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

by Mark Harris

  John Huston’s departure from Hollywood was of a somewhat different character. His declarations of fidelity were made not to his estranged and humiliated wife Lesley but to Olivia de Havilland, and before he left he sat down with Warner Bros. to do some business, urging them not to assign The Treasure of the Sierra Madre to another screenwriter before he could take a crack at it, and also checking in with the studio about a script he had written called Background to Danger, based on a spy novel by the British writer Eric Ambler.*

  Huston assumed he would be back soon; for him, a return to steady work in Hollywood seemed to be just one wartime assignment away. But he’d waited impatiently to get that assignment, and when it finally came, he saw an opportunity to make a great movie. On June 6, as the Battle of Midway was being fought, the Japanese army launched a separate offensive, landing on and taking Kiska, one of the small “Rat Islands” at the western end of the Aleutians in the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. Five hundred Japanese soldiers captured the ten members of the U.S. Navy who constituted the entire population of the remote base; the next day, the Japanese captured the neighboring island of Attu as well. Until that attack—the only ground invasion of U.S. territory during the war—most Americans had no idea where Kiska, Attu, or the Aleutians were. Now their strategic importance had become front-page news, and they would soon be the focus of a major army counteroffensive. The Signal Corps wanted Huston to travel to Adak, a larger island southeast of Kiska that housed a navy air station, and make a documentary, intended to be shown theatrically, about the U.S. fight to take back the two islands.

  Huston eagerly accepted the job; he left Hollywood for Alaska in September 1942 and soon after was promoted to captain. His goodbye to de Havilland was, the actress later said, “very difficult” and “painful.” It was also not as private as either of them imagined. For weeks, he had been under surveillance. And as soon as he left, the army began a formal investigation “to determine the discretion, integrity and loyalty of Subject, who is suspected of being a Communist.”

  ELEVEN

  “A Good Partner to Have in Times of Trouble”

  ENGLAND, NORTH AFRICA, AND HOLLYWOOD, SEPTEMBER 1942–JANUARY 1943

  John Ford was already in England when The Battle of Midway opened across the United States on September 14, 1942. Of the many venues in which the short film played—often on a bill with Mrs. Miniver or The Talk of the Town—the largest was New York’s six-thousand-seat Radio City Music Hall, where some patrons were so overwhelmed by what they saw onscreen that they fainted. Ford’s name did not appear anywhere in the credits, which simply stated that the “greatest Naval victory of the world to date” had been shot by “U.S. Navy photographers.” But every review credited Ford—or, as the New York Times now referred to him, “Commander John Ford, U.S.N.R., the former Hollywood film director”—and repeated the story of how “the unsung camera men and Commander Ford, who was wounded while operating a 16mm. hand camera, risked their lives in making this astounding factual film record.” People had been waiting three months for color footage from Midway, and most critics cautioned that anyone expecting to see a clear record of the battle would be disappointed. Newsweek called it “a hastily assembled job,” Time faulted Jane Darwell’s “corny” narration, and the New Yorker warned that the movie offered “nothing . . . that a spy would waste invisible ink on. . . . Things were obviously happening too hot and heavy to be very neatly photographed.” Still, they asked, couldn’t there have been maps, or an explanation of Japan’s strategy, or an analysis of the military objectives behind the battle and the significance of America’s victory?

  Many reviewers had been expecting something more definitive and less emotional and impressionistic than the movie Ford had made. But they also admitted, almost universally, that none of their reservations mattered. Moviegoers were stunned to see a film that was “so real it jars you,” and virtually everyone who wrote about The Battle of Midway noted Ford’s decision to include “many scenes where the concussion of bombs actually knocked cameras out of the photographers’ hands.” The juddering, jolting, damaged images captured at Midway had, it turned out, created a new standard for realism in which, for the first time, lack of polish was taken as a benchmark of veracity. The result, James Agee wrote, “is a first-class failure to film the most difficult of all actions—a battle—but a brave attempt to make a record—quick, jerky, vivid, fragmentary, luminous—of a moment of desperate peril to the nation. . . . In the oily blue-blackness of smoke, the strange black flowers and white streamers painted on the sky by planes and bursting ack-ack, the mortal brilliance of blood, Technicolor vindicates the remark made about it at its birth a decade ago that ‘Now Hollywood is ready to film the Last Judgment.’”

  In his Time review, Agee stated that Ford’s documentary “should be seen by all Americans,” and for once, that oft-invoked wish came remarkably close to being realized. The five hundred prints Technicolor had made were in such heavy demand that by the end of its run The Battle of Midway had been booked more than thirteen thousand times, playing in three-quarters of all U.S. theaters. Frequent moviegoers saw it so often, before so many different features, that more than any other single film, Ford’s rough-hewn, sentimental, patriotic, and sorrowing version of the battle created a national understanding of what the war in the Pacific looked and felt like.

  In August, Donovan had told Ford to pack up and prepare for an extended stay in Europe; he was to travel to London and begin preparations to film the planned British-American invasion of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. But before he left Washington, he managed to squeeze in a crucial bit of campaigning for his movie. Ford, who had skipped the Oscars all three times he won Best Director, nonetheless wanted a fourth trophy, though he liked to cultivate an air of nonchalance about such things. When Walter Wanger, who had produced Stagecoach and The Long Voyage Home and was now the president of the Academy, came to town, Ford arranged a private showing of The Battle of Midway for him and sat in the back of the screening room while the film played.

  “It’s definitely award material, Jack,” Wanger said as the lights came up.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sakes, Walter,” snapped Ford. “I’m not interested in awards. I just want to remind you Hollywood guys that somebody’s out there fighting a war.”

  As Ford lit his pipe, Wanger politely replied that the war had already yielded an extraordinary number of impressive documentaries and that the decision would be particularly difficult this year. By the time he left the screening room, Ford had convinced him to change the Academy’s rules. When Wanger announced the 1942 nominations the following February, the list would include Midway among an unprecedented twenty-five candidates for Best Documentary—more than half of them produced by U.S. government agencies or branches of the military—and, for the first and only time, the promise of four winners rather than one.

  Ford was, more than ever, writing his own rules, and his high-handedness was beginning to make him some enemies. When the Office of War Information sent a request for him to turn over all of the footage he had shot at Midway for their use, he refused on the assumption that a civilian propaganda agency had no justification for requesting any property belonging to the navy. His intractability infuriated Mellett, who wanted the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures to have oversight of all filmed material, whether it came out of Hollywood or Washington. Mellett was not one of The Battle of Midway’s admirers; he thought the film was off-message and had made his distaste clear to Ford, who had responded that if Mellett wanted the footage, he was going to have to go up the OSS chain of command all the way to Bill Donovan to get it. Mellett, whose taste for turf wars was becoming a serious impediment to his leadership, responded by threatening to prevent the movie from being shown overseas. As Ford flew to London, Sam Spewack, a genial screenwriter who had left Hollywood to serve as one of Mellett’s deputies, tried to broker a peace on the plane.

  “I had a 36 hour talk with John Ford,” he wrote to Mellett.
“He finally broke down and said he was for releasing all his Pacific stuff [in Europe]. . . . Incidentally, Ford was very hurt at your criticism of Midway. I think personalities are pretty silly at a time like this. He’s an extremely able director and a nice fellow, but just why he should be in a position to release or withhold film is beyond this non-government mind.” Mellett and Spewack both knew but could not express even in correspondence exactly why Ford was in that position; almost a year into the war, the Roosevelt administration had done nothing to demarcate lines of authority among the various agencies that were producing, vetting, and releasing films designed to aid the war effort. In part, the administration’s reluctance stemmed from an aversion to creating any kind of propaganda system that was centralized or formalized enough to arouse the ire of congressional Republicans. But as a result, Mellett, who had been used to getting his own way as a newspaper editor and regarded Hollywood filmmakers with an outsider’s suspicion, increasingly found himself outmaneuvered by directors who had years of experience at doing whatever it took to protect their work from interference.

  Spewack succeeded in soothing Ford enough to get him to turn his footage over to the BMP, but Ford didn’t wait for Mellett’s approval to take the movie overseas. He cabled Robert Parrish and instructed him to fly to the UK with a print of The Battle of Midway on an OSS mission to show the movie to the British high command. Ford thought the film would help “to prove that we were actually in the war with them”—a sore point among many in England who by the end of 1942 were becoming impatient that the United States was still focusing almost exclusively on the Pacific when sixty thousand Britons had already been killed by bombs. All year, American soldiers and officers had been streaming into London. For the most part, they had behaved well; the War Department had given them all pamphlets with guidelines that included “Don’t be a show off,” “If you want to join a darts game, let them ask you first,” “To say ‘I look like a bum’ is offensive to their ears,” and “You can rub a Britisher the wrong way by telling him, ‘We came over and won the last one.’” But Anglo-American tensions were still running high. “You won’t be able to tell the British much about ‘taking it,’” the pamphlet read. “They are not particularly interested in taking it any more. They are far more interested in getting together in solid friendship with us, so that we can all start dishing it out to Hitler.”

  To that end, Ford was charged with helping to set up film crews for the impending Operation Torch under the auspices of the OSS. The navy installed him in Claridge’s, the luxury hotel in London’s Mayfair district that was then home to a kind of rotating international gentlemen’s club of senior Allied military officers, exiled European royals, and the ad hoc community of British and American filmmakers who had volunteered for the war. The guests when Ford arrived included producer-director Alexander Korda, Darryl Zanuck, who had just begun a leave from 20th Century Fox for full-time army duty, and the young British director Carol Reed, one of the most talented recruits in the British army’s film unit.

  Ford also found one of his longtime rivals there. William Wyler had arrived at the Eighth Air Force headquarters and checked into Claridge’s a couple of weeks before him. He had quickly been befriended by Korda and Reed, and was immersed in mapping out plans for a series of war documentaries while he awaited assignment to an Army Air Force base. Wyler wanted to make a movie about joint missions flown by the air force and the RAF; he also had in mind a picture about the Eagle Squadron, the volunteer pilots who were the first to fly in the war and had been the subject of a drama that Universal had just released. Two of his other ideas were particularly strong—a film he wanted to call Nine Lives, a group portrait of an American crew on a bombing mission, and Phyllis Was a Fortress, which would track a single mission over France flown by one of the USAAF’s B-17 bombers, known as Flying Fortresses.

  Wyler’s slate of documentary proposals reflected the focus and ambition of a man who now expected to be in the army for a long time and wanted to contribute as much as possible. But when he got to England, he found himself sitting at Claridge’s with nothing to do but wait. The army still hadn’t sent over the crew he had recruited, and the equipment he needed, other than the single camera he had brought with him, was on a ship that was making its agonizingly slow way across the North Atlantic. When Ford arrived in grand style, “it just drove Willy crazy,” said Talli Wyler. “Willy didn’t know the Army ways. He couldn’t requisition even a typewriter, much less cameras.”

  “Suddenly, John Ford showed up, eye patch, cigar and all,” said Wyler. “He was in the Navy and his equipment was flown over by the Navy. I don’t know how he did it.” He later complained that by the time his own gear finally arrived, “half of it had been sunk by the Germans.” The 35-millimeter cameras that Wyler believed would be essential for his planned documentaries never made it across the Atlantic; instead, he would have to rely on whatever 16-millimeter equipment he could beg or borrow in London. And Ford was no help; when Wyler sent word that he needed cameras, Ford abruptly replied that he couldn’t spare a thing. “[Ford] didn’t like Willy Wyler,” said cameraman William Clothier, who knew both men well. “I really don’t know [why].”

  Wyler’s spirits were low. “The trouble with London at the moment is too damn many Americans,” he wrote in one of many long letters to Talli. “The British call it ‘the invasion.’ . . . Dinner invitations are few and far between. Also, whiskey is at a premium, so just being invited for a drink is usually quite a gesture.” Whenever he was able to host a guest or two himself, he dolefully referred to his room as “Wyler’s Mortuary.”

  His grim mood changed abruptly when Mrs. Miniver started to be shown in London. Wyler was not surprised to hear that British critics cast a dubious eye on an American director’s depiction of their country and people. “The picture of England at war suffers from that distortion which seems inevitable whenever Hollywood cameras are trained on it,” sniffed the reviewer for the Times of London. The Spectator, noting that the putatively middle-class Minivers enjoyed a kind of ostentatiously moneyed luxury that bore little resemblance to the lives of the average English family, dismissed the movie as a “defense of bourgeois privilege” and condemned its opening-title description of the British as “a happy, careless people” who were oblivious to the coming war as “unconsciously pro-Fascist propaganda.” And Eric Knight, who was still doing part-time duty as a movie critic, called the film “hogwash. . . . Oh, God, those Hollywood men with their funny ideas of what this war is about!”

  What Wyler did not suspect was how little the critical verdict would matter. Ordinary British moviegoers, it turned out, loved Mrs. Miniver every bit as much as Americans had. Whether or not Winston Churchill actually ever told Louis B. Mayer that it was “propaganda worth many battleships,” the prime minister had more important things to do than to refute MGM’s widely publicized contention that he had said it, and others were open in their praise to Wyler: Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, cabled the director that the film “portrays the life that people live in England today in a way that cannot fail to move all that see it. I hope this picture will bring home to the American public that the average Englishman is a good partner to have in times of trouble.”

  In London, Wyler’s newfound celebrity as a visiting American eminence overshadowed even Ford’s. Invitations started coming more frequently, and one of them was from Laurence Olivier. The last time Wyler had been in England, in 1938, he was courting the actor to star in Wuthering Heights. This time, Olivier was courting Wyler. In May, he had joined the Royal Navy as a pilot—by all accounts, one of the worst in the history of the British military. After weeks of flying lessons that more than once ended in near catastrophe—he is said to have destroyed five planes—the Royal Navy and Olivier came to the mutual conclusion that he could better serve his country on the ground. Olivier was granted a leave from service to aid the war effort by making films. The actor was about to embark on a mediocre
dramatic propaganda effort called Adventure for Two, in which he was to play a Russian engineer who warms to the British during an extended stay in England. But when he met with Wyler, it was to propose something more ambitious—a filmed adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry V that he believed could serve as an inspiring testament to British valor during the war. He felt certain that Wyler, who had recently said that “a propaganda picture doesn’t have to be filled with blood and brutality,” was the man for the job. “Don’t worry,” he told the director. “I know Shakespeare, you know how to make pictures.”

  Wyler declined his offer, explaining that his first obligation was now to his documentary work, and he had the satisfaction of recommending Ford, knowing that however unequal they were in the armed forces, in the movie business the man who had beaten him twice for Best Director was, at least for the moment, a runner-up. Olivier took Wyler’s advice and went to Ford a few weeks later. He got another rejection, as Ford laughingly told him he was completely unqualified to direct a Shakespeare play.*

  Ford got his orders to move out long before Wyler did. On October 28, 1942, after two months at Claridge’s, he traveled to Scotland and boarded a freighter bound for Algiers. For two weeks, the ship made its way south, so uneventfully that Ford said “we might just as well have been on a pleasure cruise.” He and the mostly British fighting force spent their days aboard “stripped down and getting tanned” on the deck. He arrived in Algiers with a Field Photo crew of thirty-two men, just four days after American forces had landed and begun their push east toward Tunis, where the most serious fighting would take place.

  At Midway, Ford had been the ranking filmmaker. But in Algiers, he discovered he would be answerable to his old boss at 20th Century Fox. Zanuck, whom the members of the 13th Armored Regiment derided behind his back as “the little colonel,”* was presiding over filming operations in North Africa with the bluff and brio of a know-it-all on his first big-game hunt. “Can’t I ever get away from you?” Ford said, perhaps not entirely amiably, when they first saw each other. “I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut that if I ever go to heaven you’ll be waiting at the door for me under a sign reading ‘Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck.’” Ford liked Zanuck, but he wasn’t happy that for this campaign, his Field Photo Unit had been moved under the authority of the Signal Corps, and he was not alone in his distaste for the Fox chief’s dilettantish behavior. Zanuck had somehow managed to take possession of a private car in which he traveled while everyone else used army or navy transport; he was planning to write a book about his experience in Algiers and Tunis, he kept his own schedule, and he made no secret of the fact that he was less interested in filming the Allied advance for newsreels than in amassing footage for a feature-length documentary he intended to produce himself.