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

by Mark Harris

  Capra immediately began pressing the army to release him from his duties. He crafted a three-pronged argument built out of equal parts financial self-interest, nonspecific pleading about his physical condition, and a murky case that it would actually be in the War Department’s best interests to allow him to return to Hollywood. Soon, he wrote, “I will have been away from my civilian profession nearly three years. Motion pictures are highly competitive and in [a] constant state of flux. I feel . . . staying away longer will seriously curtail my standing, ability, and future earning capacity. My health is gradually deteriorating and I feel it will affect the efficiency of my work. Most important, I feel I have given all I can possibly give toward the education of the orientation of the soldier. From this point on I feel I can do a bigger job on civilians.”

  Money was a pressing, though unexpressed, concern. Although Warner Bros. finally opened Arsenic and Old Lace that fall, three years after Capra had shot it, an army salary and the diminished royalties that continued to trickle in from his older movies were insufficient to keep Lucille and his children in the comfort to which they had long been accustomed. And Capra had reason to assume that the army no longer needed him urgently. His assignments had become vague and minor. He was sent to Hawaii for a month on a mission to organize Signal Corps cameramen in the army’s push to document what it believed would be the final phase of the war in the Pacific, but he wasn’t asked to oversee a specific documentary. Much of his time was instead spent resolving petty jurisdictional disputes or trying to wheedle cooperation out of the entertainment world, which was not quite so blindly willing to ignore its bottom line to aid in the war effort as it had been two years earlier. Capra had little patience for resistance; when Arturo Toscanini refused to grant the Army Pictorial Service permission to use his recording of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the final Why We Fight film, Capra wrote him a polite and distressed letter expressing “deep regret, and some surprise” at the loss of his “magnificent rendition” for a “most important project,” then told Robert Riskin to “tell the sweet old Maestro he either lets us use his recording, or he can go to hell and we’ll use it anyhow.”

  Capra also missed his family; he had spent so little time at home since the end of 1941 that he felt his children were growing up fatherless; they communicated with him almost as if he were a distant but friendly stranger, writing short letters at the urging of their mother. “Dear Daddy,” his ten-year-old son Frank Jr. wrote him. “How are you? I hope you are fine and dandy. I had a good report card, isn’t that fine! I bet I can write all the states and their capitals in ten mins. . . . How much do you want to bet? Everyone is fine here . . . the mother cat has babies on the trellis below mom’s bedroom window. I am doing very good in school and I understand fractions and numerators and denominators. Love, Frank.”

  The army turned down Capra’s request, telling him he was needed in Washington. Theodor Geisel had just turned in a new script for Know Your Enemy—Germany, but it needed work, and General Osborn, still Capra’s most reliable champion, had been unexpectedly blunt about his disappointment with the first cut of the sixth Why We Fight movie, The Battle of China. With war documentaries now relying more and more on actual (or at least cleverly feigned) combat footage, the bargain-basement principle on which the Why We Fight series had been created and budgeted now seemed out of date; audiences, even those composed entirely of GIs, were losing interest in movies that were patched together from foreign propaganda pictures, newsreels, and drawings of maps. The Battle of China relied heavily on narration, clips from old movies, clichés of Orientalism (the movie makes extensive use of gongs), and intense anti-Japanese rhetoric that emphasized the savagery of an entire people and the evil of the Tanaka plan, a document in which Emperor Hirohito was thought to have articulated his “mad dream,” a sinister scheme for world domination, fifteen years before Pearl Harbor.*

  The Battle of China was, Osborn told Capra, “the least satisfactory of the Why We Fight series”; he complained that “many of the sequences are not actually pictures of historical events, but scenes taken from entertainment or other film to produce the desired effect.” Capra had padded out the movie with whatever was available to him, including several scenes that MGM had shot but not used in its 1937 China melodrama The Good Earth. Osborn thought the script talked down to its intended audience, and found the overall picture to be of such inferior quality that he told Capra he was recommending “that it be withdrawn from showing, pending consideration of its possible revision.” Capra, chagrined, could offer only the weak defense that he had used exactly the same technique in the earlier movies in the series. “I’m not trying to alibi for the Chinese film,” he added woundedly. “I know there are people in the War Department who claim we have put too much ‘emotion’ in these films. They may be right. A dry recitation of facts might have been a ‘safer’ way to present them. But my experiences with audiences . . . long ago taught me that if you want facts to stick, you must present them in an interesting manner.

  “I have a feeling that perhaps I’ve let you down,” he concluded. “Knowing the full and generous confidence you have placed in me this is quite disturbing. . . . It is . . . not through lack of study or effort.”

  Capra still had one movie in the works that he believed could make a real impact. John Huston had spent the last few months before D-Day working on the script and editing of his movie The Battle of San Pietro, an assignment Capra had given him back when they were both in London but that had somehow never taken on the status of an official army picture for a particular department. Other than Capra, nobody in the army knew what, exactly, Huston was spending so much time and effort putting together. Capra told Huston that in order to get enough money to finish the film, he’d have to complete a rough cut, bring it from New York City to Washington, and show it to General Surles, who, he wrote, “always had some cockeyed idea Huston was making a picture for OWI” instead of for the army. Huston arrived in the capital and screened an early version of the picture. Surles liked what he saw enough to tell him to get it finished. “Now,” Capra wrote, “we can spend money on it officially.”

  Huston was also beginning to worry about his financial security. The war had cut short his Hollywood career just as he had been about to start receiving his first large paychecks in the wake of The Maltese Falcon, and his army salary was not paying the bills. When his eighty-nine-year-old grandmother died in July, just as he was finishing San Pietro, Huston justified burying her in a plain pine box rather than an expensive casket by telling the mortuary director, apparently with a straight face, that he and she were both Orthodox Jews. With no end to his service in sight, he signed to write two screenplays that fall—an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers for producer Mark Hellinger at Universal, and The Stranger, which Orson Welles would eventually direct at RKO. Huston skirted army regulations about drawing a civilian salary while on active duty by writing both scripts under pseudonyms—a decision that also allowed him to escape the scrutiny of Warner Bros., where he was under exclusive contract.

  Before his work on those movies began, though, Huston devoted himself to the completion of San Pietro. (Capra, suddenly suffused with Catholic fervor, told him he strongly preferred the title The Footsoldier and St. Peter but would “settle for” the name of the town where the battle had taken place as a reasonable second choice.) In August, he returned to Washington to show a more polished cut of the film, which ran between forty-five and fifty minutes, to an assemblage of generals and senior military staff.

  The reception was disastrous—and not because of Huston’s extensive use of reenactments. Still badly shaken by the loss of life he had seen in Italy, he had chosen to make a documentary that was true to his own emotional experience, a film that emphasized the terrible cost of the Allied campaign in Italy rather than its strategic importance, tactics, or ultimate success. He had included a shot taken near San Pietro, though not at the battle, of dead Allied soldiers, their bodies c
overed with blankets, and instead of accompanying it with narration, he had used audio of interviews with excited young GIs poignantly talking about their futures.

  That moment, which Huston had placed about three-quarters of the way through the film, was when the officers began to walk out—first a general, and then, in descending order by rank, his subordinates. In Huston’s account, the screening room had completely emptied by the time the picture ended, “with the low man on the totem pole bringing up the rear.” That was undoubtedly an exaggeration, but Huston’s initial reaction (“I shook my head and thought, ‘What a bunch of assholes! There goes San Pietro!’”) was confirmed when he was called into General Surles’s office at the Bureau of Public Relations, where a number of officers were present.

  “The War Department wanted no part of the film,” Huston wrote. “I was told by one of its spokesman that it was ‘anti-war.’ I pompously replied that if I ever made a picture that was pro-war, I hoped someone would take me out and shoot me. The guy looked at me as if he were considering just that.” Huston himself felt that perhaps he had gone too far in juxtaposing the dead soldiers with the voice-overs, and he was troubled by a possibility he hadn’t considered, which was that the soldiers’ families might find the scene too much to bear; he felt that the brass was justified in telling him to remove it from the picture. But he was infuriated by the generals’ overall reaction, and not inclined to back down. “My God, nobody ever wanted to kill Germans more than I did,” he said. “Or to see them killed. I thought it was ‘anti-war’ to stop Hitler.”

  Huston had come to view San Pietro not just as an act of conscience, but as a tacit atonement for his earlier work. He thought back to Report from the Aleutians and felt angry at himself for the water carrying he had done as an army propagandist. (“In one of the missions [shown in the film], we said that everybody returned unscathed. Well, very rarely did [men] return unscathed.”) And he had no interest in softening the facts he had presented in San Pietro, including its clear-eyed statement that some U.S. regiments in Italy had been so devastated that almost all of their soldiers would have to be replaced.

  For the set of officers who saw the film, however, there was no question of cuts or emendations; San Pietro was unreleasable, and would have to be shelved permanently. The picture was saved only when General Marshall asked to see it weeks later. Marshall agreed with the others that it was completely unsuitable for general audiences, but he felt it might have value as a training documentary intended to introduce new GIs to some harsh truths about combat—if it could be shortened by as much as twenty minutes and completely reshaped.

  Trying to save his movie, Huston went back to work. In the fall of 1944, he swallowed his pride and recut the film, taking every note that a senior officer had to offer. Colonel Curtis Mitchell of the Bureau of Public Relations at first insisted on the “deletion of certain footage in which the bodies of dead American soldiers are . . . pulled aboard a truck” as well as any “sequences which show recognizable human dead”; he then agreed to a bizarre compromise in which the shots could stay in the film as long as a voice-over clearly identified the corpses as Italian. Colonel Gillette, Huston’s Signal Corps supervisor in Italy, quarreled with some explanatory narration about the goal of the campaign being to liberate Italian villages, writing to Huston that “most prefer to think that the objectives of the war are far greater than liberating towns of an enemy country.” Huston even had to contend with a demand from Robert Patterson, the undersecretary of war, who was apparently slightly hard of hearing. “Alright, Huston, let’s not have any more of this insubordination,” Capra wrote to him, only half joking. He attached a request from Colonel Lyman Munson: “Patterson is irate that a rewrite has not taken care of what he views as a troublesome aural similarity between the words ‘Italian’ and ‘battalion’ which he fears will cause confusion. . . . [He insists that] synonyms for ‘battalion,’ such as ‘units’ or ‘outfits’ or similar words are used. I would not care to be in the projection room if it so happened that the Undersecretary ran into the pronounced similarity for the third time.”

  Huston did as he was told, but as 1944 came to a close, he believed that San Pietro would never be seen by civilian moviegoers. The only portion of his battle reenactments that he thought would make it to theaters would be a few scenes that the producers of The Story of G.I. Joe, the fictional film based on Ernie Pyle’s columns, asked if they could use to make their movie more realistic. Huston gave his consent, since at that point there seemed to be no reason to withhold it.

  With nothing more to do on San Pietro for the time being, he returned to Los Angeles, where Capra put him to work on another project, handing him all of the previous failed drafts of Know Your Enemy—Japan and telling him to take over and see what he could do with them. Doris Lilly, the magazine editor with whom Huston had had a fling in New York, was now pursuing him with more determination than ever, often showing up unannounced; she followed him to California and seems to have provided considerable distraction. One night while Huston was out, she climbed through his window at 3 a.m. and grabbed the first thing she could find to scribble a note on—a copy of the Know Your Enemy—Japan script that he had been revising by hand. On the back of one page, she wrote, “Dear John, ‘tha Lilly’ was bye to pay her umble respects—en route home—weeping bitter tears you were still out—but then you always are. Miss you madly—and will probably end up wiring my ‘adios’—Sleep well ma love—of course! Ever loving. P.S. Stole some cigarettes.”

  Huston seemed bored by his latest assignment; his mind was clearly elsewhere. Many of the pages of the Know Your Enemy—Japan drafts on which he worked are filled with half-completed sketches of nude bodies, male and female, and his work on the scripts appears to have been sporadic. Earlier versions of the screenplay included extensive detail about the history of Japan designed to make the case that a centuries-long pattern of bizarre religious practices and blind fealty to royalty had led inevitably to Pearl Harbor. Huston deleted much of that and replaced it with cruder and more contemporary language, writing, “The Japanese are afflicted with a mission—to impose upon the world by force or otherwise their Emperor, their Shintoism, and their divine superiority. A nation so obsessed cannot stand still. It must go forward or be destroyed. There is no compromise possible with such fanaticism.”

  For more than two years, the army had wrestled with the vexing issue of just how anti-Japanese and anti-German the Know Your Enemy films should be: Would it be best to direct most of the blame for the war at political leaders, the military, or the people themselves, targeting some ineffable elements of their national character? After years of false starts, Capra had apparently decided the last option was best; under his direction, Huston wrote the most racist, unapologetically xenophobic version that had yet been drafted. To a previous writer’s description of the typical Japanese soldier that read, “He is pigeon-toed and perhaps bow-legged,” Huston added, “He is near-sighted and has buck teeth.” He also sought to pad the movie with any footage that would establish the Japanese as being in the thrall of peculiar customs, going well past the by then customary use of foreign propaganda newsreels. He even contacted the producers of a British film version of The Mikado requesting permission to use scenes from their movie in the documentary (they approved on the condition that neither Gilbert and Sullivan nor the title of the operetta would ever be mentioned).

  In the first eighteen months of the war, Lowell Mellett had used the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures as a bully pulpit from which to caution both Hollywood and Washington against the moral evil of incendiary race-baiting in movies. But with Mellett long gone and the BMP’s power greatly diminished, his warnings were forgotten. War-related entertainment pictures in 1944 were unembarrassed about denouncing the Japanese people in the ugliest possible terms. In 20th Century Fox’s The Purple Heart, the first Hollywood movie to depict Japan’s treatment of American prisoners of war, a soldier suggested that the only path to peace was to def
eat the Japanese by making sure to “wipe them off the face of the earth.” The same phrase was used in director Raoul Walsh’s Objective, Burma!, which he had shot for Warner Bros. over the summer and which featured not only GIs but an American newspaperman referring to the Japanese as “monkeys,” “slopeheads,” “degenerate moral idiots,” and “stinking little savages.” The outburst occurs when the GIs come upon the corpses of American soldiers who were tortured and mutilated by the Japanese army. In the original script, the picture’s hero, a paratrooper played by Errol Flynn, had responded by saying, “There’s nothing especially Japanese about this. . . . You’ll find it wherever you find Fascists. There are even people who call themselves American who’d do it too.” The movie’s producer ordered the line cut over the heated objection of its two original screenwriters, letting the anti-Japanese language in the scene stand as the final word on the subject.

  Huston’s script for Know Your Enemy—Japan was almost as strident. He had cut some scare-tactic language from an earlier writer’s introduction which posited that the Japanese would settle for nothing less than the conquest of North America and the growth of its population to “a billion people—[the] Japanese with their slaves.” But he had replaced it with a recurring device that was almost as inflammatory, beginning a dozen sentences of the narration with the incantatory phrase, “If you are Japanese, you believe . . .” in lines intended to establish them as an alien and paranoiac race of animal-deity worshippers.