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

by Mark Harris

  Wyler got his way, just as he had on Memphis Belle. He and John Sturges prepared a forty-three-minute cut and had it scored and processed. They completed the picture just as the Japanese army surrendered. When Wyler took the movie to Washington, D.C., to screen it for senior air force officers, after the lights came up, General H. H. Arnold looked around and said, “Is Willy here?” Wyler stood up.

  “Willy,” Arnold said, “what’s this picture for?”

  According to Sturges, “Willy was literally speechless. Maybe it was because of his hearing, but he didn’t say a word. He could have given fifty reasons why we made the picture. He knew them all. . . . Willy finally mumbled something. He was fumbling around. Arnold needed positive answers. He just walked out, and that was the end of that.”

  Wyler wouldn’t give up. He took Thunderbolt to the Hollywood trade press and tried to get them interested in covering it; a sympathetic journalist at the New York Times wrote, “Mr. Wyler doesn’t feel that his own readjustment to civilian life is complete, or that it will be until his last Army assignment, the production of a documentary about the operations of fighter-bombers, is released to theatres.” In Hollywood, he showed the film to colleagues and friends—James’s brother William Cagney, Lloyd Bridges—to try to get them talking about it. After his official separation from the army after thirty-eight months of service on October 31, he kept writing letters to anyone he thought might be able to get the film onto the big screen. Even his closest colleagues brushed him off. Sam Goldwyn told him that it was the “government’s problem” and claimed his hands were tied. The coordinator of the War Activities Committee, which was in the process of being dismantled, wrote Wyler to say, “It is too bad that this wonderful film could not have been made available closer to the date [on] which the events portrayed took place.” Wyler wrote back to say that he regretted it too; “the war ended sooner than expected,” he explained, “though I can’t express any regret over that.”

  He then turned back to the air force, imploring General Eaker to pay for one hundred copies of the film in the belief that free prints would be an offer too good for the studios to resist. “If you personally contacted the heads of the major companies with this proposal,” he told Eaker, “I don’t see how they can refuse—or I’ll be ashamed to be a member of the picture business.” But every studio had a different reason for declining: The film’s moment had passed; war documentaries were box-office poison; Wyler’s work was, of course, wonderful but the company’s marketing money was already committed to other pictures. Finally, he had to let it go. Thunderbolt would not be shown theatrically until late 1947, when the minor studio Monogram gave it a token release. By then, Wyler had to contextualize it for audiences by filming an introduction in which Jimmy Stewart referred to the events in the movie as “ancient history.”

  The polite but firm rejection of his work by all of the men he had known as colleagues rattled him. In 1942, Mrs. Miniver had made Wyler the toast of the American and British film industries; three years later, he was just another director returning from the war and discovering that the motion picture business had gone on without him and was in fact thriving. Wyler wasn’t sure where he stood anymore, and didn’t know how he was going to continue to direct unless his hearing improved, but he was eager to get back in the game. In July, he accepted an offer from Capra and Briskin to become a partner in Liberty, borrowing against his life insurance to put in the $150,000 that would purchase him a quarter of the company and the freedom to direct and produce movies of his own choosing for the next five years. Capra was still looking for a third director to join them, and he was also trying to make a studio distribution deal for the company’s films, but the delay suited Wyler, since he still owed Goldwyn one final movie.

  Goldwyn had a couple of projects in mind for him. One was a dramatized biography of Eisenhower, whose life rights the producer had been working to secure for months. Robert Sherwood, who had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama three times before leaving the theater to become a speechwriter for Roosevelt and the overseas director of the Office of War Information, had agreed to write an outline for the screenplay, and Goldwyn, who idolized Eisenhower, was passionate about the project. Wyler wasn’t; he declined an invitation to go and meet the general face-to-face. Nor was he interested when Goldwyn offered him The Bishop’s Wife, a family fantasy about an angel and the building of an Episcopal cathedral. Goldwyn wanted something big, bright, and popular from his star director. “[His] point was, ‘Come on now, the war’s over, let’s forget the war and do something funny or sexy,” said Wyler. But the director longed for something else. “I wish that I could go back [to Hollywood] quietly and make a small picture,” he said, “just to get the feel of things.” And even if he were given the chance, he wasn’t sure he could pull it off. “I’ve learned so much dealing with real people in very real roles of life,” he said, “that I dread the day when I have to get back to telling actors how to get into a plane or put on a hat.”

  “I was still full of the war,” said Wyler, “and although I was now out of it, I wanted to do something that had . . . to do with my experience.” Finally, he found a “small picture” that suited him. It was a property that Goldwyn already owned; he had bought the rights to the source material a year earlier and registered the title so no other producer or studio could use it. The Way Home was a simple story about men returning from the war. Wyler thought it was perfect for him. “I spent four years being one of those characters,” he said. It would be “the easiest picture I ever made.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “An Angry Past Commingled with the Future in a Storm”

  HOLLYWOOD, NEW YORK, AND GERMANY, 1945

  The story of The Best Years of Our Lives began long before William Wyler had any inkling he was going to make it. In July 1944, while he was still flying missions over Italy, a Time magazine correspondent half a world away was accompanying 370 members of the 1st Marine Division, all of whom had just returned from fighting in the Pacific, as they boarded a train in San Diego that would over the next several days slowly make its way east. The men had been granted thirty-day furloughs, and they called the train the “Home Again Special,” writing its name in chalk on the sides of the old Pullman cars. They talked enthusiastically about seeing their families and nervously about seeing their girls. They told war stories, and then they told stories about how everybody exaggerates when telling war stories. They bragged and they joked; at some stops they were given free beers, and at others townspeople assembled to cheer and wave flags. The closer the train got to its final destination, the more it emptied out, until the quiet moment when just a handful of marines were left, suddenly subdued, looking at the Manhattan skyline and nervously hoisting their duffel bags over their shoulders. After a week in their company, Time’s watchful reporter was able to capture some of the vulnerability beneath the bravado; the closer they got to home, the more the men seemed to turn back into boys—their average age was just twenty-one—and the more they began to wonder what they were coming back to and whether they would be accepted. “My stomach’s tied in knots,” admitted one GI. “I’m a little worried about how I’ll look to them,” said another. “About how much I’ve changed.”

  “The Way Home,” which was published just two months after the invasion of Normandy and a year before the end of the war, may have been little more than a snapshot, but it was one of the first pieces of national journalism to anticipate the emotional uncertainties that returning veterans might face. When Sam Goldwyn read it, he knew that the subject, if not the story itself, had the makings of a great movie, albeit probably not one that could be produced until the war was over. To write the script, he turned to Mackinlay Kantor, a novelist and screenwriter who had recently served as a war correspondent in London and had acquired a good deal of experience interviewing young GIs. He had since come to Los Angeles, and Goldwyn paid him $12,500 to create an original treatment, telling him, “Returning soldiers! Every family in America is pa
rt of this story. When they come home, what do they find? They don’t remember their wives, they’ve never seen their babies, some are wounded—they have to readjust.”

  Kantor began work that fall, keeping his pages to himself and holding off the inquiries of his eager producer. “The story is going along tolerably well,” he wrote to Goldwyn. “I have to date about 70 manuscript pages, but I believe that is about one half of the eventual length. Because of the unusual form in which this story is couched, I cannot estimate accurately exactly how long the completed draft will run.”

  When that draft was finally handed in, Goldwyn learned exactly what Kantor had meant by “unusual.” Instead of a treatment or a screenplay, he had written a 268-page novel in blank verse. Kantor’s Glory for Me tells the story of three returning vets—Al, a middle-aged officer who feels, for the first time, alienated from his family, his familiar desk job at a bank, and his comfortably upper-middle-class life; Fred, a hardened soldier haunted by the savagery of his time on the battlefield; and Homer, the very young victim of a brain injury that had rendered him, in the widely used parlance of the time, a spastic.

  Kantor’s narrative, which followed the three men back into their lives as civilians, charting their rough adjustments and small victories, was very much the template for The Best Years of Our Lives. But from its first sentence—“Fred Derry, twenty-one, and killer of a hundred men / Walked on the width of Welburn Field”—it was darker, grimmer, sadder, and more explicitly brutal than any movie of the time could have been. Homer is introduced as

  . . . a death—one piece of death

  Alive on its right side, and dying, jerking on its left

  It walked with pain and twisted muscles

  It was so young . . . it had a face without a beard . . . He went

  In as a child, as many went

  He came out as a monster.

  His homecoming is described as “an audience of horror on the porch”; “one thing about spasticity, you always seem to drool,” Kantor adds later. The rest of Glory for Me is at least as harsh, particularly in its depiction of war as both a sexual playground—it’s made clear that Fred slept with many women while in the service—and a sexual nightmare: Al is tormented by memories of child prostitutes.

  Even if the unfilmable elements of Kantor’s take on the material were to be eliminated, the hardbitten pessimism of Glory for Me was tonally closer to the budding genre of postwar noir than to the naturalistic, sympathetic drama that Goldwyn had in mind. At a low moment, Fred thinks about robbing the bank at which Al works; Fred’s wife is portrayed as a faithless slut; Homer considers suicide; Al tosses away his secure job to sell flowers. The narrative is defined by the interiority of their misery and the unbridgeable distance between them and the peacetime world. Kantor ends with his three protagonists just barely holding on to sanity and facing the possibility that they will never be free of the spectre of their war years. He bids them farewell by describing them as

  . . . a lost battalion, huddled close—

  The three who’d known destroying flame,

  And still perceived its blisters on their hide . . .

  They looked, they saw an angry past

  Commingled with the future in a storm.

  Goldwyn didn’t dislike Kantor’s unorthodox treatment, which he thought contained the skeleton of a workable film story, but he knew that he needed someone else to write the screenplay. In the spring of 1945, just as his Eisenhower project was falling apart, he sent Miriam Howell, a story editor in his New York office, to woo Robert Sherwood for the job. After they met, Howell sent a telegram to her boss telling him that the playwright was “very discouraging”; she had persuaded him to read the treatment, but Sherwood warned her that it was “unlikely he will be available at all but if he should it would be for only six to eight weeks. . . . He is still under call to government although on inactive status at present and also is anxious [to] start working on play for fall production hence his unwillingness [to] make commitment.”

  By the end of May, Goldwyn had gotten Sherwood to read the first half of Kantor’s poem. He gave his opinion of it to another of the company’s story editors, Pat Duggan: “He thinks [it] is excellent but unfortunately exactly [the] type of assignment he does not wish to do at this time.” Sherwood particularly disliked Kantor’s use of spasticity, which he thought would be impossible for an actor to depict with any accuracy. Goldwyn told him he could simply get rid of the character, but for every concession the producer made, Sherwood found more reasons to say no. He was too busy with his play. He couldn’t find the right approach to the story. He didn’t want to let the Eisenhower project go, even though it seemed increasingly unlikely that it would be made.

  His excuses masked a deeper objection: Sherwood was offended by Glory for Me’s assertion that an ugly divide had opened up between damaged soldiers and an uncaring home front. According to Duggan, he complained about the “criticisms of civilians in the book and disagreed with the idea that all returning soldiers were maladjusted.” Furthermore, he felt the book—which was about to be published as a novel—“was going to be well established and successful, and he didn’t want to be responsible for doing a typical Hollywood trick of softening a good property. . . . He said he would like to have written this story from the beginning because he would have written a story of these guys returning to a town and expecting the civilians to be cruel and unaware of what they had been through, only to discover that they had an agreement and an adjustment between them and a future together.” Sherwood had spent the last several years in the Roosevelt administration trying to shape public opinion, and he couldn’t imagine writing a movie that suggested that the country, having united for war, was now about to mishandle its aftermath.

  Goldwyn thought that a top-tier director might induce Sherwood to try his hand at a draft, and he had one in mind: John Ford. In July, while Ford was still waiting for his broken leg to heal completely, Goldwyn sent him a copy of Glory for Me, with a note that read, “I’m very excited about it and I believe you will be too.” Ford turned him down. Having finished his own war movie, They Were Expendable, he was about to return to active duty in Washington for two months; after that, he owed his next picture to Zanuck.

  Goldwyn kept working on Sherwood, and told him he could change Glory for Me into anything he wanted it to be. On August 14, 1945, after months of wooing, Sherwood finally reluctantly signed a contract to write the screenplay. He lasted just two weeks before telling Goldwyn that taking the assignment had been a huge mistake and that they should abandon the whole project. “This is entirely due to the conviction that, by next spring or fall, this subject will be terribly out of date,” he wrote. The film would be “doomed to miss the bus,” and would probably succeed only in sparking resentment among veterans that the “small minority . . . afflicted with war neuroses” was getting so much attention.

  Goldwyn reminded Sherwood that “there will be several million men coming home next year,” and told him that “to release a picture at that time presenting their problems seems to me to be hitting it right on the nose.” But by then, the project had a new and more persuasive champion. Wyler had told Goldwyn that he was eager to direct it, and it was his encouragement as much as Goldwyn’s that kept the development of the script moving forward. Sherwood was moved by Wyler’s argument that the film could potentially “prevent a lot of heartaches and even tragedies among servicemen who were confronting demobilization and return to civilian life.” And Wyler was sympathetic to Sherwood’s desire for the movie to carry a message that, in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, “the whole country and the whole world face the necessity of finding a way to live at peace with each other.” He told the reluctant playwright to take a breath and start from scratch on a more optimistic version of Kantor’s story.

  Before long, Sherwood had completed a two-hundred-page draft. He flew from New York to Los Angeles to stay in a cottage on Goldwyn’s estate while he and Wyler worked on revisions.
As they collaborated, The Best Years of Our Lives gradually evolved into Wyler’s own story. He openly identified with Al, the family man who gives up the comfort of success to go into the military and then comes back only to realize that, as Wyler put it, “no man can walk right into the house after two or three years and pick up his life as before.” But Sherwood infused all three of his main characters with aspects of Wyler’s own experiences: The anger that had almost gotten him court-martialed after he threw a punch at an anti-Semite was given life in the pugnacious, hard-bitten Fred, and Homer became a repository for all of the director’s anguish about living with a disability. “I explained all my own fears and problems to Bob Sherwood,” he said, “and he worked them in just the way I wanted them.” At the end of their time at Goldwyn’s house, Sherwood almost gave up again, saying, “I just can’t get this story—something blocks me.” But by the next morning, he had had a breakthrough: He had decided that the three men, as different as they were, should become comrades and weave in and out of one another’s narratives as they collectively discover their paths to renewed hope. He sat down with Goldwyn at the breakfast table and, scene by scene, told him exactly what The Best Years of Our Lives was going to be.

  • • •

  The plight of the returning veteran was at that moment perhaps the most avidly discussed domestic issue in the country; the question of how to resume a normal life, and what exactly “normal” meant, opened up other subjects—from spousal abuse to mental illness—that finally had room to be aired now that the war was over. As Wyler and Sherwood worked on their script, John Huston began to explore the same issues in his documentary, immersing himself in life at Mason General Hospital, where he filmed for three months and eventually amassed more than seventy hours of footage. He would shoot all day, then at night start to sketch out a script for narration that would eventually be spoken by his father. “The guns are quiet now, the papers of peace have been signed, and the oceans of the earth are filled with ships coming home,” Huston’s screenplay began. “In faraway places, men dreamed of this moment—but for some men the moment is very different from the dream.”