Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

by Mark Harris

  The fall of France in June 1940 was a shock that millions of Americans took in as a collective experience at movie houses, where footage of Nazi soldiers on the march and Parisians weeping in the streets made the war feel closer and more frightening. To many moviegoers, Poland and Czechoslovakia were foreign countries with foreign cultures, points on a map somewhere far away. France was closer, more real: It was the country of Charles Boyer and Jean Gabin, of romance and sex comedy and sophistication. Just a year earlier, Americans had watched Paris thaw Greta Garbo’s icy exterior in Ninotchka and turn Claudette Colbert from an ordinary girl into a pretend baroness in Midnight. Now, in the space of just six weeks, moviegoers across the country saw Winston Churchill take over from Neville Chamberlain as prime minister; they filled theaters as newsreels competed to present the best footage of the successful evacuation of Dunkirk; they heard Churchill’s thunderous “We shall fight on the beaches . . . we shall never surrender” speech to the House of Commons; and they witnessed the occupation of Paris by the Wehrmacht.

  The so-called phony war was over, and Hollywood responded with a combination of economic apprehension—it was now apparent that much of the lucrative European market for its movies was going to shrivel away in a matter of months—and fervent activism. The interventionist Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies, which opposed any further enforcement of the Neutrality Act that Congress had passed the previous fall, had formed in May, with a strong outpost in Hollywood that was funded by, among others, Zanuck, Wanger, Goldwyn, and the Warners. Weeks later, writer Philip Dunne, an instrumental early organizer of the Screen Writers Guild, helped found the Motion Picture Committee Co-operating for Defense, the first official Hollywood group committed to making films that would support any future war effort. That summer, the committee, which had been formed by all eight studio heads with the tacit approval of Roosevelt and his inner circle, kept its activities quiet, hoping not to spark any new antitrust charges or inflammatory accusations from isolationists. Its members scrupulously avoided using the word “propaganda.” But the group stood ready to produce movies if ever the administration made an official request; among those who served on its production committee was Capra, who was there to represent the Directors Guild and had agreed to make a short himself if necessary.

  That summer, the Warners again made their voices heard first and loudest. The day after Churchill’s speech, Harry Warner summoned more than three thousand of his employees (as well as several members of the Hollywood press) to a vacant soundstage on the Warner lot and made a speech denouncing, in parallel terms, Nazism and Communism, all totalitarian governments, American anti-Semitism and racism, isolationists, and appeasers. His language was sometimes more impassioned than coherent, but it won considerable attention and national news coverage. In case his point had been missed by other studios—many of which, unlike Warner Bros., were still attempting to hold on to their businesses in countries that Germany had invaded—Warner promptly had his speech printed as a pamphlet he titled “United We Survive, Divided We Fall!” and made sure it was mailed not just to his colleagues and rivals but to columnists, congressmen, cabinet members, and Roosevelt.

  In June, Warner Bros. had brought William Wyler back into the fold, convincing Goldwyn to loan them the director so that he could reteam with his Jezebel star Bette Davis, who was becoming so instrumental to the studio’s fortunes that she was jokingly referred to as “the fifth Warner brother.” (In the typically elaborate and personalized system of talent trading that was common at the time, a year later Jack Warner would loan Davis to Goldwyn so that Wyler could direct her again in The Little Foxes; in exchange, Goldwyn would loan Warner Gary Cooper and forgive Jack part of a $425,000 gambling debt.)

  Wyler’s affair with Davis had, by all accounts, ended with his marriage to Talli, but the two were eager to work together again. The Letter, the story of a married woman on a Malayan rubber plantation charged with murdering her lover, would be the greatest of their three collaborations; it stands as one of the most psychologically acute melodramas of the era, with deep, fine-grained work by both director and star. But the shoot was, from the beginning, fraught with misery. Davis discovered she was pregnant during the first week of filming; uncertain who the father was, she kept it a secret and had an abortion, her third, the following week, telling friends later, “I should have married Willy.” She and Wyler fought several times over her interpretation of the role, and at one point she walked off the set. In the end, she said, “I did it his way. . . . Yes, I lost a battle, but I lost it to a genius. . . . So many directors were such weak sisters that I would have to take over. Uncreative, unsure of themselves, frightened to fight back, they offered me none of the security that this tyrant did.” Davis loved Wyler’s intensity, the way he braced for battle on the set, the “Who do you hate today?” attitude that she said they shared. Nor did she mind his request for repeated takes of scene after scene; she felt it mirrored her own perfectionism.

  Jack Warner, however, was not so forgiving. His studio was a factory; second and third takes were permissible if something went wrong with the first one, but he had little patience for more. After he received a daily production report on The Letter showing that Wyler had used sixty-two takes to complete nine scenes, he was furious. “You are a very good director and no one can tell me you can’t make a scene in 2 to 4 takes tops and print the one you really know is right. . . . I am not going to let any one man put us out of business,” he wrote. “You must not realize that there is a war going on and that the film industry is in a very bad condition. . . . I will not stand for this practice and you must discontinue it immediately.”

  Warner’s jab about the war must have particularly stung Wyler, whose attempts to help get his relatives out of France through promises of sponsorship were giving way to more direct, and probably hopeless, gestures; he had started to send packets of cash abroad with the intention that the money be used to bribe Vichy officials to protect his family. It took him a couple of false starts before he was able to compose his polite, cool response. “Please be assured that I have no intention of putting your company out of business,” he replied. “Quite the contrary. If I found it necessary to make fourteen takes of one scene there must have been a very good reason. I . . . have made a particular effort toward speed and economy in the production of this picture (even at occasional sacrifices of quality). . . . I would consider it a favor if you would . . . at least give me the benefit of the doubt.” Wyler kept his temper and got his way; Warner did not interfere again, and The Letter came in at $665,000, $35,000 under budget. Wyler never learned whether the money he had sent to France had reached its intended recipients, or if it had done any good.

  Harry Warner’s public equation of Communism with Nazism may have been calculated to cool the tempers of politicians who were taking every opportunity to attack the movie industry as the epicenter of the “Red menace,” but it didn’t work. For the last two years, Martin Dies had rarely missed an opportunity to rail against what he saw as the potentially treasonous politics of Hollywood and the men who ran it. Dies was a blustery, none-too-bright conservative Democratic congressman from an at-large district in Texas. In 1938, he had run the House’s first version of the Un-American Activities Committee, sometimes chairing hearings alongside like-minded colleagues, but often serving as a committee of one. That year, he had become the target of widespread national mockery, including from the Roosevelt administration, when he had released testimony about a list of Hollywood stars believed to have Communist sympathies; the list included Shirley Temple, who was then eleven years old. Dies had quickly retreated onto safer ground, restricting his purview to inquiries about Nazi and Ku Klux Klan cadres. But in July 1940, a month after Warner’s speech, he reared up again, this time with a witness—a onetime Communist Party functionary and hanger-on named (exquisitely) John Leech—who, during closed one-on-one testimony, had furnished him with the names of forty-two Hollywood luminaries whom he claime
d gathered regularly at the Malibu home of Paramount production chief B. P. Schulberg to “read the doctrines of Karl Marx.” Leech testified that the Communist Party was using the movie colony’s fear of Nazis and of anti-Semites to build loyalty. Among the biggest names on his list were Philip Dunne, Fredric March, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart.

  As the names were leaked and reported nationally, Dies announced that he intended to hold hearings, swept into Los Angeles, installed himself at the Biltmore Hotel, and summoned his first witness. When Bogart arrived in the company of his lawyer, he was surprised to find that the only other person at the hotel conference table was Dies himself. There was no committee, nor was his accuser Leech anywhere to be seen. Bogart told Dies he was not a Communist and didn’t know of any. Asked to name names, he replied that he could not call anyone a Communist unless he saw a party membership card. Dies kept pressing; Bogart remained nonchalant and calm, and offered him nothing. The testimony ended quickly, and as the press began to turn on the congressman, calling his tactics “repugnant,” Dies hastily announced that he had found no evidence to support his witness’s charges against anyone. Within a couple of days, he gaveled his own hearings closed and fled Los Angeles.

  The episode, which had been designed to throw a scare into Hollywood’s interventionists, instead emboldened them by its very ineptitude. John Ford appeared not to be shaken in the slightest. The charges that his adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath was a veiled pro-Communist tract had failed to stick, and as the movie continued to attract large audiences, he started a production company that would, for the first time, allow him a degree of independence in the films he made. His newest project would combine two of his current passions, his love of the sea and his hatred of the Nazis. The Long Voyage Home, an adaptation of four short Eugene O’Neill plays set aboard a merchant marine ship, marked a reunion between Ford and several of his closest recent collaborators: Stagecoach producer Walter Wanger and its stars John Wayne and Thomas Mitchell, Informer screenwriter Dudley Nichols, and, perhaps most important, Gregg Toland, who had shot The Grapes of Wrath. On The Long Voyage Home, Ford considered Toland’s expressionist compositions so important that director and cinematographer shared their credits on a single title card.

  O’Neill and Ford were born five years apart—O’Neill in 1888 and Ford in 1893—and had much in common: They were the children of Irish immigrant fathers who had attained middle-class respectability in America, they were raised in New England, and Ford, whose real name was Sean Aloysius O’Feeney and whose father had run a saloon, shared with O’Neill a fondness for barrooms and the whiskey-enriched storytelling of the sailors who always seemed to be around when he was growing up. O’Neill had written his quartet of one-acts, known as the Glencairn plays, between 1914 and 1918, and they acknowledged the Great War only tangentially. But Ford and Nichols, who had told a reporter in 1939 that they had been looking “for years” for a film project that would allow them to make a statement against Fascism, quickly made the decision, with Wanger’s enthusiastic endorsement, to update the story to the present.

  Nichols wove the plays into an ensemble piece portraying, with a melancholy romanticism that deeply appealed to Ford, the salt-of-the-earth crew of alcoholics, dreamers, and bums aboard a tramp steamer carrying a cargo of dynamite to England. Life aboard the ship feels timeless; the movie begins with a title card that states, “With their hates and desires men are changing the face of the earth—but they cannot change the Sea,” and throughout, Ford remains committed to the idea of a ship as a comradely haven of close-quarters rue and bonhomie, even as the map of the world is being redrawn. News soon seeps in over the ship’s radio through a haze of static, as word comes that “another ship exploded under the fire of German anti-tank guns.” A sailor named Driscoll (Mitchell) gets into a brawl with local policemen when one calls him a “neutral”; he exclaims, outraged, “I never was a neutral in all my life!” Later, when the Glencairn docks in England, Driscoll and his mates walk through the black, foggy night and are attracted by the warmth and music pouring out of a service club, only to be told, “Sorry, you civilians can’t go in there—that’s for these lads going off to war . . . Move along . . . Get inside somewhere. Best place to be during a blackout.” In one shot on a London street, we see a newsboy’s placard announcing Germany’s invasion of Norway—news that had broken just eight days before the movie began production.

  Nichols and Ford were immensely proud of The Long Voyage Home (“You’re a thorny guy,” Nichols told him, “but a grand thorny guy—the O’Neill of the picture makers.”) The film is not suffused with the gung-ho patriotism that would soon characterize the majority of Hollywood war films, but its clear statement that the world was now in the grip of a conflict between good and evil was a distinct step away from the Great War sensibility of O’Neill’s original plays, which depicted war as a largely abstract horror. The movie’s tone is plaintive and sorrowing, not belligerent; the theme is fully expressed in Driscoll’s plea, “Everywhere, people stumbling in the dark. Is there to be no light in the world?”* Still, The Long Voyage Home’s impassioned bluntness about the Nazi threat startled many who did not expect to see Hollywood movies confronting world events so forthrightly after years of expressing little more than the kind of generalized pacifism that All Quiet on the Western Front had epitomized. If one of the country’s leading directors had become so bold and unconcerned about a possible backlash, others would surely follow his lead. “With their foreign market already lost,” wrote one critic, “the movies are getting pretty reckless. They say ‘Nazi’ and ‘Fascist’ and ‘Ribbentrop’ as easily as if they were the names of cocktails.” Another remarked on Ford’s staging of the film’s climactic sequence, in which the Glencairn’s crew comes under assault from German machine guns and Stuka dive bombers. Ford, he wrote, had reached “the highest pitch of realism.”

  Frank Capra was also eager to make a “statement” movie; he just didn’t know what the statement should be. In many ways, Meet John Doe, which he shot during the summer and fall of 1940, would serve to conclude a thematic trilogy that had begun with Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and continued in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The film brought Capra back together with his Mr. Deeds (and his first choice to play Mr. Smith), Gary Cooper, as well as with Deeds screenwriter Robert Riskin, with whom he’d worked on and off for a decade. Their new project, initially titled The Life and Death of John Doe, would tell yet another story of a little guy steeped in the unschooled wisdom of the common people who puts his plainspoken ideals up against the cynical interests of entrenched power. The picture would be the first made by Capra’s new company, and in order to cofinance it with Warner Bros., he borrowed $750,000—a third of which was for his own salary—from the Bank of America, where he had a friendly relationship (the bank had for years been the primary financer of Capra’s former home Columbia Pictures).

  Looking back at the making of Meet John Doe decades later, Capra admitted that for the first time in his career, he had felt he had something to prove. Even after three Oscars, he bristled at his standing among reviewers who had treated his films as likable diversions but didn’t imagine him capable of the kind of uncompromising social treatise for which Ford had recently become known. “An ego like mine needed—nay, required—the plaudits of sophisticated criticism,” he wrote. “The ‘Capra-corn’ barbs had pierced [my] outer blubber. And so Meet John Doe . . . was aimed at winning critical praises.” To that end, Capra and Riskin contrived a story so convoluted in its determination to take on everything from the power of the press to the corruption of state and city governments to the possibility of a Fascist movement arising within the United States to the manipulation of presidential politics that nobody, including the two of them, could ever figure out exactly whom they wanted to confront or what argument they intended to advance.

  Meet John Doe begins with the slogan of a venerable newspaper—“A free press for a free people”—being chiseled off the cornerstone of a bui
lding as a new corporate owner takes over and initiates massive layoffs. It’s an image that swiftly establishes the film’s central if vague thematic through-line, which is that standards are declining, American freedoms are in danger, and even foundational principles are (literally, in the opening shot) being ground to dust. Among the reporters fired is a columnist played by Barbara Stanwyck, who, in a last-ditch effort to save her job, fakes a letter from an outraged everyman who complains that “the whole world’s going to pot” because of “slimy politics” and threatens to jump off the roof of city hall unless things change. Stanwyck parlays that into a regular feature, “I Protest, by John Doe,” in which Doe angrily albeit generically complains about “all the evils of the world! Man’s inhumanity to man!” All she needs is a trainable stooge—“a typical American who can keep his mouth shut”—to be the face of the column. Enter Cooper, a down-on-his-luck former baseball player named Willoughby—“human flotsam . . . devoid of ideals,” said Capra—who needs a job and agrees to play Doe.

  The overelaborate farrago that follows finds Capra swinging at many targets with a kind of easy yahooism—the Democratic and Republican parties (which he depicts as collusive), corporations that put people out of work, and the news media, which is portrayed in true Capraesque fashion as either a bunch of savvy skeptics or an easily swayed mob, depending on the demands of the narrative at any given moment. As the plot thickens (and thickens), thousands of John Doe Clubs spring up, inspired by Cooper’s credo (“Be a Better Neighbor”—“the one thing capable of saving this cockeyed world,” he says, echoing a line from Mr. Smith). Soon enough, the John Doe Party is formed, and a viable third-party run for president threatens to undermine the status quo.