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

by Mark Harris

  After a “terrific salvo of explosions,” the film’s heroine replies, “It looks to me like the little guy isn’t missing.”

  Huston was not yet in uniform, but he treated Across the Pacific as his first propaganda assignment. He discarded that last scene and replaced it with a simpler and more optimistic denouement. His version of the film ends on December 6, 1941; the Japanese, at least within this particular story, are soundly defeated, with the collaborator played by Greenstreet attempting to commit hara-kiri, and Bogart telling the enemy, “You guys have been looking for a war, haven’t you? . . . You may have started it, but we’ll finish it.”

  If much of Across the Pacific feels slapdash and hurried, that may be because Huston already had one foot out the door while he was shooting it. The army had granted him a sixty-day deferral to make the picture, but even on a tight shooting schedule, he didn’t have time to finish. When his orders to report for duty arrived, Huston had tossed them away thinking they were junk mail, only to discover late that he was expected in Washington to begin service as a lieutenant on April 29. When it was clear that he wasn’t going to be available to shoot the movie’s climactic action sequence, the studio drafted one of its most reliable second-tier directors, Vincent Sherman, for the last ten days of filming. Huston liked to say that he left Bogart’s character tied to a chair and surrounded by enemy agents and told Sherman, “You figure it out,” but Sherman recalled an orderly transition with more complicated reasons behind it. “I can’t believe the Army would not allow him to finish the film,” he told Jack Warner, who replied, “The poor guy is having other troubles. His wife comes in one door as Olivia de Havilland is walking out the other, and sometimes he doesn’t know what he’s doing. . . . Take over in the morning.” In Sherman’s view, Huston knew that the hasty revisions made after December 7 had resulted in a subpar script, and “under emotional pressure from his romantic entanglement, he used the Army as an excuse to get away.” When his active duty began, perhaps suspecting that his marriage was coming to an end, Huston listed his father, not his wife, as next of kin.

  As he saw his friend off, Wyler felt more out of the action than ever. Schlossberg was continuing to tell him that the Signal Corps had no room for him. An increasing number of his colleagues were now in uniform in Washington, and even those who stayed in Hollywood were contributing to the war effort by working in a new, post–Pearl Harbor style that suddenly threatened to make Mrs. Miniver irrelevant before it even opened. Fox had just released the Marine Corps recruitment drama To the Shores of Tripoli, Paramount had begun production on Wake Island, the first movie that would depict American soldiers in combat against the Japanese, and Warner Bros. was developing Howard Hawks’s Air Force, one of the earliest portrait-of-a-platoon movies. Wyler could wait no longer. When Frank Capra reached out to him with an idea for a documentary, he jumped at it. The assignment would get him out from under Schlossberg’s thumb, and he wouldn’t have to wait for a commission to get started. He said goodbye to Talli and, four days after his second daughter was born, packed his bags for Washington.

  EIGHT

  “It’s Going to Be a Problem and a Battle”

  WASHINGTON, MARCH–JUNE 1942

  The seven men who had been asked to wait for Frank Capra in a makeshift office in Washington, D.C.’s Archives Building didn’t know exactly why they had been summoned. Capra had cabled them and their studios with something between a request and an order: They would be needed in the capital for a month of work. They dropped everything and came. For Julius Epstein and his brother Joseph, it meant temporarily walking away from their screenplay for Casablanca, much to the disgruntlement of Jack Warner. The studio “was quite mad at us,” Julius said later. “But we certainly felt we had to go.” The others were doing less momentous work and were happy to abandon it—what was the point of toiling on Tombstone: The Town Too Tough to Die or Butch Minds the Baby when you could be, if not on the front lines, as close to them as a middle-aged screenwriter was likely to get? Nobody turned Capra down. They didn’t even complain that their only compensation for the next four weeks would be free housing and twenty dollars a day.

  “You’ve all heard what they say of me in Hollywood,” Capra told the men, none of whom had ever worked with him before. “‘He can’t tell you what he wants, but he’ll know it when he sees it.’ That’s pretty much the truth.” Capra cited one of his most famous scenes—the dialogue-free moment in It Happened One Night when Claudette Colbert gives Clark Gable a lesson in how to attract a ride by hiking up her skirt, adjusting her stocking, and flashing some leg. “That,” he said, “is the kind of thing I want you to give me when you turn these lectures into training films. I want you to turn words into pictures.”

  Capra made it clear to the men that he would supervise every aspect of the series of historical-lecture films that General Marshall had commissioned; when a writer jokingly said, “So we’re necessary evils?” Capra replied that that’s exactly what they were. He would require twenty-page scripts within a week or ten days, each of them based on a different moment that, when run in sequence, would guide new soldiers chronologically from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931 up through Pearl Harbor. When the writers finished, they would be expected to read Capra the scripts out loud, the only way he could satisfy himself that the narratives were clear enough for a child to understand. The perspective he wanted the movies to take was simple: Americans were fighting for a free world, Hirohito and Hitler were fighting for a slave world. The GI he pictured sitting in a mess hall watching the movie projected on a bedsheet “was 18 years old when they took him and put a uniform on him, was so uninformed,” Capra said later. A plain black-and-white version of history was, he believed, “the only way you could reach that guy at that moment. You give him a lot of ‘On the other hand’s and you confuse him completely.”

  At that meeting, Capra asked the men to volunteer for different segments—the Sino-Japanese War, the Anschluss, the Battle of Britain, the fall of France. When a writer named Julian Shapiro who had changed his name to John Sanford to get work in the movies said he was interested in writing a segment about the Russian front, Capra dismissed the other men and kept him back. “Is there anything,” he asked Sanford warily, “that would prevent you from taking the Oath of Allegiance?” Sanford told him there was not, and Capra gave him the assignment.

  There may have been a degree of old-fashioned tribalism in Capra’s concern. The screenwriters he had recruited were almost all Jewish, and all were committed leftists whose politics had been diametrically opposed to Capra’s since the days of the Spanish Civil War. “He was a big Francoite, and he always felt we were for the radicals,” Leonard Spigelgass, one of the recruits, remembered. “That was what was killing him.” But Capra was also trying to impress upon the men the seriousness of their mission, which he believed would be integral to the early war effort. His fervor was contagious; the writers got to work immediately. With no official offices yet designated for his project, Capra commandeered a few small unoccupied warrens in the Library of Congress for his team, and he made himself available almost around the clock seven days a week to talk through an approach, a sticking point, or an issue of history. On many evenings he would summon his team to a group dinner so they could give him progress reports.

  The urgency Capra felt was real; in those first months of the war, he, like many Americans, believed that there was no time to lose since an attack on the West Coast might be imminent. Even as he told Lucille that he would soon “start thinking seriously about whether you should come out here or not,” he warned her about air raids, telling her, “If anything happens, put all the kids in the cars and head for San Bernardino, and then to Arizona or Reno.” Nevertheless, his mood overseeing the writers was initially one of irrepressible exhilaration. “I call them my seven little dwarfs,” Capra exulted. “I’ve sent them up a Chinese stenographer I call the Slant-Eyed Snow White. They’re still working like mad. . . . One of these days I’m g
oing to get purposely sick so I can sleep until eight or so.”

  The good cheer ended a couple of weeks later, when Capra saw the screenplays. “I was aghast,” he wrote in his autobiography, The Name Above the Title. “The unexpected and unfunny happened . . . the outlines were larded with Communist propaganda.” Based on the few surviving early drafts of the scripts, this seems largely to have been a figment of Capra’s imagination. It was more likely the case that the series of spirited late-night political discussions he had been having with a group of writers who weren’t shy about their ideological leanings reawakened the same fear that he had expressed on the set of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington—that his own lack of political sophistication would allow a writer to sneak pro-Communist language into a screenplay without his knowing it. (“Frank thought everything was full of Communist propaganda,” Spigelgass later complained.) In any case, there was no arguing with Capra; he immediately sent all but one of the men back to Hollywood, telling them that while he personally didn’t have a problem with their work, he feared that the Dies Committee would use any evidence of Red sympathy to defund his whole enterprise before it even got started. He jettisoned their screenplays and began negotiating with the studios for a new set of writers.

  Capra later recalled that those first drafts “murdered our confidence,” but memos from the period show that he treated the episode not as a setback but as impetus to create an even grander plan. In early March, under General Osborn’s supervision, he started drafting a comprehensive proposal for a set of propaganda pictures—fifty-two of them to be produced by the end of 1943. In addition to the adaptations that would replace the GI lectures, the list of what he called “orientation films” included two other ongoing series, Know Your Allies and Know Your Enemies, a program of training films for officer candidates, a project to photograph all lectures given by the Bureau of Public Relations, and a biweekly armed forces information reel intended to “keep our troops informed on world events.” He asked for money not only to import more writers from Hollywood, but directors, editors, and production assistants as well. When his request that the army find him office space became snarled in War Department paperwork, he simply bypassed his bosses and made a deal with the Department of the Interior to use empty space in a cooling tower in one of their buildings.

  Capra convinced Osborn to ask for an initial appropriation of $400,000—then about the cost of a single modestly budgeted Hollywood feature—to finance the entire series of movies that would “tell the Armed Forces the whys and wherefores of this war,” noting that Marshall had “emphasized the need for speed in telling the troops who we are fighting and why.” The scope of Capra’s plan, which he conceived almost entirely on his own, was immense. His competitive instincts had been spurred by the indifference with which Schlossberg had treated him when he first arrived in Washington, and now that he was operating under Marshall and Osborn’s directives rather than under the authority of the Signal Corps, he felt he had something to prove. “I’ve got budget troubles. You have no idea what it takes to get permission to spend one dollar,” he told Lucille. “I have presented them with some staggering plans. . . . If I can get the program I’ve got in mind to go, then it’ll really be something. Zanuck and the Signal Corps will be eclipsed and they know it, so it’s going to be a problem and a battle.”

  One of Capra’s most significant ideas was earmarked for William Wyler—a documentary described in Osborn’s overall proposal as “a ‘Negro War Effort’ film to show . . . Negro contributions to this war, to show the Negro that this is his war, and not a ‘white man’s war,’ to prove that this is not a ‘race war.’” Osborn added that “the necessity for judicious handling of this problem is obvious,” and Capra thought Wyler was the right man for the job. At a time when Hollywood movies still routinely trafficked in shamelessly racist clichés, depicting black characters only as servile, inept, “sassy,” lazy, or childlike comic relief, he was one of the few major directors who consistently avoided those stereotypes. Even when his films featured black servants, as The Little Foxes did, he won approval for finding what the New Republic called “that rare balance of humor and dignity that so many pictures and plays . . . strive for without achieving more than a Tom-show.”

  Capra and Osborn knew that a well-received documentary about Negroes in the military could have salutary effects on both black and white moviegoers. In Hollywood, Lowell Mellett would soon begin a sustained campaign on the government’s behalf to convince studios to increase the visibility of black people in their movies; he urged filmmakers to put them in crowd scenes, in the stands of ball games, in stores, restaurants, and hotels, and on sidewalks as background presences whenever possible. The Office of War Information believed that as more and more young men joined up, Hollywood could help white Americans get used to seeing black men in jobs that hadn’t until now been open to them. But Osborn also knew that given the oppressive racism black people faced daily in America, they needed to be won over by a direct appeal. In a survey conducted in Harlem at the start of the war, half of the African Americans polled said they didn’t imagine they would be any worse off if Japan won, and in the South, paranoid chatter about the potential of a “Japanese-Negro alliance” was becoming more common.

  In early April, right after he finished editing Mrs. Miniver, Wyler heard Capra’s idea and enthusiastically agreed to make the movie. He was left to his own devices—so far, the army had had virtually no experience commissioning anything but training films from Hollywood, and Capra didn’t have the time or the focus to offer him much guidance. Wyler’s first instinct was to try collaborating on the script with Lillian Hellman. But the treatment she came up with was more incendiary than what the army had in mind: a colloquy between a thirteen-year-old black newsboy and a black soldier named John, set on the night of a heavyweight championship fight featuring “Private Joe Louis.” Hellman’s idea was timely—Louis had been a national hero and a symbol of anti-Nazi strength since beating the German Max Schmeling in 1938, and in January 1942, after a charity bout for the Navy Relief Society, he had enlisted, saying, “Let us at them Japs.” His induction was featured in every newsreel and his face adorned recruiting posters in cities with large black populations. It was Hellman’s notion to have the young boy complain that by turning over part of his championship purse to military families, Louis was helping a country that didn’t particularly care about the fate of people who looked like him. Hellman then had the soldier explain to the boy that Louis was able to “rise above bitterness” and was joining up to fight not for “what’s bad, [but] for what’s good now, and what’ll maybe get better.” “What’s bad” in America was made explicit in her script, which included graphics of newspaper headlines like “White Neighbors Refuse Occupancy to Negro Tenants.”

  Hellman hoped that Paul Robeson would agree to play the soldier, but she and Wyler had never conferred on the approach the movie should take, and when he told her that he was interested in filming a documentary rather than a dramatization, Hellman dropped out. Looking for a treatment of the subject that felt more authentic to him, Wyler then recruited a black writer named Carlton Moss to collaborate with him and playwright Marc Connelly (whose Pulitzer Prize–winning play The Green Pastures had featured one of the first all-black casts on Broadway) on a new approach.

  In May, Capra gave Wyler clearance to take his two writers on a research tour of army bases in the Midwest and South; they would travel to Kansas City; New Orleans; Alexandria, Louisiana; Montgomery and Tuskegee, Alabama; Fort Benning, Georgia; and finally Fort Bragg, North Carolina, before arriving in Washington. The trip was disheartening for Wyler, who found that he hated the South. The virulence of American racism was brought home to him every time they were told that Moss had to ride in a different train compartment or find a room in a “colored-only” hotel. When they met with a group of black Army Air Force flyers in Georgia, the pilots told Wyler that the locals hated them and considered it “uppity” of black men to fly plan
es; they said they lived in constant fear of attacks from the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

  Wyler was starting to have misgivings about making the movie, and once he arrived in the capital in June, he lost his taste for it altogether. Capra told him that The Negro Soldier was still a “top priority,” but he seemed less interested in commissioning an honest documentary from Wyler than in avoiding cataclysmic mistakes or potentially divisive depictions. At Capra’s directive, army researchers had created a set of guidelines for the movie that would make any director feel as if he were tiptoeing across a minefield; they ranged from the embarrassingly obvious (“Avoid stereotypes such as the Negroes’ alleged affinity for watermelon or pork”), to the politically expedient (“Show colored officers in command of troops, but don’t play them up too much”), to the manifestly offensive (“Play down colored soldiers most Negroid in appearance” and omit all references to “Lincoln, emancipation, or any race leaders or friends of the Negro”). As recently as 1937, a study of black soldiers conducted by the U.S. Army War College had referred to the typical black GI as “docile, tractable, light hearted, care free [sic] and good natured” but also “careless, shiftless, irresponsible and secretive. . . . He is unmoral, untruthful and his sense of right doing is relatively inferior. . . . He has a musical nature and a marked sense of rhythm.” Wyler said he had no interest in helping a government that was so clearly part of the problem paint a rosy picture of the life of black enlistees—who would number almost 300,000 by the end of 1942—when his trip across America had provided such a grim education in the isolation, suspicion, and prejudice they had to endure. Capra reluctantly reassigned the film to another director.