by Mark Harris
Ivens and Foreman wanted Know Your Enemy—Japan to do more than educate American soldiers and movie audiences; they hoped it could somehow be used to stir the people of Japan into revolting against their own corrupt system if the Allies ever occupied the country and could thus expose the Japanese to American propaganda. That idea ran directly into a buzzsaw; when Capra submitted Ivens’s completed film at the end of 1943, the army and the administration both summarily rejected it. The picture’s unsparing treatment of Hirohito ran counter to the State Department’s conviction that since the United States would almost surely have to reestablish some kind of relationship with the emperor after the war, it would be wise to avoid denigrating him more than necessary. (The same warning was being given to producers of entertainment films; as late as 1945, the OWI cautioned United Artists, which was releasing the anti-Japanese James Cagney picture Blood on the Sun, to depict Hirohito “only . . . as a tool of Japanese militarists, not as a personal heavy.”) The army also balked at Ivens’s suggestion that Hirohito should be considered a war criminal; it wanted more blame for the war directed at the Japanese people themselves, even though that approach could easily lead to the kind of racism that Hollywood filmmakers, under Mellett’s watchful eye until recently, had been instructed to avoid.
Capra scrapped Ivens’s film completely, removed him from his unit, and started again with Foreman and a young aspiring screenwriter and novelist named Irving Wallace who had been working alongside Theodor Geisel at Fort Fox. Wallace claimed that Capra was “totally unsophisticated when it came to political thought. He only knew one thing: America had been good to him, America was beautiful. . . . He came up with a simple foreign policy . . . : The only good Jap is a dead Jap.” Wallace hated that approach and argued for a more refined version of the anti-industrialist, antimilitary case that Ivens had made, but he knew that Capra was working in the dark; it was impossible to make a film articulating a policy that had not in fact even been formed by policymakers. “From FDR to General Marshall on down,” Wallace said, “no one knew what to tell the troops about who their real enemy was”—Hirohito, Tojo and his army, or the people of Japan, a tempting target at a time when polls showed that half of all GIs believed that Japan’s entire population would have to be wiped out in order to guarantee a lasting peace. “There was a policy vacuum,” said Wallace, “and in fact Foreman and I were left alone to design what our fighting men’s attitudes should be toward the Japanese.”
After two years of service, Capra was tired of being stymied by unclear policy, poor lines of communication, and military bureaucracy. After his months in England acting with virtual autonomy to make Tunisian Victory happen his way, it had been hard for him to come back to Washington and return to service as a functionary who was stuck, seemingly permanently, somewhere in the middle of the chain of command, always subject to second-guessing. The success of The Battle of Russia had emboldened him to speak his mind, and in a letter to General Surles he argued for more authority. In late November 1943, a group of Signal Corps filmmakers who were not under Capra’s command had been assigned to the Cairo Conference in Egypt, a war-strategy summit following the defeat of Rommel and the Allied victory in North Africa that had been attended by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kai-Shek. When Capra saw the footage they had shot, he told Surles, “I nearly vomited. Out of focus, light flashes, incompetent, inept, and criminally amateurish. It’s a disgrace to the profession, a disgrace to the Army, and a disgrace to our country to have such a world shattering conference be recorded by amateurs. . . . I’m supposed to be head of Special Coverage. For the sake of future efforts I sincerely request that I be given the opportunity to assign the right men and equipment to these important jobs.”
Capra got a Christmas Day promotion from lieutenant colonel to colonel, but he didn’t get the expanded role he wanted. Nor did his new rank hold much sway in Hollywood. Like Ford, he found himself in straitened financial circumstances as America’s involvement in the war moved into its third year, and a significant piece of income he had counted on—profits from the release of Arsenic and Old Lace—had failed to come through; Warner Bros. had released the Cary Grant comedy for showing to troops stationed overseas, but more than two years after Capra had completed the picture, it still had no U.S. release date and could not contractually be scheduled until the Broadway play closed. In January, Capra, who had, like Zanuck, made it known that he now liked to be called “Colonel,” asked Harry Warner to put the film in theaters. Warner turned him down. The war was becoming an inconvenience for the studios; onscreen it was overexposed and audience fatigue was beginning to show at the box office; offscreen, it continued to be a drain on talent and resources. Warner told Capra he intended to sit on Arsenic and Old Lace until the war was over—“and I hope that will be soon,” he added, “so that people won’t have forgotten you.”
• • •
On January 10, 1944, Ernie Pyle’s report “This One Is Captain Waskow” appeared in newspapers across the country. The account of the death of a twenty-five-year-old American soldier in the battle of San Pietro became one of the most widely read stories of Pyle’s career; it helped him win a Pulitzer Prize, inspired a movie the following year called The Story of G.I. Joe, and brought the small village of San Pietro and the bravery of Allied soldiers there to the attention of millions of Americans who never would have heard of the battle otherwise. Pyle had gotten to San Pietro four days before John Huston and his team had; he had waited three days for Waskow’s corpse to be retrieved, walked alongside the mule that carried the body on its back, and then watched the young survivors of his heavily depleted unit say a shattered goodbye to their captain before burying him.
Pyle’s story was the kind of firsthand, unflinching reportage that Huston, who was still in Italy, had hoped to do in San Pietro, and he was not deterred by the fact that by the time the article appeared, the battle was long over. Now there could be no question of finding a new town to serve as the subject of his film; it could only be about the place where Captain Waskow and so many other young Americans had died for their country. Eric Ambler had been reassigned to North Africa by British intelligence, but Huston, Jules Buck, and a Signal Corps crew had remained in Venafro, and for the next six weeks, with the army’s full cooperation, he conceived, staged, and shot the film that was released to U.S. movie theaters as the combat documentary The Battle of San Pietro.
In his autobiography, Huston did not acknowledge that the film was entirely a reenactment. Instead, he recounted his and his team’s first, genuinely dangerous visit to San Pietro—embellishing it to include not only the shelling, the hiding, and the precarious escape in the jeep but the presence of a little Italian orphan whom he considered adopting—and he suggested that the documentary had actually been filmed on the spot over those two days. He took his own terror and displaced it into the character of an unnamed captain alongside him who got the shakes while they were waiting together for the shelling to stop. He recounted his explosion at Buck when the jeep’s wheels got stuck, but without the anti-Semitic outburst that Ambler recalled. And he invented a joyous scene after the battle had been won—“What a welcome the people of San Pietro gave us! Whole cheeses and bottles of wine appeared from God knows where.” Huston’s self-mythologizing about the picture had by then been his practice for decades; soon after the war, he gave a newspaper interview in which he said, “When I made San Pietro, I was a wet nurse for the camera crew, trying to save them from mines and booby traps.”
None of it was true. The Battle of San Pietro was a scripted, acted, and directed movie that contained barely two minutes of actual, unreconstructed documentation. The most “real” shots in the movie are the pictures Jules Buck had taken the very first day they approached the town and run into the smiling, eager Texas soldiers—many of whom had since been killed in other battles—and the crazy, tumbling, unreadable shot from Buck’s still-rolling camera as he, Huston, and Ambler had dived for cover to avoid a mortar shell. That
shot is distinguishable from the others in the movie because of its sudden, violent, and chaotic movement; it is not an approximation of the terror of coming under fire, but an exact representation of it.
The rest of San Pietro is a contrivance, albeit one that Huston pulled off with the considerable assistance of the Signal Corps in Italy, which provided him with time, equipment, a crew, and all the soldiers he needed to play the GIs who had liberated the town. Huston and the army both wanted the picture to be correct in its details; at the end of 1943, he was given access to an extensive and confidential written account of the battle that had been compiled by the 143rd Infantry from army interviews with several of the soldiers who had fought at San Pietro, and he used it to create an accurate timeline of the battle.
With that report as his basis, Huston started to jot down ideas for a shooting script that would follow exactly the narrative line Capra had imagined when he had come up with the assignment—an explanation of the strategic importance of a victory, followed by the army’s approach to the town, the battle itself, and then the elated return of the townspeople. Some of Huston’s notes were practical—“Greater clarity needed in the maps,” he wrote. “Figures and names are not legible enough.” But others indicate clearly just how far he was willing to go in manufacturing a story that would fit the army’s propaganda needs. Although both German and American planes had bombed the town, he wrote, “the woman that is dug up from the ruins should be a casualty caused by German shelling.” In addition, “after San Pietro is occupied by Americans—and civilians return—the Germans should shell the town as they are retreating.”
Huston had learned a good deal about battle-scene reconstruction by the time he shot San Pietro. His time in England working on Tunisian Victory, and his access to the more sophisticated recreations the British had staged, had given him an education in the inadequacy of his own reconstructions. As he staged the quasi-documentary battle scenes for San Pietro, Huston worked to achieve a kind of ragged-edged verisimilitude that helped to create a general American understanding—one that persisted long after the war was over—of what “real” war film is supposed to look like. When guns were fired or shells exploded, he made sure the image jolted as if the ground had shaken or the cameraman had been taken by surprise. He slowed the action down, shooting soldiers belly-crawling over rocky terrain under mortar fire or advancing through treacherous passes by halting, jittery fits and starts rather than at a steady pace. And he even allowed a couple of the soldiers to notice the camera, just as they would under actual battle circumstances, catching its “eye” for a split second, then expressionlessly turning back to their business.
By February 22, 1944—more than two months after the battle had ended—Huston had shot all the film he needed. Fourteen unedited reels of his work at San Pietro survive in the National Archives, and they provide ample evidence of the many different techniques he tried, some more successful than others, to recreate the battle. The unused film also reveals that he systematically discarded any shot that looked too perfectly composed or overstaged—several images in which the cameraman changes focus, moving from the foreground to the horizon just in time to capture a distant explosion, and other scenes in which the soldiers or the cameramen forget to react to sudden gunfire or shelling. The unused footage provides fascinating glimpses of Huston directing the untrained men in front of his cameras—a smiling GI goes from “alive” to “dead’ at his cue, and a team of soldiers proceeds cautiously into an abandoned farmhouse looking for bombs and mines, only to have the camera cut when one of them insouciantly kicks at a misplaced prop grenade. The villagers eventually did return to San Pietro, and Huston made full use of them, cajoling them into enacting the images of relief and good cheer that Capra had craved. Some familiar contrivances did make it into the finished film—a cameraman shooting from inside a trench, with a soldier already in perfect focus jumping in after him, and several shots in which the camera already seems to have advanced comfortably through terrain that the soldiers onscreen are still trying to take while under heavy fire. But for the most part, Huston followed his instinct to include slightly imperfect images—a jumpy rather than smooth camera movement or a momentary loss of focus—as a badge of authenticity, taking a cue from the home-front audience’s enthusiastic reaction to the moments in The Battle of Midway when John Ford let them see the film come loose from its sprockets.
After four months in Italy, the strain of recreating a bloody battle on location in a country that was still very much in the middle of the war began to take its toll on Huston. The close calls that he had experienced months earlier during his first two days at San Pietro had terrified him; now that the pressure of filming was over, his fear returned and he was unable to shake it off. Italy was still under heavy German bombardment, and Huston became wildly sensitive to unexpected sounds; he would sometimes confuse the screech of jeep wheels with the high-pitched whine of enemy mortars. “I had never before seen dead in numbers,” he wrote, “and for someone raised in conventional America . . . it was deeply shocking. I felt I had adjusted. I remember saying to myself one day in Italy that I was really seasoned at last, a proper soldier. That same night I woke up calling out to my mother. We really don’t know what goes on beneath the surface.”
The army sent Huston home, back to New York’s Astoria Studios, to work on his documentary. Although he had never deceived anyone in the Signal Corps about what he had filmed at San Pietro—there would have been no need to, since he had the full endorsement of his superior officers—by early 1944 there was considerable dispute within the armed forces about both the ethics and the usefulness of extensive reenactments. The completed version of Tunisian Victory was soon to open theatrically; it had not yet been seen by the press or the public, but the Signal Corps’ staged North African footage was making the rounds within the army, and some of the reaction was withering. “The re-enactments in most cases are done so poorly and with no military supervision,” wrote Second Lieutenant James Faichney, chief of the army’s Film Security section, “that seasoned Army officers who saw it viewed the material with a mixture of laughter and disgust.” In his memo, Faichney wrote that he did not dispute the need to recreate a scene or two that would have been impossible to film in actual combat, but he argued that Capra and his men had now gone far beyond that and were “attempting to re-enact the war on a Hollywood scale.” In a harsh report at the end of January, just as Huston was starting to shoot in San Pietro, Faichney had urged that filmmakers in Italy not make the same mistakes, recommending that they go “as near to the front lines as possible and not . . . stay behind the lines and ‘go on location’ as if they were in Indio or Palm Springs.”
Faichney’s report was met with self-righteous outrage from Huston, who went up the chain of command to demand an apology. The twenty-six-year-old officer was called on the carpet and forced to retract his accusation that the Signal Corps was shooting “a ‘phoney’ war.” After watching Huston’s San Pietro footage, Faichney called it “far superior in over-all quality” to previous reenactments done for the Army Pictorial Service, but he would not back down from his eminently reasonable concern that “material of a re-enacted nature is still not being slated or marked in a fashion whereby such material is easily recognizable.”
Huston received a promotion to major for his work in San Pietro, but his time in New York that spring was marked by behavior so impulsive and erratic that it would now be called post-traumatic. He pushed his romantic life, always overcrowded, closer to complete self-destruction—although he was still married to Lesley Black, he continued his long-standing relationship with de Havilland and his pursuit of Marietta Fitzgerald while beginning an affair with Doris Lilly, an editor at Town & Country who pursued him with unembarrassed avidity. Faichney’s report had injured him, and, de Havilland said later, he “couldn’t take . . . any kind of rejection without desperately going off and comforting himself with some female conquest. . . . He had no self-discipline. And he d
idn’t have much taste either.” De Havilland knew about both Fitzgerald, whom she liked and thought was a good match for Huston, and Lilly, whom she saw as a vulgar climber; Lilly was so smitten with Huston that she didn’t care what anyone thought of her, even when their affair made the papers. “He was in a uniform,” she said later, “and the idea that there was Italian mud on his boots was just absolutely devastating. He was so divine.”
Huston had gone into the war with an appetite for derring-do and a desire to test his fearlessness; now, even as he worked on the movie in New York, he was both witnessing a kind of disintegration in his colleagues he never would have imagined possible and experiencing it himself. Rey Scott, the big, bluff cameraman on Report from the Aleutians whose seeming indifference to putting his life at risk had so impressed Huston, was now at Astoria and spiraling rapidly toward a psychotic break. Scott had been in Italy as well, where he was known for his willingness to run toward wherever the guns were firing or the bombs were falling. “But Astoria,” Huston wrote, “was not Rey’s cup of tea. He had been living in cellars and tents for years and he felt ill at ease in these more civilized surroundings. . . . Finally it got to him.” Scott was on guard duty at the film facility in Queens one night when he called the colonel in charge at home and told him there was an emergency, then started firing his .45. Nobody was hurt, but Huston came in to work the next morning to learn that Scott had been arrested and was being held in an army psychiatric ward.
When Huston had gotten back to the United States, Capra had sent him a telegram that read, “Dear John Welcome home what are you doing and why.” He no longer knew how to answer those questions. He would work at Astoria all day, roar around town with one or more women well into the evening, and then return to his room at the St. Regis, where he would lie in bed unable to sleep until he could no longer bear it. Then he would get dressed, load his service revolver, take the elevator downstairs, and walk alone across Fifth Avenue into Central Park. He later said he was hoping to get mugged so that he would have someone to kill.
