been too late. Another year . . . and I would have been too smart to do it.”
At the same time that RKO was steering Stevens away from Paths of Glory, a far more powerful filmmaker found himself in a battle with his bosses over a war movie. It was not a position to which Frank Capra was accustomed. By 1938, Capra was the most important director on the Columbia Pictures lot, and nobody else even came close. Columbia was not a powerhouse, not one of the studios that were then referred to in the industry as the “big five” (Warner Bros., 20th Century Fox, RKO, MGM, and Paramount). Like Universal, it was considered a second-tier company with more modest financial underpinnings and a far less impressive stable of talent. Capra was the exception; his 1934 comedy It Happened One Night had swept the Academy Awards, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town had won him his second Best Director Oscar two years later, and the fall of 1938 brought an adaptation of the Broadway hit You Can’t Take It With You that would win the Best Picture Oscar and bring Capra his third Best Director trophy in five years.
In the public eye, Capra was the first brand-name director of the sound era; his latest movie had landed him on the cover of Time magazine with the headline “Columbia’s Gem.” The article praised his understated on-set style, explaining that he “works without mannerisms [and] confers quietly with his actors and technical crew before each take.” It also enthusiastically advanced the rags-to-riches autobiography that Capra had, even at the outset of his career, actively promoted, taking him from his humble beginnings as an immigrant boy from Sicily selling newspapers on California street corners to his present $350,000-per-annum salary and his and his wife Lucille’s lifestyle as “two of the community’s most dazzling celebrities. . . . [They] spend most of the year in a vacation cottage in Malibu Beach and send two of their three children to the U.C.L.A. nursery school.”
Columbia president Harry Cohn had such confidence in Capra that he had not hesitated to pay $200,000 to buy him the screen rights to You Can’t Take It With You. But he also knew how to say no, and, just two months after the Time story, when Capra came to him with an idea for a new movie, Cohn turned his most valuable employee down flat. For several years, Capra had wanted to film an adaptation of Maxwell Anderson’s play Valley Forge, a drama about the conditions endured by American fighters in the Revolutionary War during the punishing winter of 1778. The New York Times had praised the play as a chance to “worship at the shrine of an inspiring figure,” George Washington, but in fact, Anderson’s play was perfectly suited to Capra; it was a veneration not so much of General Washington as of the common soldier whose fighting spirit convinced him not to surrender.
Cohn had already turned up his nose at Valley Forge when Capra first pitched it three years earlier, just after the success of It Happened One Night. Now Capra returned to mak
e his case with considerably more clout as well as the inducement of casting Gary Cooper as Washington—and Cohn told him the answer was still no. The reason was something Capra hadn’t anticipated: Cohn said he couldn’t bring himself to finance a movie in which audiences would be encouraged to root against British soldiers at a moment when England was under an ever greater threat from Germany. Capra didn’t put up much of a fight; he got the point. He hadn’t even considered the potential public relations peril of appearing to take the wrong side.
It was not the first time Cohn had saved Capra from himself. Over the last few years, the director’s naïve and inconsistent political instincts had sometimes led him close to disaster. In 1935, after he visited Italy and expressed his admiration for Benito Mussolini, Il Duce—a big fan of Capra’s movies—offered Columbia $1 million if Capra would direct a film biography based on his life, with Mussolini himself writing the screenplay. Capra, who was said to have a picture of the dictator on his bedroom wall, may have been interested, but Cohn, after briefly considering it, scotched the idea, saying, “After all, I’m a Jew. He’s mixed up with Hitler and I don’t want no part of it.” Cohn was blunt, coarse, and abrasive—most filmmakers couldn’t stand him—but he was also hard-nosed and shrewdly protective of his assets, Capra chief among them, and he believed that as an outsider, the director could not afford to dabble in global politics without having his loyalty questioned. Hollywood was already seen by too much of the rest of America as a nest of perversion and subversion, and the industry’s growing population of foreign-born filmmakers, writers, and actors had to walk an especially careful line. Even in 1938, Capra’s foreign origins made him such an easy target for casual distaste that a Collier’s magazine profile could lightly refer to him as a “little wop.”
