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

by Mark Harris

  In the press, much of the coverage of veterans tended toward lurid examples of what the historian Joseph Goulden called “the War-Crazed Veteran theory . . . the following [headlines] were not atypical: ‘Veteran Beheads Wife with Jungle Machete,’ ‘Ex-Marine Held in Rape Murder,’ ‘Sailor Son Shoots Father.’” Huston wanted to counteract the crime stories that seemed to be transfixing the public with a set of case studies that would be grounded in compassion. He had plenty of men from whom to choose. Even in the last months of 1945, Mason General was crowded to capacity. During the war, one out of every five U.S. soldiers who was listed as a casualty required psychiatric treatment, and at Mason alone, 150 new patients were still being admitted every week for a therapy regimen that would typically last two months. Huston’s plans to shoot the documentary there had already made headlines, and the hospital accorded him and his crew VIP treatment, allowing them virtually unlimited access to doctors and patients. He filmed the soldiers—“human salvage,” he wrote, “the final result of all that metal and fire could do to violate human flesh”—as they were wheeled into the hospital by nurses, and the tough but empathetic language he used to describe them was in some ways autobiographical. His characterization of the men who were hospitalized at Mason as “casualties of the spirit . . . born and bred in peace, educated to hate war, they were overnight plunged into sudden and terrible situations” was not far removed from his description of himself as “someone raised in conventional America—taught to abhor violence and believe that killing was a mortal sin” who, after what he had seen in Italy, felt he was “living in a dead man’s world.”

  At Mason, each patient’s course of treatment was determined by an intake interview conducted by a psychiatrist in a tiny room. The new arrivals were informed that they would be filmed and told not to be alarmed by the presence of three cameras positioned at different angles (the space was too small to accommodate cameramen, so the filming was done automatically). Huston shot dozens of the interviews, then assembled them into a troubling and intimate sequence that would form the first part of his film. A thin-voiced soldier, playing with his hands and never making eye contact, talks about a shot comrade “clawing at my feet . . . he was the last one of the original boys with me.” A soft-spoken black GI insists he’s “doing well” but then admits that he has been suffering from “crying spells” and breaks down, unable to continue. A soldier who can barely speak above a whisper says that after his brother was killed at Guadalcanal, he “just didn’t feel like living,” and would start shooting wildly into the night every time he was on sentry duty. There are men with terrible twitches, men with nervous laughs, men so lost they can barely form sentences. Hollywood had begun to explore psychiatric practice and mental illness, but dramatic films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound generally treated therapy with a combination of fascination, suspicion, and naiveté. What Huston was now cataloging was revelatory—the devastation of healthy men turned into hopeless lost souls telling their stories in voices that were virtually drained of feeling. No American soldiers like them had been seen in any fact or fiction film about the war.

  Some of the hospital staff feared that Huston’s portrait of the toll the war had taken on America’s men would overshadow any positive message the film contained about therapy and rehabilitation. They suspected that audiences would remember only the stricken faces, not the successful cures, and that the war would come to be viewed not as a victory but, in the words of one reporter covering the movie, a “monstrous subnormal thing which can twist good-looking high-school boys into shivering, frightened wrecks.” Huston wanted the patients “to act like cry-babies,” insisted one indignant psychiatrist at Mason. “He wanted to sentimentalize how the poor boys suffered. I didn’t feel comfortable about the way he conveyed the feeling . . . that we had a lot of weak-willed namby-pambies.” Huston ignored their objections, and he had the men he was filming on his side. As they became used to the cameras and started to get better, they would playfully drape the director’s chair with toilet paper; at one point, they hung a sign reading “Hollywood and Vine” in their ward. The extra attention they were getting proved beneficial; the recovery rate of the seventy-five men Huston and his crew followed was the highest in the hospital.

  If Huston’s filming of the intake interviews was raw and unvarnished, his depiction of psychiatric practice was so credulous as to be misleading; he focused almost exclusively on the rare phenomenon of the quick fix. Huston chose to highlight improvements in what was then known as “battle neurosis” that were so instant and drastic they could actually be captured in a minute or two of film. In the picture, one patient with apparently intractable amnesia suddenly recovers his memory while under hypnosis. Another needs just one injection to regain his power of speech (“Oh God, I can talk! Listen, I can talk!”). Another, suffering from hysterical paralysis, abruptly stands up and moves around the room in a sodium-amytal-induced dream state immediately after a psychiatrist tells him, “You’re gonna get right up and walk.” (More persuasive are the scenes of “group therapy”—really lectures—in which two dozen patients at a time are told by an army psychiatrist, “You have nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of. Your time in the service has not been entirely wasted.”)

  Huston admitted that he highlighted only the most dramatic cases. “Certainly you can’t expect to reach an original trauma, the original cause of neurosis, in six weeks’ time,” he said, “but I think it is fairly true that these men were put back into as good shape as they were when they came in [to the war].” He insisted that, contrary to their appearance, the miracle-cure scenes were not fabricated, and no evidence has ever turned up to contradict him; in contrast to San Pietro, this film begins with an onscreen title asserting that no scenes were staged.

  After shooting was completed, Huston holed up in Astoria, working on the first cut of the movie. He was not averse to using Hollywood techniques, from dramatic crosscutting to an ominous, thrumming musical score, to make his points, and he ended the picture with a contrivance that was likely arranged for his benefit: a baseball game played on the grounds of Mason General in which the men he followed, now at the end of their treatment, are shown to have been transformed back into energetic, cooperative team members. When he was making San Pietro, Huston had been forbidden by the army to juxtapose images of dead American soldiers with voice-overs of them talking hopefully about their futures. But for the last scene of what he was now calling Let There Be Light, he revived and reversed the technique: As the patients were throwing strikes, catching fly balls, and rounding the bases, he overdubbed their inconsolable, timid initial intake interviews to emphasize how far they had come.

  To please the army, Huston ended his picture with an image of healthy men looking forward to productive employment as civilians. Nowhere in the film is there any suggestion of untreatable problems, or even of the reality of fitful rather than immediate progress. But whatever he overemphasized, omitted, or exaggerated for effect, Huston finished his time at Mason General feeling that he had made an honest movie about a private hardship afflicting tens of thousands of veterans. He knew that he had done his job without either sweeping the plight of the mentally ill under the rug or exploiting it for shock value. And in doing so, he had finally started to regain his own bearings. “For some reason, to see a psyche torn asunder is more frightening than to see people who have physical wounds,” he later said. His months of filming were “an extraordinary experience—almost a religious experience.” He left Astoria believing that his third and final documentary for the army would send him back to civilian life on a high note.

  • • •

  On September 29, 1945, John Ford’s time in the navy officially ended. He had served for four years and three weeks, longer than anyone else in Hollywood, and his final Officer Fitness report praised the “superb accomplishments” of Field Photo and cited his “outstanding ability, his devotion to duty, and”—somewhat unusually—“his loyalty to and love for his subordi
nates.” Ford had been as good as his word; as soon as his leg had mended, he returned to Washington, D.C., where he spent his final weeks of active duty in communication with George Stevens. Stevens was still in Europe, traveling between London and Berlin and working hard to compile footage for Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps and The Nazi Plan, the two documentaries that were to be entered into evidence that fall at Nuremberg. Ford assigned the few remaining staffers in Field Photo to help him from Washington in any way they could; his division had over the years come into possession of a wealth of filmed Nazi propaganda and newsreels, and he had Robert Parrish search the navy’s archives for images that could be used to demonstrate a long-standing pattern of intentional abuse in the camps over the last decade. He had any footage that might be of value flown to Europe, where Stevens quickly culled fourteen hours of film down to one.

  Ford planned to fulfill his contractual commitment to Fox by shooting the western My Darling Clementine in early 1946. But when Zanuck offered him the chance to extend their relationship with what would have been the richest deal for any director in Hollywood—$600,000 per year to make movies for Fox—Ford said no. Like many directors and actors returning from the war, he was through with studio servitude. Just as Capra was doing, Ford would now work independently, choosing and producing his own movies and then selling them to studios, a move he had been considering even before Pearl Harbor. With former studio executive Merian Cooper, a longtime friend who had just come out of the air force, Ford made plans to form his own company.

  As the Nuremberg trials neared, Ford hesitated one last time before leaving the war behind, and considered traveling to Germany to make a feature-length documentary about the proceedings. The pursuit of war criminals was a subject of increasingly intense public interest and was already being processed into entertainment. The Stranger, the suspense script that Huston had written pseudonymously a year earlier in which he presciently anticipated what he called an “Allied War Crimes Commission” and toyed with the idea that fleeing Nazis might try to hide in plain sight in America, was about to start shooting with Orson Welles as both director and star. But Ford ultimately decided not to attend the trials, feeling that a documentary might impede the normalization of relations between the United States and what would, in a few years, be known as West Germany.

  Besides, Ford knew that any filmmaker’s attempt at a documentary might be preempted by the work that his colleague was doing. Months after the end of the war, Stevens was still on active duty, and virtually single-minded in his purpose. He no longer considered himself “retired” from movies; that fall, while in Germany, he started to read, for the first time in twenty years, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and to make some notes about how it might be adapted as a film. It had been two and a half years since he had completed his last feature, The More the Merrier, for Columbia, and when Harry Cohn came to Paris, he asked Stevens to sit down with him at the Ritz Bar and talk about his plans. Stevens showed up unshaven and in a rumpled uniform.

  “You’re coming back to the studio,” he recalled Cohn saying in a tone that was poised halfway between a question and an answer. Stevens felt caught off guard; he hadn’t even thought about it. “He was seducing me by saying, ‘You want to come to work? You want a job when you get out of that suit?’ What could I say, no?” he recalled. “I guess I said yes. . . . I didn’t say ‘Of course’—that’s more definite than I would be in such a situation. I said yes.” Stevens still wasn’t sure when he would get home, but once that day came, he knew he was unlikely to return to Columbia; Capra had recently approached him to become the third directorial partner in Liberty Films, and Stevens, who greatly respected both Capra and Wyler, had all but decided to join them. Cohn went back to Hollywood, and when he learned of Stevens’s decision, it created “undying enmity” between the two men. Cohn was “the only guy ever to tell me I broke a contract,” said Stevens, who regretted having misled him, even briefly, for the rest of his life. The notoriously unlikable studio czar, a man for whom Stevens had made movies only on the condition that he could never visit one of his sets during production, “was just being sweet,” said the director. As a matter of conscience, he felt, “I should have come back [to] Columbia.”

  The Nuremberg trials began on November 20 in that city’s Palace of Justice. Eight of the twenty-one defendants who would eventually be tried sat in the dock under a spotlight. There were four judges, one from each of the major Allied powers, and four chief prosecutors, with a score of lawyers assisting them; a team of defense attorneys, most of them German; a large staff of simultaneous translators; and a packed crowd of reporters and observers from around the world. After what was widely described as an electrifying opening by the chief American prosecutor, Justice Jackson, the trial seemed to meander through the next week, bogging down in procedural motions and prosecutorial housekeeping. Then, on November 29, the hall was darkened and Stevens’s Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps was shown.

  The movie began with two sworn affidavits of authenticity, the first signed by Stevens and the second signed by Field Photo acting head Ray Kellogg and witnessed by Ford. Then the images took over. “The impression we get is an endless river of white bodies flowing across the screen, bodies with ribs sticking out through the chests, with pipe-stem legs and battered skulls and eyeless faces and grotesque thin arms reaching for the sky,” wrote one correspondent who was present that day. “On the screen there is no end to the bodies, tumbling bodies and bodies being shoved over cliffs into common graves and bodies pushed like dirt by giant bulldozers, and bodies that are not bodies at all but charred bits of bone and flesh lying upon a crematory grave.”

  Stevens had omitted nothing—from the vermin-infested bunkhouses to the thumbscrews to the gas chambers and ovens to the harvesting of gold from the teeth of the murdered to the lampshades made of human skin for the amusement of an officer’s wife. During the screening, the spotlight illuminating the defendants’ box had not been dimmed, and the journalists recorded every one of their reactions. Ribbentrop, Hitler’s minister of foreign affairs, covered his eyes but would then drop his hands, unable to prevent himself from looking. Wilhelm Keitel, the head of the Wehrmacht, turned bright red and started to wipe his eyes with a handkerchief. Julius Streicher, publisher of Der Stürmer, leaned forward and nodded as if in endorsement. And Goering remained expressionless, staring straight at the screen and betraying his nerves only by wiping his sweaty palms again and again. After the film ended, Rudolf Hess started to speak. “I don’t believe it,” he said, but Goering immediately hushed him. The defendants were “shattered,” said Telford Taylor, an army lawyer who was assisting Jackson. “Even for those who, like me, had had an earlier viewing, these pictures were hard to bear . . . the effect was stunning. Dr. [Victor] von der Lippe [a defense lawyer] recorded that the film would rob its viewers of sleep and that he heard one of the defense counsel say it had become intolerable to sit in the same room” with the men they were there to represent.

  Two weeks later, Stevens’s second evidentiary film, The Nazi Plan, was shown at the trial with narration that Budd Schulberg had written. It offered a history of German politics and aggression in two sections, the first covering the years 1921 to 1933, the second tracing Hitler’s rise and his war crimes. This time, the defendants, again spotlighted, reacted differently, bouncing their knees to the marching songs and appearing enthralled anew by the Nazi rallies, including those that had taken place in the very building that was now being used for their trial. As they watched Hitler speak at Zeppelin Field, Albert Speer beamed and Ribbentrop wept: “Couldn’t you just feel the force of the Führer’s personality?” he said that night. When the movie was finished, Goering turned to Hess in the box and said, “Justice Jackson will want to join the Party now!” But as the trial’s spectators stared at them, aghast, their jubilation dissipated. That night, an army psychiatrist who had been assigned to monitor the mental state of the defendants reported that most were “desp
ondent.” Stevens’s films had done what weeks of testimony had not: It had made their crimes irrefutable, and their fates inevitable.

  Stevens did not attend the trials. His work was finished. At the end of the year, he cabled Yvonne that he planned to sail for New York on RMS Queen Mary and would be home soon. It was a moment, John Huston said later, “when hopes ran higher for the world than I’ve ever known them to before or since. And I know George had that high sense of the fate of the world. He thought, with all the rest of us, that everything was going to be all right afterwards.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  “A Straight Face and a Painfully Maturing Mind”

  HOLLYWOOD, NEW YORK, AND WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 1945–MARCH 1946

  The war in the Pacific had been over for only four months when They Were Expendable started to open across the country, but time had already done its damage to the movie’s prospects. In December, critics greeted John Ford’s return to Hollywood filmmaking with respect that was tinged with a kind of detachment, as if they had been presented with a handcrafted curio from the past. War movies, as a genre, were now outmoded; a movie about the beginning of the war that stopped in 1942 felt arbitrary and mistimed; and a drama that took as its subject the nobility of American failure and the necessity of honoring the greater good by obeying shortsighted orders seemed almost defiantly out of step with the appetites of a battle-weary audience that was, after so many years, bored with the whole subject. The few war movies that did succeed in 1945 were either action-packed chronicles of victory or escapist larks; the most popular sailor onscreen that year was Gene Kelly, a navy man without a care in the world, on joyous shore leave and dancing with Tom and Jerry in Anchors Aweigh.