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

by Mark Harris

  The rhythm of They Were Expendable, in which brief and intense battle sequences alternate with long stretches of indolence or quietly tense anticipation, mirrored Ford’s own experience of the war, as did the many scenes of all-male comradeship, the gentle maritime comedy that he asked James McGuinness to thread through the screenplay in a rewrite, the testy rivalries navy men felt with other branches of the service (by the time his ships see action, Ryan complains that “the air force will have won the war”), and the strong notes of elegy and sentiment throughout. Ford had his heroes learn of the attack on Pearl Harbor while they sat down to a meal with their commander, just as he had; he even inserted a small implicit tribute to two Field Photo men who had been killed while Wead was working on the script; they are represented in the movie by a pair of modest crosses in a jungle graveyard. Ford’s memories of Midway—particularly of the young men who were there one day and gone the next—informed his approach to a movie that has more moments of gloomy, uncertain parting than any other war picture of the time. Wead wrote one scene after another in which men are seen saying goodbye to each other. (“Like many fine artists,” Ford’s frequent screenwriter Dudley Nichols said later, “his true feeling was for the man-man or man-men relationship. I cannot recall one of his films in which the man-woman relationship came off with any feeling or profundity.”) The idea of a combat unit as a surrogate family in which every leave-taking could be final was underscored by Ford’s casting of extremely young-looking men as navy enlistees, and reaches its climax in a scene in which Brickley departs from his young squadron and says, “You older men, with longer service records . . . take care of the kids.” The paternalism of the moment echoes the way Ford had long seen himself as the caretaker of the men his son’s age who filled the ranks of Field Photo.

  The screenplay for They Were Expendable had little time to spare for patriotic speeches, calls for support from the home front, or exemplifications of squad unity, nor did it have anything to say about the reasons the war was being fought, all of which, by 1945, had become such overused staples of war movies that even the Office of War Information was no longer pushing for their inclusion in Hollywood pictures. Wead and Ford even revisited some controversial terrain when they inserted into the script some of the questions about the navy’s preparedness before Pearl Harbor that Gregg Toland had brought up in his first cut of December 7th; they included a chorus of voices in a crowd asking, “How did [Japanese flyers] get in undetected? Where were our search planes? What about our carriers? They’re set to invade the West Coast now! And they got away scot-free.” Perhaps sensing that he had hurt Toland’s feelings by recutting his documentary two years earlier, Ford, at one point, asked him to codirect They Were Expendable, telling him that “it would be a great experience for you”; Toland was still out of the country on active duty, and was not available. When the OWI saw the script, it raised no initial objections; the office felt that They Were Expendable would serve as “an outstanding contribution to the government’s War Information program,” and requested the deletion of only one line, in which a black enlistee said that the loss of the Philippines would “be bad back there in the South—no hemp—what’ll dey do for lynchin’s?”

  Ford cast a uniquely qualified actor to play Brickley. Robert Montgomery was a former president of the Screen Actors Guild and two-time Best Actor nominee who had left Hollywood three years earlier, at thirty-eight, to join the navy as an officer. In the summer of 1944, he was aboard USS Barton, one of the destroyers at Normandy. After the invasion, Montgomery was briefly reassigned to Bulkeley’s PT fleet, possibly at the behest of Ford; he wanted to come up with an alternative to Spencer Tracy, MGM’s choice for the role, and thought Montgomery could use the opportunity to study Bulkeley, who later remembered the actor “watching me carefully” as soon as he came aboard his boat. Montgomery bore a passing resemblance to Bulkeley, and Ford, who knew he would have no problem coming off as a believable navy man on screen, pulled strings to arrange for his transfer to inactive duty so he could take the part.

  When Montgomery’s casting was announced in November 1944, MGM told the press that the ensemble would “be comprised almost wholly of actors who have been in the military or naval service.” Ford had originally hoped to stock much of the crew with Field Photo veterans; that proved impractical, but the movie’s close ties to the navy were so important a part of the surrounding publicity that in the opening credits, Ford, Wead, cinematographer Joseph August, and second unit director James Havens were each listed with their military rank and branch of service. To play Rusty Ryan, the studio first wanted another member of the armed forces, Robert Taylor, a popular contract star whose stock had risen during the war. But Taylor was unavailable—he had joined the air force in 1943 as a flying instructor—and so in January, just a few weeks before production was scheduled to begin, MGM turned to its second choice, John Wayne.

  Wayne had not worked with Ford since The Long Voyage Home five years earlier. Since then, he had become a major star, appearing in almost twenty movies and always managing to maintain the public fiction that he was just a couple of professional commitments away from joining the army. He and Ford, and their families, had remained friendly—Pat Ford had even thought of asking Wayne to be godfather to Ford’s grandson—but Ford had long made clear to his wife that he found Wayne’s behavior cowardly and dishonest. To compound what Ford felt was an insult, Wayne turned out to be especially popular whenever he played a war hero: He had starred as a pilot in Flying Tigers and again in Reunion in France, and as a lieutenant commander in the navy—Robert Montgomery’s actual rank—in The Fighting Seabees. Just before signing for They Were Expendable, Wayne had completed Back to Bataan, another movie about the fight for the Philippines, but one which, unlike the one Ford was about to make, had no compunction about setting up a hasty reshoot with a new last scene that depicted the recent Allied victory.

  When Wayne arrived to begin work, Ford was in a punitive mood. The director’s prewar habit of picking a victim on each new production—someone to bully or humiliate—had not left him, and although Ford’s movie Stagecoach had marked the beginning of Wayne’s ascendancy, he had always been hard on the actor, berating him as lazy and slow. Now, however, there was real animus behind the jabs: He saw Wayne as an imposter, someone who had lined his pockets pretending to be a war hero while others did the real work and put themselves on the line. (“Well, Jesus, I [was] 40 years old and of fair standing and I didn’t feel I could go in as a private,” Wayne said. “I felt I could do more good going around on tours and things. Most of the ones who were doing the fighting were 18-year-old kids and I was America to them. They had taken their sweethearts to that Saturday matinee and held hands over a Wayne western. So I wore a big hat and I thought it was better.”)

  Ford was unconvinced by the argument. Working with dozens of men in uniform (even if the uniforms were costumes) and commanding the fleet of six PT boats that the navy had loaned MGM for the movie, he managed to convince himself that he was in the middle of a quasi-military operation. The film was being made with the cooperation of the navy and the Coast Guard, which provided both materiel and extras. He had little patience for someone he saw as a pampered movie star.

  But before he could turn his attention to Wayne, Ford had to deal with an unexpected crisis caused by his costar. Montgomery had “said yes without reflection” when Ford had asked him to play Brickley, as he thought the role “seemed an ideal way to get back to acting. But when we were down in Miami to shoot the first scenes . . . we started out with the boats going through their maneuvers, out in Manila Bay, that’s when it really hit me,” he said. “I was seized with panic.” He had not been in front of a camera for four years, and the jolt of going so suddenly from being a naval officer to playing one, from combat in the English Channel to tooling around in speedboats off a Florida beach, was too much for him.

  “I’d forgotten everything,” he recalled. “Forgotten acting, forgotten what the who
le thing was about. I felt I couldn’t do it anymore.” At four o’clock in the morning, wild with anxiety, he called Ford to his hotel room.

  “You in any trouble?” the director said calmly. Montgomery told him he was quitting, that he never should have agreed to make the film, and that Ford would have to find another actor.

  Ford listened to him, then asked him how he would feel about just taking a PT out in the water by himself—no cameras, no film crew. Montgomery said he thought he could do it.

  Good, said Ford. “Take the boats. Play with them. When you’re ready to start, we’ll start. It may be three days, it may be three weeks, or three months. We’ll wait till you’re ready.”

  Ford was as good as his word. The next day, Montgomery took off for a ride; the day after, he did the same thing, “and got used to command again” while Ford and his crew waited. “At lunchtime on the third day,” he said, “I suddenly felt it. I walked over to Ford and I said ‘Shoot!’ And we started.”

  Ford had intense sympathy for Montgomery and his rough readjustment; as they began to work, he stripped down the actor’s dialogue, often reducing long speeches to just a few lines and allowing Montgomery to draw on his military experience and shape a strong and convincing performance by playing Brickley as a terse, watchful, quiet commander. “Bob Montgomery was his pet on that picture,” Wayne said. “He could do no wrong. I guess it was because he had been in the Navy. Jack picked on me all the way through it.”

  Wayne had virtually worshipped Ford, whom he called “Coach,” since the director had first taken him under his wing a decade earlier. But the two men got off on the wrong foot almost immediately, when they were filming a shot in which an airplane strafes a PT boat being captained by Rusty Ryan. A prop man was throwing metal ball bearings meant to simulate bullets at the boat’s windshield, but, Wayne recalled, he “had forgotten to replace the windshield with a non-breakable Plexiglas one.” As the cameras rolled, “real glass went flying into my face. In a rage I grabbed a hammer and went after the guy. But Jack stepped in front of me and said, ‘No you don’t. They’re my crew.’”

  “Your crew?!” said Wayne. “Goddamnit, they’re my eyes!”

  Not long after that, Ford went too far. He was shooting one of the script’s first scenes, in which an admiral disdainfully inspects the fleet of PT boats led by Brickley and Ryan and dismisses the idea that they could be of any use in the war, then walks off. The set was filled with dozens of extras playing navy men, but the shot didn’t require much work from Wayne or Montgomery aside from their salutes to the actor playing the admiral. Ford filmed a first take, then, without any instruction to either of the two stars, asked for a second one. When he asked for a third, Wayne murmured to Montgomery, who was standing next to him, “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Duke!” Ford yelled to Wayne in front of the extras and crew. “Can’t you manage a salute that at least looks like you’ve been in the service?”

  That was it for Wayne. Without a word, he walked off the set and returned to his hotel room. Shooting was done for the day. Montgomery had already observed what he called a complicated “father and son” tension between his director and his costar, and now saw that it was out of control. After Wayne left, he walked over to Ford. “I put my hands on the arms of his chair and leaned over and said, ‘Don’t you ever speak like that to anyone again.’” Ford at first denied that he knew what Montgomery was talking about. “I know you’re doing this for my benefit,” said Montgomery quietly, “but it’s not amusing and I don’t like it.” He told Ford he would have to apologize to Wayne.

  Ford at first blustered, then said he never meant to hurt Wayne’s feelings, and finally started to cry. He soon made up with Wayne, and, as a way of apologizing, even added a scene to the script that gave the actor one of his strongest moments in the movie, in which, after two of his men die, Rusty recites Robert Louis Stevenson’s eight-line epitaph for himself, ending with “Home is the sailor, home from the sea / And the hunter home from the hill.”

  The rest of the filming of They Were Expendable proceeded smoothly; Ford and both of his stars had all now experienced low moments on the set, after which they were able to work together with a kind of sober focus that is evident onscreen. “Jack was awfully intense on that picture,” said Wayne, “and working with more concentration than I had ever seen. I think he was really out to achieve something.”

  After several weeks of location shooting, Ford and his cast and crew returned to Los Angeles to finish They Were Expendable on the MGM lot. Shortly before production was scheduled to end, Montgomery and Wayne were on a soundstage to shoot close-ups that Ford intended to cut into battle sequences that he had already filmed. Ford was standing on a camera platform several feet above them adjusting the lighting when he stumbled backward, lost his footing, and fell into the darkness.

  “Jesus Christ, you clumsy bastard!” Wayne yelled, not realizing how far he had fallen. When the two actors ran behind the platform to help him, Ford was lying on the ground. He had broken his right leg below the knee.

  “He wouldn’t let anyone else touch him,” said Montgomery. “We lifted him onto a stretcher and took him to [the] hospital.” As the two men rode up in the elevator with Ford, he locked eyes with a woman who wouldn’t stop staring at him. Finally, he barked, “Alcoholic!” It is not clear whether he was referring to her or to himself.

  Ford was told he would have to spend the next three weeks in traction. The next day, Wayne and Montgomery were visiting him when the telephone rang. It was MGM’s general manager Eddie Mannix, wanting to know when Ford thought he’d be well enough to resume production.

  “I’m not coming back,” Ford told him. “I’m staying here and getting my leg right. Then I’m going back to the Navy. Montgomery’ll finish the picture.”

  It was “the first I heard of it,” Montgomery said, adding that “by that time I felt so in tune with the way Jack thought and felt that it didn’t seem difficult. I just tried to imagine how he’d have done it.” The actor spent the next two weeks shooting the close-ups and insert shots that had already been mapped out and scheduled, but Ford came back against his doctor’s orders to film the movie’s downbeat final scene himself.

  The end of They Were Expendable sums up all of Ford’s feelings about the conflict between a private code of ethics and a larger sense of responsibility. The scene portrays a hollow victory for Brickley and Ryan: Thanks to their heroism and the bravery of their men, many of whom have been killed, the brass now believes in the value of the PT boats. With the Philippines about to fall, the navy pulls the two men out of the Pacific and orders them to Washington to oversee the building of more PTs, putting them on the last plane out and forcing them to separate from their men, who look unlikely to get out unharmed. “That makes a fine pair of heels out of us,” mutters Brickley. But when Ryan tries to bolt from the plane just before it takes off so he can stay with his men, Brickley sternly pulls him back. “Who you working for—yourself?” he snaps. “We’re going home to do a job—and that job is to get ready to come back.” The darker resonance of the scene is unmistakable: One of the costs of war is that both men—and the handful of other officers going home—will have to live with the nagging fear that they could have, or should have, done more. In the picture’s last minutes, their commander tells Brickley and Ryan to bring a message to the War Department: “When you see the general, tell him the end here is near. If he should ask you what we want, tell him a navy task force, a tanker loaded with gasoline, and 100,000 men. Give me that and we can start taking the islands back.” Brickley and Ryan salute him. This time, no additional takes were necessary. Ford took the film to the editing room. He had two months to complete it before he was due back in Washington.

  Around the time that Ford started to shoot They Were Expendable, William Wyler returned to Italy to finish Thunderbolt. Before dropping the film and taking a long detour to Mulhouse, he had shot enough footage of P-47s so that John Sturges and writer
Lester Koenig, who had been working with him on the movie, could pull together a preliminary narration script. But he couldn’t shake the sense that he had failed to crack the material the way he had on Memphis Belle, and his suspicions were confirmed when he saw the draft Koenig and Sturges had roughed out.

  When he started working on Thunderbolt, Wyler had been determined to avoid turning it into the start-to-finish story of a single bombing run. He hadn’t wanted to repeat the idea he used in Memphis Belle, and he knew that since he wasn’t up in the air in the P-47s himself, he wouldn’t be able to create a story about the experience of flying a mission that was as personal and rich in detail as he had in the previous movie. But Koenig and Sturges had, he felt, gone too far in the other direction. “You minimize the mission,” he complained to them in a long set of notes attached to their proposed draft. “A. You don’t give it enough buildup. B. You don’t give it enough in drama, i.e., you spread it. C. You follow it up with lots of unexciting anti-climax.”

  Wyler was now willing to forget his earlier reservations about reusing the structure of Memphis Belle; the army wanted the movie done quickly, and there was no time to find a fresh way to tell the story. “You’ve got to make the mission the Big Thing,” he wrote. “This outline gives the impression that the Mission is merely one among many picayune little sorties. Pedestrian warfare. Maybe it is. But for the movie, it should be life-or-death crucial. For my money—give everything to the destruction of the enemy . . . and then finish quick.”

  Sturges, in response, told Wyler that what they really needed was the kind of aerial footage that they hadn’t been able to obtain by screwing stationary unmanned cameras into position aboard the P-47s. They had placed Eyemos in cockpits, under wings, and in the tails of the Thunderbolts, and rigged them so that all it took to operate them were two buttons, one marked “Start” and one marked “Stop.” But some of the men aboard the fighter-bombers didn’t want to have to bother operating cameras while they were in the air, others thought their mere presence on a plane was bad luck, and others simply forgot to use them in the heat of the moment. Wyler and his team had compensated for the lack of good footage every way they knew how; they had even driven into the north of Italy, chasing the planes to the planned targets of their strikes so that they could get usable film of how effective the P-47s were from the ground, if not the air. But nothing they got was good enough to make the picture work.