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

by Mark Harris

  Despite a pro forma disclaimer, hastily dubbed into one scene, that “there are many Japanese here in Los Angeles who are loyal to America,” the invective in Little Tokyo, U.S.A. was so virulent that it spurred Mellett and the Bureau of Motion Pictures to take a more aggressive role in overseeing the content of Hollywood releases. The bureau called the movie “an invitation to a witch hunt” and deplored its “Gestapo tactics,” asking, “Did somebody mention that we are presumably fighting for the Bill of Rights?” The U.S. Relocation Authority, which oversaw the Japanese internment camps in America, also objected to the film. At the time, it was considering a social-engineering experiment to scatter internees around the country, presumably to prevent them from clustering and conspiring; administrators worried that the picture’s paranoid rhetoric would create resistance to the Japanese in small middle American communities.

  Burned by the controversy, the studios agreed to have Mellett’s office assess their new pictures at the screenplay stage rather than once they were finished, an immense concession to the idea of government oversight. Mellett urged the studios to consider not just how their films portrayed enemies and allies, but whether they risked “creating a false picture of America”; he also cautioned them against merely “using the war as the basis for a profitable picture” and against including the kind of hyperbole that might give “the young people of today . . . reason to say they were misled by propaganda.” His marching orders to the studios came perilously close to state censorship—the codification of matters of taste into a federally mandated production code. Since the BMP was not empowered to enforce its opinions, it was often ignored. But Mellett had one strong card to play: The U.S. government maintained control over what movies could be sent abroad, and for the studios, a “not recommended for export” label from his office represented a serious economic penalty.

  As he watched leaders in Hollywood and Washington struggle with these issues and with one another, Capra found it almost impossible to commission a script for Know Your Enemy—Japan or to give its writer any useful guidance. He asked Warren Duff, a prolific screenwriter who had written two of James Cagney’s most popular recent movies, Angels with Dirty Faces and Each Dawn I Die, to try his hand at a draft, but what Duff came up with was both bullying and off the point. “We didn’t bother about your way of life because it was none of our business,” said his narrator, directly addressing the Japanese rather than U.S. servicemen. “But now we’re interested, and we’re going to bother quite a bit—because you’re our enemy. We think we’ll surprise you.” Capra scrapped the screenplay as soon as he read it, and, seeing no way to fix it, shelved the series until the following spring.

  He still had plenty to keep him busy in Los Angeles. His plan for a seven-film Know Your Ally series was progressing quickly—he was in touch with the National Film Board of Canada about one segment, and Janet Flanner, the Paris correspondent for the New Yorker, would soon start work for him on an installment devoted to “The Fighting French.” More important, the first episode of the Why We Fight movies was nearing completion. At Eric Knight’s urging, Capra had stopped tinkering with the scripts and narrowed the history-lesson plan down considerably. (“We have eliminated the Battle of the Atlantic and the Battle of the Mediterranean and most of the Balkan campaign,” he wrote to a colonel at West Point, “figuring that we would take these up at a later date.”) Crews at Disney were busy executing Capra’s innovative idea to use animated maps to illustrate Germany’s advance through Europe with spills of spreading black ink and the pincers of a crab grabbing at neighboring countries, and demonstrating Japan’s ambitions with tentacles into China and across the Pacific. And with Knight’s help, Capra had finally conceived a viable overall structure for the series. The first film, Prelude to War, would take GIs through Japan’s invasion of Manchuria and Italy’s push into North Africa. That would flow seamlessly into The Nazis Strike, about Germany’s conquest of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland, and then Divide and Conquer, which would cover the fall of France. The fourth and fifth installments would explore the Battle of Britain and the Russian front, the sixth would analyze Japan’s attempt to conquer China, and the seventh, War Comes to America, would finish with Pearl Harbor. Each of the chapters was to run about an hour.

  By early fall, all seven scripts were far along, and spirits in Capra’s unit were high enough so that the writers he and Knight were overseeing could afford to joke about the difficulties they faced. Working on the narration for the sixth segment, The Battle of Russia, Leonard Spigelgass—the only one of the original seven writers Capra had kept on—told the director in a letter that it was “as difficult to write as the Versailles Treaty. The Consul and the Soviet Representatives went over every word with a fine tooth comb . . . after breaking my back to try to teach her, we were forced to the conclusion that Lieutenant Pavlinchenko could never learn to speak a word of English even phonetically, but by gargantuan effort, we finally got her to say, ‘Fellow soldiers, forward to victory.’ . . . I think we can get away with it.”

  While he was in Hollywood, Capra was finally able to recruit the last major member of his team, and perhaps the most important. According to his own recollection, he was on the Columbia lot having some secondhand desks, chairs, and office equipment loaded onto a truck for use at Fort Fox when George Stevens ambled up to him. “You?” Stevens said. “You need an old desk? I thought you were chief of something.”

  Capra replied that he was. “Can you use me?” Stevens asked. By the end of the conversation, Capra had offered him a commission as a major.

  Although the meeting was happenstance, Stevens’s decision was not nearly as impulsive as Capra made it sound. The most deliberative of young directors, a man whom Time magazine had recently said was best known for “getting over a bad spot [while shooting] a picture [by striding] up & down interminably while everyone waits,” Stevens had been thinking about enlisting since Pearl Harbor. Woman of the Year, the Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedy he had been shooting at the time of the attack, had opened in February to mostly generous reviews, and although it had become a sizable hit, Stevens knew the movie still bore too many traces of the compromised, timid prewar moment in which it had been conceived. It now seemed ludicrous that Louis B. Mayer had nervously forbidden him to include a scene in which Hepburn’s character shows her linguistic fluency by speaking a bit of Yiddish because it might have stirred up anti-Semitism. And a few critics gently noted that the story of an avid globetrotting journalist who needs her priorities corrected by, of all people, a sportswriter seemed to have its own priorities backward. The New Yorker suggested that it might have been a better idea to make a movie about a woman who persuades her man “to give up writing stories about games played by other people and take a grown-up interest in the collapse of this planet,” whereas Woman of the Year has it “just the other way around.”

  Stevens wasn’t defensive about the picture; he was all too aware that it depended on “the audience . . . accepting what in many ways could be questionable.” Soon after the movie opened, he received a gently scolding letter from an old friend who was now an editor at Time magazine in New York. “Woman is a hell of a hit and should do you plenty of good,” he said. “[But] I think you should give some thought to making your pictures a bit thicker—not quite so easy to grasp and perhaps a bit more provocative.” He also implied that a stint in the military might do Stevens some good as an artist, writing, “You’re lucky enough to be young enough to take the war in stride and not be an old man when it’s over. I think you’ve made some swell pictures, but I know they’re not a patch on what you’ll be making ten years from now.

  “I’m full of military secrets, but I can’t tell you any of them,” the letter concluded. “Get ready for lots of bad headlines and few pleasant surprises for a long time, however. This war is really a toughie. It’s the third quarter, and we’re about three touchdowns behind. It’s going to take a team of All-Americans to pull us out of this one.”


  The implication that Stevens was choosing to stay on the bench while his colleagues were going off to fight—or at least relocating to Washington to await orders—was not lost on him. He had no shortage of reasons to remain at home. He had a wife and a ten-year-old son, George Jr., whom he adored, and he suffered from asthma that was serious enough to exempt him from any active duty. His responsibilities as president of the Screen Directors Guild were considerable, and he was also under contract to make two more pictures for Columbia, which greeted any sign of wavering on his part by warning him that if he went off to war, his career would stall just when it was on the ascent.

  But Stevens felt increasingly consumed by a sense of duty, and resolved to work off his Columbia deal as quickly as he could manage. Immediately after finishing Woman of the Year, he began preparing The Talk of the Town, a high-minded comedy-drama that was designed to give Columbia exactly the kind of semisophisticated, vaguely political, somewhat romantic crowd-pleaser it had sought since Capra left the studio. Stevens brought a light touch to the story of a prison escapee (Cary Grant) framed for arson and the Supreme Court nominee (Ronald Colman) who attempts to exonerate him. But during production, he retreated into himself more than ever, taking hours between scenes to contemplate each setup and driving his cast and crew half-mad with his impassive mien and stony silences.

  Although critics applauded the results—the film became Stevens’s first Best Picture nominee—many of them noted that he was working in a vein that had already been well mined by Capra, a similarity that was only underscored by his use of the costar (Jean Arthur) and screenwriter (Sidney Buchman) of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The Talk of the Town was Stevens’s first attempt to go “a bit thicker”—it makes a political statement, but the statement is about the horror of lynch-mob rule and vigilante hysteria, which had been a favorite Hollywood subject since the mid-1930s and was by 1942 a relatively safe way for a film to be topical. Nelson Poynter, the young, progressive deputy of the BMP, praised Talk for dramatizing “one of the basic things we are fighting for—a decent social contract.” But Stevens knew that he still hadn’t made a picture that belonged in a post–Pearl Harbor America, something that was brought home to him bluntly when he tested two different endings before preview audiences. Unable to decide whether Jean Arthur’s character should end up with the firebrand played by Grant or the older, more professorial Colman, he put the question to moviegoers, wondering whether they would prefer a man of action or a man of intellect. The audience chose Grant, but for reasons Stevens hadn’t anticipated. “While there are men of draft age on the screen, the girls should marry them,” read a typical comment card. “Later on the mature men will have it all to themselves.” Another viewer, rooting for Colman, wrote, “Send Grant off to war without Arthur to stay true to life.” It was the beginning of the era of the 4-F movie hero—three years during which, if a young man appeared on screen in a contemporary film set in the United States, moviegoers wanted to know why he wasn’t in uniform.

  The Talk of the Town had just opened when Stevens ran into Capra on the lot, and by then he had made up his mind. His agent, Charles Feldman, tried one last time to scare him out of leaving. “You go in, this war will last seven years, or five years—you’re finished as far as the films are concerned, if nothing worse happens to you,” he told his client. Stevens was undeterred. He informed a resigned Harry Cohn that his next picture for Columbia, a romantic comedy called The More the Merrier in which he planned to reteam Grant and Arthur, would be his last. His active duty would begin just days after he finished work in the editing room. “The war was on . . . I wanted to be in the war,” he said later. “It’s hard to get a fifty-yard-line seat like that.”

  World War II was no longer a shock; it was an ongoing fact of life with no end in sight. Any hopes that an American victory would be swift had evaporated with daily headlines about fresh casualties and new combat zones in the Pacific. Over the summer, U.S. planes had flown their first, tentative missions over France, and the army would soon begin Operation Torch, opening a new front with its first major deployment of ground troops in North Africa. As summer turned to fall, nobody in Hollywood was calling the war an “adventure” any longer; there was fearful talk that it could last until 1950. The commitments to service that Hollywood’s directors had made were just beginning, and around Labor Day they all came home to Los Angeles for short reunions with their loved ones, followed by a series of farewells that felt sadder and more permanent than when they had first gone off to Washington and uniforms and salutes and protocol were still new.

  John Ford had already been away from home for almost a year, and his wife was unhappily getting used to life alone; they had not wanted to uproot their teenaged daughter, Barbara, with a move to Washington. The Fords had a tender and companionable relationship, but not an especially intimate one—they had long slept in separate beds, and Mary looked the other way at his occasional indiscretions, drawing the line only at a passionate romantic attachment to Katharine Hepburn that had persisted through the late 1930s. (“She doesn’t like me anymore,” Hepburn had said in late 1938. “But I can’t blame her for that.”) While he was away, Ford had kept in touch with Mary by writing frequent and emotional notes. “Dear Ma,” he wrote, using his preferred endearment, “Your letter written Tuesday pleased me—gave me pictures of our beautiful home—the home and family we are fighting to preserve. . . . All my love. Miss you so much. Daddy.”

  As the summer of 1942 ended, the Fords enjoyed a brief and bittersweet family reunion. Their son Michael Patrick, whom they called Pat, had just married his college sweetheart and graduated from the University of Maine with the hope of joining his father as an officer in the navy, but he was rejected for a commission because his eyes were weak. When he enlisted, Ford tried to get him assigned to duty on his ketch, the Araner. (“The kid is really tops,” he wrote the commander in charge of the boat. “You would be doing Mrs. Ford and me a great favor.”) But Ford’s plea failed; instead, his frustrated son would serve out the war at a desk, as an apprentice seaman in the navy’s West Coast public relations office, feeling “like a failure” while his father traveled the world. Ford was soon called back to duty. He urged Mary to be brave and keep busy. Bette Davis, John Garfield, and MCA president Jules Stein had just founded the Hollywood Canteen, the nightclub on Cahuenga Boulevard where servicemen of all ranks could dine, dance, and even mingle with stars. Mary intended to take an active role when it opened in October. Ford returned to Washington in late August. It would be well over a year before he would be able to spend another week at home.

  William Wyler was in Los Angeles on army business. He had traveled west to convince MGM to donate cameras, editing bays, and sound equipment that could be used in the war. But despite the fact that Mrs. Miniver was on its way to becoming a huge hit, the studio held him at arm’s length. “I have seldom been so busy or worked so hard and accomplished so little,” he fumed to Talli. “It’s shameful how we got no cooperation—nothing but evasion when it came to giving up some equipment they could really spare. They all talk big, but when it comes to doing something, the tone changes. Sometimes I feel I should just get on a ship and go. . . . But there’s no sense in my going without proper equipment.” Louis B. Mayer, ever pragmatic, may have felt he had nothing to gain in helping Wyler, who, after all, was still under contract to another man’s company. But while he was in town, Wyler made arrangements through his lawyer to suspend the deal he had recently renewed with Sam Goldwyn for the duration of the war. He had no interest in making another movie in the near future; what he really wanted was to recruit a unit of filmmakers that could serve as his team once his posting to an Army Air Force base in England came through.

  Wyler got most of the men on his wish list: Screenwriter Jerome Chodorov (one of the original Why We Fight writers whom Capra had fired in his fit of anti-Communist panic), William Clothier, a camera operator whose experience with aerial photography included the 1927 film Wings, and
Harold Tannenbaum, a sound recorder for RKO. The only man to turn him down was Irwin Shaw, a rising star who had had his first Broadway play, the antiwar drama Bury the Dead, produced when he was just twenty-three. Six years later, Shaw, a first-generation American Jew from the Bronx, was a sought-after screenwriter who had just written The Talk of the Town for Stevens. He admired Wyler and agreed to meet with him, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to serve out the war in a Signal Corps unit. “After sober reflection,” he cabled the director, “I’ve decided that going with you as a private would mean a long succession of frustrations—military, artistic, economic and social. And the war effort would suffer. . . . So I’m going into the regular army this morning at 6:45. I feel I’ve waited too long as it is.” (Shaw’s attempt to game the system by volunteering failed; the army, noting his résumé, promptly assigned him to the Signal Corps anyway. Within a year, he would end up serving under Stevens.)

  Wyler’s parting from Talli was particularly painful. He was leaving her with Cathy, then a toddler, and their new baby, Judy, who was only a month old. He returned to Washington with just one 16-millimeter camera to take overseas. He promised to write home regularly. Like Ford, he would not see his wife and children for a year.