by Mark Harris
Ultimately, Wyler chose not to start the film that way; Memphis Belle begins with a simpler and more conventional title, albeit one that pointedly distinguishes the movie from the reenactment-laden work of many of his colleagues: “All aerial combat film was exposed during air battles over enemy territory.” Over shots of the English countryside, the narrator announces, “This is a battlefront. A battlefront like no other in the long history of mankind’s wars. This is an air front.” If anything was going to sell war-weary audiences on another army documentary, this was it: The air war offered moviegoers a chance to see World War II from a literally new perspective. A year earlier, Howard Hawks had fictionalized the bravery of a wartime flight crew in the combat drama Air Force, which had become an immense success for Warner Bros. and heightened public interest in the youngest division of the armed forces. In his film, Wyler would exploit that curiosity with an evocative, detailed, minute-by-minute style of second-person narration that made Memphis Belle one of the most effective nonfiction films of the war. He took every opportunity to articulate the sensations and emotions of being in or near aerial combat: “If you’re a mechanic you’ve got your own bomber. You get attached to it. But you know when your ship goes out on a mission you may never see it again.” If you’re assigned to the actual crew, once you learn your destination, “sometimes your face turns white. . . . Sometimes the feeling that you won’t come back tightens your insides.”
Wyler then introduces Captain Morgan and his crew by name. As the bombing missions unfold, the narration becomes frank in its anti-German rhetoric, saying that the German people have “twice in one generation . . . flooded the world with suffering . . . in such quantity as the history of the human race has never known.” As the aerial footage that serves as the movie’s centerpiece begins, the narration drops away for several minutes and is replaced by the emotionless voices of the crew on the intercom that Wyler had recorded in Hollywood; they get louder only when they see one of their planes shot down and spiral toward the ground. “B-17 out of control at 3 o’clock . . . Eight men still in that B-17, come on, guys, get outta there . . . Come on, you son of a bitch!” The last third of Memphis Belle takes place back at the airfield after the bombing, and although Anderson’s wistful voice-over was never used, Wyler is unstinting about showing the ground crew nervously counting the planes as they come back—“sweating out the mission,” the narrator explains—and pulling badly injured men out of the B-17s and onto stretchers. “Our losses were heavy,” the audience is told, ‘but the enemy’s were far heavier. . . . Who can tell the number of German torpedoes that will not be fired, the number of convoys that will get through now, the battles that will be won instead of lost . . . because of what these bombers and flyers did today?”
When Wyler first showed his completed film to his commanding officers, they didn’t know what to make of it. That The Memphis Belle was impressive was beyond dispute; no film about air combat had come anywhere close to its immediacy and verisimilitude—even the static-muffled monotone of the recreated soundtrack felt unlike anything from a Hollywood movie. “This is a superb picture,” wrote Brigadier General L. S. Kuter, who recommended that Wyler be awarded the Legion of Merit for his work after screening the forty-one-minute documentary.* “It is real.” Perhaps too real. The army felt that a scene in which the young flyers were blessed by a chaplain after receiving their flight instructions would have to be omitted—it “suggests a resigned finality,” Kuter wrote, rather than the can-do spirit that the army wanted to serve as the public image of the air force. Kuter also worried about a line of narration spoken during combat—“You try not to be where the next flak hits”—which he feared would imply that American pilots were in the business of “running away from anti-aircraft fire.”
The War Activities Committee, the Hollywood board that vetted all Signal Corps pictures intended for theatrical release, also had its concerns, and relayed them directly to the secretary of war. The line, “For Christ’s sake, get out of that plane” was blasphemous and would have to be deleted. “Damn it, don’t yell on that intercom” was also unacceptable. And even though Wyler had overdubbed the last word of the line “Come on, you son of a bitch” with machine-gun fire, the mere implication that the word was being spoken was taboo. In 1942, the committee’s vice chairman reminded Secretary Stimson, Noel Coward and David Lean had collaborated on a drama about a British warship in combat called In Which We Serve in which sailors were heard to use the words “hell,” “damn,” and “bastard.” The Breen Office refused to approve the British film for release in the United States, and when Breen was widely attacked, including by American servicemen, for suppressing a patriotic movie made by an ally, the office sniffily responded, “The function of the Production Code is not to be patriotic, it is to be moral.” The resulting outrage was so great that Breen was forced to back down and issue a tortured one-time exemption for language used by “persons in active duty under pressure of great dramatic force apparent on screen whose pictures are produced . . . under sponsorship of government where words are not offensive per se.” The War Activities Committee feared that the exemption for Coward and Lean had created a slippery slope, and it urged Stimson to see “the wisdom of making these suggested minor deletions.”
Stimson wouldn’t do it. He stood by the movie, knowing that he had the backing of Roosevelt, who had watched The Memphis Belle with Wyler in the White House screening room and then told the director, “This has to be shown right away, everywhere.” In early February, the army approved it for general release. Wyler politely ignored a final request from the brass that the title be changed to something more exciting—for instance, “Big League Air War.”
Memphis Belle was scheduled to open around the country on April 15, 1944, a date that Wyler came close to spending in an army jail cell awaiting court-martial. He was outside the Statler Hotel in Washington, D.C., days away from receiving orders for his next assignment, when he witnessed an argument between a hotel doorman and a guest over who was next in line for a taxicab. As the guest grabbed the taxi and slammed the door, the doorman turned to Wyler and, gesturing back at the departing cab, muttered, “Goddamn Jew.”
“Look, you’re saying that to the wrong fellow,” Wyler responded.
“I didn’t mean you, I meant him,” said the doorman.
Wyler punched him in the face, and thought little of it when, in the ensuing commotion, an army officer who happened to be standing nearby asked him for his name. Wyler left the capital for New York the next day only to receive an army telegram ordering him to return to Washington immediately. He reported to the air force base at Bolling Field where he was told he would face charges of “conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman.” He had hit a civilian without “legal provocation.” Wyler explained that the language the doorman had used was the kind of provocation that had inspired him to leave Hollywood and put on a uniform in the first place. The investigating officer was unmoved. Wyler was arrested and told he could either defend himself in a court-martial proceeding, which would take months, or accept an official reprimand. He reluctantly took the reprimand.
When Memphis Belle opened, it became the first movie in history to be reviewed on the front page of the New York Times, which called it “one of the finest fact films of the war . . . a perfect example of what can be properly done by competent film reporters to visualize the war for people back home.” Wyler had succeeded in making a war picture in the spirit of With the Marines at Tarawa—darker, tougher, more unflinching about the realities of injury and death faced by American men and boys than its onscreen predecessors. This was a picture designed to jolt moviegoers out of the apathy that overexposure to the war had bred, not simply to whip them into a patriotic frenzy. Cue magazine wrote that the movie “ought to go a long way toward [investing] the newspaper phrase ‘Our Losses Slight’ with a significance to shatter any complacency.”
Some reviews noted that the aerial footage in The Memphis Belle was actually a
composite of several different missions flown over or near Wilhelmshaven—a fact that Wyler had made no attempt to conceal in interviews—but most who saw the picture were tremendously impressed by its realism, even if they weren’t quite certain how real it was. The critic for the New Yorker said its “best feature” was “the conversation of the boys while over the target,” not realizing that their dialogue had all been recorded months after the fact, and Agee, who had roundly derided the falsification in Capra’s Tunisian Victory, admitted in The Nation that while watching Wyler’s film, he “could not guess which shots were reenacted and which were straight records.” Critics seemed especially surprised that such a strong and unsentimental film had come from the director of what one of them called the “shrewd but somewhat plushy war poster” Mrs. Miniver, and Agee remarked that “postwar planners should work out a better fate for him than going back to Hollywood.”
Wyler seemed to agree. He told reporters that Memphis Belle “says everything I’ve got to say—it is a kind of communiqué from the Army Air Force,” but he also said he wasn’t finished with his work for the Signal Corps. Hollywood wanted him back badly; Goldwyn still had him under contract, and Zanuck was hoping to persuade him to make a film version of Moss Hart’s theatrical revue Winged Victory, a morale show cast largely with servicemen that was used to raise money for Army Emergency Relief; Wyler could have done the job while remaining on active duty, since the show had actually been produced on Broadway by the air force itself. But he declined, telling Hart, “I want to make more documentary films. I strongly feel this is where I can do the most good.” A month after The Memphis Belle opened, Wyler flew to Italy and checked into Allied headquarters in Caserta to begin preparations for his next documentary, a short about the P-47 fighter planes known as Thunderbolts. He looked forward to getting back in the air with a camera as soon as possible. It was a decision, made almost casually, that would permanently alter the course of his life and career.
TWENTY
“A Sporadic Raid of Sorts on the Continent”
HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND NEW YORK, MARCH–MAY 1944
John Bulkeley was a hero made for the movies at a time when the navy desperately needed one. In 1942, the young man, a lieutenant in the Pacific fleet who commanded the six boats in Motor Torpedo Boat Squadron Three, had navigated hundreds of miles of dangerous waters in order to pick up General MacArthur, his family, and his staff and lead them to safety as Bataan fell to the Japanese. “You have taken me out of the jaws of death,” MacArthur is said to have told him when they reached port. “I shall never forget it.” Bulkeley’s daring became the subject of William White’s They Were Expendable, the best seller that MGM had been urging John Ford to turn into a movie for a year.
But a picture based on the book hardly seemed possible. Although the story of the operation to protect MacArthur was in some ways perfect for Hollywood, the majority of White’s account was an unremittingly angry study of loss—an oral history of the undermanned navy’s hopeless fight to hold the Philippines in the months after Pearl Harbor. Bulkeley and the men with whom he served had been determined to stave off an inevitable Japanese victory for long enough to allow the U.S. fleet to rebuild in Hawaii. The navy did not go down to defeat for three months, a strategic victory for the Allies that came at the cost of ten thousand American lives; when the Japanese took Bataan, an additional seventy-five thousand Allied troops were seized as prisoners of war. White explicitly framed his story as a cautionary tale, writing, “We are a democracy, running a war. If our mistakes are concealed from us, they can never be corrected. These . . . sad young men differ from those . . . in Europe only in that they are Americans, and the tragedy they bear witness to is our own failure, and the smugness they struggle against is our own complacency.”
White’s overall narrative was not, to put it mildly, natural material for a studio war movie in 1944. The point of his book is that, as one naval officer puts it, “In a war, anything can be expendable—most usually men. They are expending you and that machine gun to get time. They don’t expect to see either one again. They expect you to stay there and spray that road with steel until you’re killed or captured, holding up the enemy for a few minutes or even a precious quarter of an hour. You know . . . that those few minutes gained are worth the life of a man to your army.” Even Bulkeley himself was not sure the story was worth telling to a public whose curiosity about the war had lately given way to impatience and fatigue. He told White, “Look, never mind about that. People don’t like to hear about that. I’ve learned that in the week I’ve been back.”
If They Were Expendable hadn’t been so popular, it’s doubtful that MGM would even have purchased the movie rights, and in 1943, after Donovan refused to take Ford off active duty so that he could direct it, the project seemed to languish. Frank Wead, a Navy pilot in the 1920s who had become the successful screenwriter of movies like Test Pilot and Dive Bomber, had taken a crack at adapting it; when Wead temporarily set aside the script to move on to other work, the studio turned to Budd Schulberg, asking him to flesh out Bulkeley’s personal life by adding a wife and child so that the story would appeal to women. Throughout 1943, Ford had kept the project at arm’s length, never quite giving MGM a definitive no, but always finding new reasons that it probably wouldn’t work. “Every congressman in America would be after my ass” if he quit the navy to make a movie, he told his friend James McGuinness; besides, he had little faith that MGM would actually want to go through with the picture. Louis B. Mayer was as spooked as every other studio head by the collapse of the war-movie market, and if the studio did produce They Were Expendable, surely it would insist on softening the story, turning it into a melodrama, or tagging a victory in the Pacific onto the end of the narrative in order to wrap up on a note of triumph. Whatever MGM did, Ford told Wead, “the thing will probably be ske-rewed up.”
Ford still couldn’t let it go. He had spent time supervising Field Photo in London and he had filmed a city under siege in North Africa, but for him the war continued to be defined by his experience at Midway, by what he witnessed of the courage and sacrifice of men who knew they were risking their lives, and by the devastating loss of young men in the aftermath of the battle. A war picture that told the truth about the nobility of looking into the eye of almost certain defeat would be a picture Ford wanted to make, but it seemed impossible. On the other hand, he now had so little to do in the navy that perhaps the time had come to return to the director’s chair. Field Photo was running smoothly under Ray Kellogg, and Ford’s duties in Washington were so inconsequential that in March 1944 the navy told him he could take a couple of weeks and go home to Los Angeles. It seems to have been during that time that he began to commit himself—creatively if not contractually—to They Were Expendable, talking through script issues with Wead, who was now working on the screenplay again.
But Ford was about to be called back to duty. Late in the month, orders came through for him to report to London for preparations for the coming Allied landing in Europe, and Ford told Wead he would not be available to work on the movie for the time being. The studied casualness of his tone in delivering the news—“I understand that there is to be a sporadic raid of sorts on the Continent in the near future and I am leaving in the middle of next week to take part in same”—could barely disguise his pride. The navy still needed him after all.
Ford returned to Washington, where he received a promotion to captain and prepared for his trip overseas. Over his months of idleness, his behavior and demeanor had deteriorated considerably. He had never gotten around to moving out of his hotel room and was now living in slovenly conditions and drinking heavily, just as he had been used to doing between movie shoots. His new assignment notwithstanding, he remained attracted to the idea of directing They Were Expendable, and shortly before he left for Europe, he agreed to meet Bulkeley, now a lieutenant commander who was also about to go to London, where he would be in charge of a PT boat squadron. Bulkeley was summon
ed to Ford’s dirty suite, where he found the director, who now outranked him, splayed in bed naked. He had clearly spent the night, and perhaps the morning, drunk. In Bulkeley’s recollection, men and women, “hangers-on,” were wandering casually in and out of the room. When Ford saw him, he threw off the sheets and jumped to his feet, announcing that he wanted to salute the man who had saved General MacArthur’s life. The show of respect did not last long; Ford, still naked, then crawled back into bed and told his new visitor to open the closet door so that he could admire the new captain’s stripes on his uniform. Bulkeley, disgusted, shot back at him, “What are you captain of?” Ford threw a plate of half-eaten food at him just as he turned to walk out of the room. The next time he and Bulkeley saw each other, it would be in a PT boat in the English Channel.
In May, Frank Capra learned that he would be staying in Washington, D.C., during the invasion. Rather than returning to London to coordinate the Signal Corps efforts to film the landing, he was to take charge of receiving their film and make sure the strongest material was apportioned to newsreel producers with all deliberate speed. His job as a kind of managing editor was several steps removed from the action, but at least it would involve events so urgent that there would be almost no opportunity for the War Department, the OWI, or any other interested government agency to interfere. Capra was now facing the real possibility that the ambitious program of war documentaries he had conceived two years earlier would end up taking longer to complete than the war itself. The Know Your Ally/Know Your Enemy series that he had originally hoped would include almost a dozen documentaries had become a case study in how diplomacy and red tape could join forces to prevent progress on almost any project. After years of planning, only one of the movies, Know Your Ally—Britain, was complete, and it felt so out of date that it was virtually useless as propaganda. After four years of watching movies from Hollywood and overseas alike about English valor, moviegoers would surely laugh at the forty-minute film’s contention that out of all the Allies, Britain was the “hardest to understand.” The frail metaphor on which the script relied—Russia, China, England, and the United States were treated as “four backs” on a “football team” in “a different kind of game—this one’s for keeps!”—was patronizing, as was the picture’s assertion that one of those players, John Britain, comes from “an old people, a stubborn people, and sometimes they have moved slowly. But in three years of blood, sweat and tears, Britain has found his soul.” Capra’s unit was now drastically underfunded, and since the importance of Russia and China in the war had largely been covered in the Why We Fight series, the rest of the Know Your Ally slate, which had at one time included plans for installments that would cover Australia, Canada, and France, was canceled.
