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

by Mark Harris

  MGM knew the movie faced a hard road; a long picture that ended with its two protagonists flying back to the United States, leaving their troops to face what everyone knew would be either death or capture in the Philippines, would be virtually impossible to market honestly. Ford had insisted that They Were Expendable end where it did, but MGM did demand a final title card—“We Shall Return”—as “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” played. In later years, Ford all but disowned the picture, telling the director Lindsay Anderson in 1950, “I just can’t believe that film’s any good. . . . I was ordered to do it. I wouldn’t have done it at all if they hadn’t agreed to make over my salary to the men in my unit.” He also claimed that MGM “cut the only bits I liked,” and contended that he “was horrified to make it. . . . I didn’t put a goddamned thing into that picture.” But in truth, Ford had closely supervised the movie’s postproduction, even bringing his twenty-two-year-old daughter into the editing room as an apprentice, and the finished product was in almost every particular the picture he wanted it to be. He lost a few small battles—the cacophony of voices that the script had included questioning whether Pearl Harbor had caught the navy napping was omitted from the final cut, as was his and Wead’s original idea for the final scene, in which Robert Montgomery’s Brickley was to read out an angry roll call of the names of the “expendable” men who were staying behind. But Ford won most of the big victories, including over the film’s length—They Were Expendable was released at a deliberately paced 135 minutes, a running time that even he admitted was a half hour longer than he had imagined when he shot the picture.

  The promotional materials MGM released to the press were unflaggingly upbeat. Trade ads featured big pictures of a beaming Montgomery, Wayne, and costar Donna Reed with the words, “Big Smile! (Because they just finished a big picture),” and emphasized the fact that the film had been made by war heroes: “Robert Montgomery (don’t you feel like shaking his hand and saying: ‘Welcome home, Bob!’) plays ‘Brick.’ He’s in love with a couple of tons of wood and steel, a PT boat.” Local newspapers were sent human interest featurettes with headlines like “Montgomery Role Parallel to Own Navy Experience” and “Veterans Given Priority for Extra Roles”; MGM also provided what it called “prepared reviews” which claimed that “the picture owes much of its distinction to the brilliant direction of Capt. John Ford, himself a veteran of Navy action.”

  Actual critics, though not dismissive, were somewhat more subdued in their praise; they admired They Were Expendable’s low-key style and its attempt at a kind of near-documentary realism in depicting the small details of navy life, but few were moved to passionate endorsement. “If this film had been released last year—or the year before—it would have been a ringing smash,” Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times. “Now, with the war concluded and the burning thirst for vengeance somewhat cooled, it comes as a cinematic postscript to the martial heat and passion of the last four years . . . a moving remembrance of things past.” Time magazine was more blunt, calling it “long and late” but expressing admiration for the fact that Ford’s actors “always seem to be more like themselves—or at least more like human beings—than they are in any other picture.” And Variety predicted that “regardless of any actual or supposed reaction against war films, this one is virtually certain to go over big.”

  That proved to be too optimistic. While grosses around the world were enough to cover the movie’s $3 million budget, its performance fell short of both the studio’s and Ford’s hopes. For many moviegoers, They Were Expendable faded from memory quickly; in his initial review, James Agee called it “so beautiful and so real that I could not feel one foot of the film was wasted,” even though for much of its length “all you have to watch is men getting on or off PT boats, and other men watching them do so.” But just two weeks later, revisiting his feelings, he admitted that his ardor had cooled; he now found Ford’s movie “visually beautiful, otherwise not very interesting” and compared it unfavorably to Huston’s San Pietro as well as to another treatment of the campaign in Italy, the tough and dynamic picture that Wings director William Wellman had made out of The Story of G.I. Joe. MGM had touted Expendable as its “picture of the year,” but when the Academy Award nominations were announced in February, for the first time in six years none of the Best Picture nominees was war-related, and Ford’s movie was recognized only for its visual effects and its sound recording.

  For Ford, an honorable defeat was, in a way, the apt coda to a journey through the war that had begun with a prescient commitment to service more than a year before Pearl Harbor and had ended with a drunken collapse on the coast of France. Although he would shortly resume a robust and prolific career behind the camera as a civilian, there was no avoiding the fact that the years in Field Photo had drained him of some of the vigor that had allowed him to make seven films in three years before the war. When he had left Hollywood in 1941, his children Barbara and Pat were still teenagers; four years later, he had come back to his family and their home on Odin Street with hair that was going white, a bad eye, and ten missing teeth, a grandfather of two who had earned the nickname that many of his colleagues would use for the rest of his career, the “Old Man.”

  After his discharge, Ford found a kind of relief in being home with Mary. The Hollywood Canteen, which had filled her time and satisfied her hearty appetite for gossip and political machinations during the years of her husband’s absence, had closed in November, having fulfilled its wartime mission to serve and hearten the troops. For the first long stretch in memory, the Fords had time on their hands, and time for each other. But his transition into domestic life, which had never been an area in which he excelled, was not easy. He mourned the young men in Field Photo who had been killed in action and devoted himself to writing long and emotional letters to their parents and survivors. He grieved to learn that Jack Mackenzie, the cameraman who had served alongside him at Midway and whom Ford had sent to the Oscars to collect the award for December 7th in his place, had come home safely only to die at twenty-seven in a jeep accident on a Hollywood road not far from the Fords’ home. At times, he seemed to find his own record of service wanting in comparison to those who had risked more than he had. Robert Parrish, who had admired Ford while serving under him in Field Photo, pulled away after the war; he felt that his mentor couldn’t let go of the navy, and that his founding of the Farm was part of a desire “to extend his OSS–U.S. Navy unit into civilian life,” to build a kind of fantasy barracks that could serve as a sanctuary from women, responsibility, and sobriety.

  Ford still yearned for commemoration—for the medals and honors and recognitions that would tell him his time away had meant something. But by degrees, he let go of the war by finding other ways to preserve his own experience of it. In 1946, he rejoined the Screen Directors Guild, volunteering to serve on its Veterans Committee alongside Capra and Wyler. And later in the year, when he heard from the Office of the Bureau of Archives in Washington that it was short on space and might have to destroy all unused footage from propaganda films made during the war, he intervened with a plea to protect just one movie—not his own, but Gregg Toland’s long version of December 7th, which had never been shown publicly. “As this is the picture which some of my men risked their lives to make,” he wrote to the bureau, “it has great value to us. We would like to preserve it for sentimental reasons at the Field Photo Memorial Home. . . . I sincerely hope this picture can be turned over to us.” It was.

  In his final Qualifications Questionnaire, a form that naval officers had to fill out annually, Ford attempted to summarize his own service for the first of what would be countless times over the next twenty-five years. He had, he noted, commanded as few as fifty and (one last time, he could not resist exaggerating) as many as a thousand men. “I was instrumental in establishing the procedure of naval & military photography during late war as head of field photo branch O.S.S.,” he wrote. “The first combat film ‘Battle of Midway’ personally s
hot by me set the pace for all similar films.” And he made it clear that, at fifty-one, he didn’t yet feel his service had to be over. “More than anxious to return to active duty in case of an emergency,” he wrote. “I am sure I would be of value to the effort with my knowledge of Motion Pictures.”

  • • •

  On February 13, 1946, John Huston went to the army base at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, and received his official notice of separation after forty-five months of service. He then drove straight to his tailor in Manhattan, where he picked up three suits that had been waiting for him. No filmmaker was happier to get out of uniform. Unlike Ford, Huston had no affection whatsoever for military trappings or hunger for decoration; he had hated army clothes from the first weeks he spent sweating through them in a Washington office, and after that day, he never wanted to put on the uniform again. When he changed into his new suit, it was, he wrote, “like dressing for a costume party.”

  For Huston, the discharge was largely a formality. Since finishing Let There Be Light at the end of the year, he had been living like a civilian in New York City, making the rounds of parties and nightclubs and looking ahead to the resumption of his career at Warner Bros. But before returning to Hollywood, he intended to see his last work for the army through to its general release. In January, the Museum of Modern Art had selected his film for inclusion in a large-scale festival of documentaries that was to unfold over the following six months; Huston had attended the cocktail party at which the planned April showing of his picture was announced. Let There Be Light was to be one of the museum’s spotlight attractions that spring; it was already getting a good deal of attention from journalists who were treating it not as yet another piece of army propaganda but as a major new film by a celebrated young director that promised to explore a previously verboten subject. In the fall, stills from the movie had appeared in Life magazine, which used them to illustrate an article by John Hersey about mentally ill veterans.

  On his first day as a civilian, Huston left New York for Washington to take care of a final army formality; he brought a print of Let There Be Light to the leadership of the Army Pictorial Service and the Bureau of Public Relations, which needed to screen the picture before it could be cleared for general release. A week later, the APS issued its approval.

  But in early March, with no warning, that order was reversed. Huston was told that the film could be shown only to men in army psychiatric hospitals, Veterans Administration and navy facilities, and army libraries. The problem seemed easy to rectify: The musical score, which he had stitched together from various Hollywood movies, had been licensed for army use only, not for theatrical release. Huston was slightly taken aback by the news; he had already begun to shift his attention to the preparation of a screenplay for his next film, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and he hadn’t planned on being pulled back into the miasma of army memos, rulings, and technicalities, but altering the score would be only a brief disruption.

  Huston did not even have a chance to return to the editing room before the army came back at him with the news that Let There Be Light had more serious problems. The Pictorial Service had decided to reexamine the waivers that had been signed by the patients of Mason General allowing their images to be used and concluded that the permissions they had granted were only “in furtherance of the war effort. . . . Since the [war] is terminated,” an army memo stated, “it is difficult to see how distribution of this film to the public at large or to groups other than military would be permissible.” Moreover, a theatrical release would constitute “an invasion of the right of privacy” of the men who appeared in it.

  Huston had won his tangles with the army over Report from the Aleutians and San Pietro, but this was different: He knew that Let There Be Light was now in real trouble, and the succession of unrelated pretexts he had been given signaled to him that one way or another, the military was going to find a way to suppress the movie. The only leverage he had was that a print of the film remained in his possession, and he immediately started to show Let There Be Light to colleagues in Hollywood in order to rally their support, telling them that “the Army Bureau of Public Relations (those old obstructionists) have, for some reason, given it a ‘secret’ classification” and that the only hope of reversing it would be to make the movie “a cause celeb like the ‘A’ bomb, Colonel Roosevelt’s dog,* and Winnie’s next speech.” He also lobbied officials in the Truman administration whom he thought would be sympathetic, but when he appealed to William C. Menninger, the surgeon general, the response he received was discouraging. “I still feel that it is the best picture of psychiatry that I have ever seen,” Menninger told him. “There are, however, some very grave questions about it. . . . Anyone with legal experience knows that a patient in a psychiatric hospital who signed . . . a release is going through the motions. The paper he signs is really worthless and I think it would necessitate a statement from each of these men after they had recovered and left the hospital.” In addition, Menninger told Huston that unless the men in Let There Be Light agreed to the film’s release after they had been shown the movie, the ban would have to stand.

  The army almost immediately appropriated Menninger’s argument, adding that it had examined its own records and could not even find signed consent forms from four of the patients in the film. Huston went back to the army’s editing facility in Astoria on a hunt for the missing documents that he suspected would be fruitless, since he believed that the army had already made sure they could not be found. He was furious but virtually powerless: If privacy and competency were issues for the subjects of the film, he asked, why had the army commissioned him to make Let There Be Light in the first place? Why had the Bureau of Public Relations granted permission to both Life and Harper’s Bazaar to use images from the movie in which the soldiers’ faces were clear? And why had the question of missing consent forms been raised only after the army had tried two other grounds for objection?

  Huston wrote back to Menninger arguing that the movie could “dispel prejudice on the part of the public against service men with a psycho-neurotic history” and that, having spent $150,000 on Let There Be Light already, the Signal Corps would do well to offer up a few thousand dollars more in order to obtain all necessary clearances. Menninger forwarded his appeal to the assistant secretary of war, but to no avail. In late April, shortly before a showing of the movie that Huston had arranged for friends and a couple of sympathetic journalists, military policemen arrived at the Museum of Modern Art and seized the print. The museum had no choice but to announce that Let There Be Light had been withdrawn from the documentary festival; it would be replaced by a British short called Psychiatry in Action!

  Only a couple of critics had seen the film at that point; one was Archer Winsten, the movie reviewer and columnist for the New York Post. Huston telegrammed him with a plea to “raise your voice . . . shoot the works if you so desire,” and Winsten obliged, reporting on the dramatic seizure of the print and excoriating those who wanted to suppress it: “The Army,” he wrote, “having shrunk to its unleavened core of pre-war top executives, is re-embarking upon a do-nothing, say-nothing, think-nothing policy” at the expense of “so great a picture, so inspiring medically and humanly . . . that they just don’t know what to do with it. . . . Seeing it, I felt as if I had never before witnessed emotion on a screen so stripped of extraneous self-consciousness.” From there, James Agee took up the cry in The Nation, writing, “I don’t know what is necessary to reverse this disgraceful decision, but if dynamite is required, then dynamite is indicated. . . . The glaring obvious reason [for the movie’s suppression] has not yet been mentioned: that any sane human being who saw the film would join the armed services, if at all, with a straight face and a painfully maturing mind.”

  During the war, the Bureau of Public Relations and the Pictorial Service had been acutely sensitive to bad press. When Huston had gone to journalists with his fight to release a longer version of Report from the Aleutians, his brink
smanship had worked. This time, it did not. The army held fast. By the summer, Huston had exhausted his last hope for an appeal; the independent distributor with whom he had hoped to work tossed in the towel, telling the director he was tired of “the whole gruesome story of setbacks, slight gains and slashing defeats. . . . I am beaten.” Let There Be Light would not be shown publicly for thirty-five years.

  The experience left Huston with a profound feeling of skepticism and dejection about his years in the army. “In the Second World War I had as high hopes as anybody,” he said. “It looked to me as if we were on our way to some kind of understanding of life.” What he came to feel instead was that he had colluded in a lie. The army “wanted to maintain the ‘warrior’ myth,” he wrote, “which said that our American soldiers went to war and came back all the stronger for the experience, standing tall and proud. . . . Only a few weaklings fell by the wayside. Everyone was a hero, and had medals and ribbons to prove it.

  “That,” he said, “was my most interesting experience with the government. It seemed to me to be a wonderfully hopeful and even inspiring film. . . . And the War Department felt it was too strong medicine. This is only my opinion. But it’s the only opinion that stands up under scrutiny.”

  • • •

  As the new year began, George Stevens opened a 1946 desk calendar and decided to keep a diary. What he wrote down, in the three weeks before he tossed it aside, was the bare-bones record of a man struggling to rediscover the contours of his former life. He noted the names of the people with whom he had lunch, and the titles of the movies that he saw and the books that he read, and how long it took to drive from one place to another, and what the food and the weather were like. He was home, returned at last to his wife, his son, and his house in Toluca Lake, and he was determined to make a fresh start, although his heart hardly seemed to be in anything he did. The Stevenses attended the Rose Bowl game in Pasadena and watched the Trojans fall to the Crimson Tide; they had dinner out most evenings, dining at the Beachcombers with his old friend Gene Solo or his agent Charles Feldman. Stevens felt that his prewar existence was somewhere waiting to be reclaimed by him, but when he tried to resume his old habits, he felt ungainly and ill at ease. When he played poker, he would gamble too much and lose too quickly. When he and Yvonne attended a party, he would get drunk and sometimes need to be driven home. In Europe during the war, Stevens had poured his feelings for his wife and son into dozens of letters home, but now that they were all back together, his marriage began to fall apart. In the first months of 1946, all he really wanted was to be left alone. He would sequester himself in a room with a pile of novels and spend the day reading, or he would leave the house first thing in the morning, go to his country club, and play eighteen holes, day after day, always by himself.