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

by Mark Harris

  Wyler badly wanted Sherwood to make the trip to Los Angeles and at least watch the dailies, in part because he thought the footage he was shooting was good and might soothe the nervous writer for long enough to get some essential final revisions out of him. One crucial scene remained unwritten—neither Sherwood nor Wyler had been able to figure out how to stage the moment that was to serve as the emotional conclusion of Fred’s storyline, in which the despondent former pilot, while wandering through an airfield of now useless fighter planes, has a kind of emotional collapse while flashing back to the trauma of aerial combat. It was a moment close to Wyler’s heart, one that he had wanted to dramatize since his time in the Memphis Belle, and the resolution of a kind of cliffhanger—an answer to the question of why Fred was so troubled that by then would have been consuming the audience for more than two hours. “I want to make one last effort to sell you the idea of coming here for a few days,” he wrote to Sherwood. “Naturally I will do everything I can with the scene in the B-17 but frankly I am terribly worried that the last part of the picture may be a let down. A third act means the same to a picture as it does to a play. Sorry to sound a little desperate,” he concluded, “but perhaps we are not completely clear on your ideas and you know that telegrams and telephones are no substitute for talking things over.”

  Wyler’s most essential and trusted collaborator during the making of The Best Years of Our Lives turned out to be his cinematographer. For the fifth time, he was working with Gregg Toland, whose own military service had ended and who understood the stripped-down, unshowy style that Wyler wanted to use to tell his story. It was Toland who helped Wyler come with up a kind of jerry-rigged hearing aid that allowed him to make the movie in the first place; the director discovered that by sitting beneath the camera with a large set of headphones that were connected to an amplifier, he could hear the actors well enough to judge their performances. As they began their first working partnership since The Little Foxes, Wyler found himself grateful for Toland’s stated willingness to “sacrifice photography any time if it means a better scene.” And as Toland watched Wyler work, he felt he was witnessing a new level of creativity and integrity in the director. “He used to go overboard on camera movement,” Toland said, “but he came back [from the war] with, I think, a better perspective on what wasn’t important. . . . I think Best Years was well photographed because the photography helped to tell the story. It wasn’t breathtaking. It would have been wrong to strive for effects. We were after simple reproduction of the scenes played without any chi-chi. . . . If I had to label the photographic style of the picture, I’d call it ‘honest.’”

  Toland created that style by making extensive use of deep focus, which he had brought into the cinematic mainstream when shooting Citizen Kane; the technique allowed moviegoers to take in different expressions, gestures, and moods within different planes of a single frame. He encouraged Wyler to film unbroken shots that sometimes lasted more than two minutes, and to eschew gratuitous camera movements and fast cross-cutting. And although Wyler still indulged his penchant for filming twenty or thirty takes of a scene, uncharacteristically he would allow his cast to play out the entire sequence without interruption several times. “I shot most of the scenes through from beginning to end,” he said, “and by letting the camera turn with the actors, it caught their actions and reactions. In that way, the players did their own cutting.” Wyler also kept close-ups to a minimum, using them only when he wanted “to make a point by excluding everything else from the audience’s view.”

  As production continued, his confidence grew. When he arrived on the set every morning, he said, “I knew these [characters], had shared a good many of their experiences. . . . It was no problem to imagine what they would do in a situation because I already knew it in my heart.” That assurance made him more patient with his actors, who rose to meet his perfectionism and admired his insistence that “whatever extra trouble was necessary to make a scene right, or better, was worth it. Often, toward the end of a day, when people wanted to get home to their wives and children, I could sense a resentment. . . . I knew I was not making myself popular. . . . But I also knew that if I kept working on the scene, it would be a better scene.”

  He was demanding with the cast, but rarely brusque. When he asked for multiple takes, Loy came to feel that it was because he “suspects some wonderful new thing is going to happen, and it usually does.” He made Russell endlessly redo a scene, early in the film, in which he looks through the window of a transport plane that is carrying the three men back to their hometown. Wyler watched him become uncomfortable and actorish around take ten, then begin to improve in takes thirteen and fourteen, and finally allow a natural, believable set of mixed emotions to flicker across his features in take twenty. “I hated that—we all liked him so much and acting wasn’t his business,” Wyler said. But, he added, “I think there’s a lot in that shot. . . . Often a slight movement or the way a word is said makes the difference whether the audience will cry.”

  It had been almost a year since the war had ended, but as Wyler shot the movie, his own emotions about his time away and return home remained raw, even as he was weaving them into the lives of his characters. He told Toland about when he had come back to New York on leave and gotten his first glimpse of Talli from a distance, down the long hallway of the Plaza Hotel, and Toland turned it into one of the picture’s most famous shots, in which Al steps through his front door for the first time in years and sees Milly at the other end of their apartment as she emerges from the kitchen. He took his fear that his hearing loss might destroy his marriage and translated it into the achingly intimate sequence in which Homer, sure that his young fiancée will flee, invites her into his bedroom to watch him remove his hooks and harness for the night as he changes into his pajamas. “This is when I know I’m helpless,” he tells his girl as he shows her the stumps of his arms, a scene that was so utterly without precedent that Wyler worried the Production Code would seek to prevent the movie’s release. Aware that many of his colleagues had struggled with alcoholism and emotional problems both during and after their military service, he showed Homer giving in to sudden flashes of anger, and Al and Fred trying to anesthetize themselves by drinking too much. Even the wounded pride that he and his fellow directors had felt upon their return to a Hollywood that had thrived without them became fodder for the film, in a scene in which Fred is rudely rebuffed by the drugstore that used to employ him and has to accept a demotion and salary cut, a sequence that directly indicts healthy American businesses for their indifference to veterans. And he was perfectly attuned to the national mood when he worked to capture something that he had felt since losing his hearing and coming home—a sense of disorientation at the speed with which the world had changed. “Last year it was kill Japs, and this year it’s make money,” says Al. “Why don’t they give a fella time to adjust?”

  With just a few weeks of filming left, the question of what to do in Fred’s final scene remained unsolved. At the end of The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler wanted his main characters to have overcome their difficulties with enough success so that they could move forward in postwar America. Al would go back to his bank job, but he would channel his frustration at the mistreatment of returning servicemen into a new position in which he could provide small-business loans to veterans. Homer would draw strength from the support of his parents and understanding girlfriend, and his wedding ceremony would be the scene of joy and reconciliation that would end the movie. But Fred’s story remained a problem. His marriage had disintegrated; his parents were indifferent; he had been a high-flying hero in the air force, but at home he lacked a direction or any professional prospects. The story Wyler and Sherwood wanted to tell in The Best Years of Our Lives was not about the end of the war, but about the end of its aftermath—the moment at which, sometimes with resignation, sometimes with renewed hope, and often with uncertainty, the men of World War II would begin to live in a world that was no longer defined by
their military service. They would have to write their own futures.

  And Wyler would have to write Fred’s. Although Sherwood was supportive, he told the director that he could not finish the scene in which Fred comes upon a B-17 bomber and begins to purge himself of the tormenting memory of his years at war before realizing that he has to start from scratch and build a new life. “I know just what we want to say,” he told Wyler, “but it isn’t to be said in words—it must be said with the camera, and that’s your business.” Sherwood had come up with the idea of placing Fred in a field full of discarded planes that were destined to become scrap metal, which Wyler understood as “an outer manifestation of [Fred’s] feelings about himself.” But beyond that, Wyler would need to find a way to demonstrate that “in order to win his personal battles as a civilian, it was necessary to apply the same courage and strength of character that he and twelve million others applied to win the war.”

  Wyler thought back to his own time in the air, flying over Germany in the Memphis Belle, and also about his time in a Hollywood studio, recreating the buzz of the bomber intercom and the growl of the engines for his documentary; he also thought about his time shooting aerial images over Italy, the last moment of his life in which he could hear. What came back to him were not images, but sounds. He never wrote out the climactic scene he ended up shooting; instead, he, Toland, Andrews, and the crew drove out to the airfield they had rented in Ontario, California, and began to film. Wyler had Andrews wander through what felt like an otherworldly graveyard of planes from which the engines had been removed and then clamber into the bombardier’s nest of one of them. He wanted to have Fred “lose himself in the dream, or rather in hallucination.” Toland shot Fred appearing to sweat himself into sickness as he sat in the plane and mimicked the motions of dropping a bomb. The camera became increasingly frantic, pushing toward Andrews until it was up against the scratched, smeary Plexiglas of the windshield, then swooping under the grounded bomber as if to capture it in flight, then coming up on the actor again from the back as he crouched in the B-17’s nose. But it was not until the movie wrapped that Wyler would “write” the rest of the scene. In the editing room, he layered the soundtrack first with an urgent and almost menacing musical score, then with the hum of a single plane’s motor starting—a noise that George Bailey, in a line from Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life script, calls “one of the three most exciting sounds in the world.” Wyler added another motor, and another, creating a nightmarish vibrating roar of planes readying for their bombing runs, and building it to a crescendo that was not only maddening but, intentionally, deafening.

  And then he switched it off. For Wyler, the excitement, the adrenaline, and the emotional and physical trauma of the war years would end with a brief exchange between a panic-stricken Fred and a calm airfield mechanic who comes upon him and tells him to get out of the plane.

  “Reviving old memories?” he asks.

  “Maybe getting some of them out of my system,” says Fred.

  • • •

  It was an accident of scheduling that at the end of 1946, Capra and Wyler’s diametrically opposed visions of what a postwar Hollywood movie should look like ended up in a head-to-head competition for audiences, acclaim, and prizes. The Best Years of Our Lives was originally scheduled for release in mid-1947; Wyler’s first cut of the movie was 172 minutes, and Goldwyn worried that audiences wouldn’t sit still for it. After a wildly successful test screening in Long Beach, Wyler persuaded him to open the film before December 31 in order to qualify for that year’s Academy Awards. Goldwyn booked the picture for an exclusive reserved-ticket run in New York City at Thanksgiving, and began to sell the film as a story “with something important to say . . . that reflect[s] these disturbing times in which we live.”

  Goldwyn thought he had the field to himself; RKO had always planned to open It’s a Wonderful Life in January, just after the Oscar deadline. But when one of its big Christmas movies was delayed, the studio decided to release Capra’s film in December instead. Moviegoers had an unusually clear choice: Wyler’s new realism or Capra’s old-fashioned sentiment; a vision of a world in which the war could finally be left behind, or a dream of a world in which war might have been nothing more than a terrible waking nightmare. More than they ever had, or ever would again, both men had put their lives onscreen.

  For reviewers, it wasn’t much of a contest. Praise for The Best Years of Our Lives was fervent and unanimous, with many critics heralding the arrival of a maturity and seriousness in Wyler’s work that they believed signaled exactly the new era for American movies that Capra had promised. “William Wyler has always seemed to me an exceedingly sincere and good director; he now seems one of the few great ones,” James Agee wrote. “He has come back from the war with a style of great purity, directness, and warmth, about as cleanly devoid of mannerism, haste, superfluous motion, aesthetic or emotional overreaching, as any I know.” The New York Times called it the year’s best movie, “not only . . . superlative entertainment but . . . food for quiet and humanizing thought” that “catches the drama of veterans returning home . . . as no film, or play or novel we’ve yet heard of has managed to do.” Praise rang out from congressmen and generals, on editorial pages, and from Wyler’s fellow filmmakers, with Billy Wilder, the most recent winner of the Academy Award for Best Director, calling it “the best-directed film I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  The response to It’s a Wonderful Life was more muted. While some critics were delighted and moved—the Hollywood Reporter called it “the greatest of all Capra pictures, and in saying that, one must mean one of the greatest pictures of this or any other year”—just as many were left cold. The New Republic derided the film for the “hysterical pitch” of its “moralizing,” the New York Times called it quaint and sentimental, and Variety noted that, despite its “oldtime craft,” Capra had not “taken the stride forward in filmmaking technique” that many of his colleagues had.

  When the Academy Award nominations were announced, both movies were in contention: The Best Years of Our Lives was up for eight Oscars and It’s a Wonderful Life for five. But there was little suspense about the outcome. In a ceremony at the Shrine Auditorium on March 13, 1947, Wyler’s film swept the board, beating Capra’s for Best Picture, Director, and Actor. Robert Sherwood’s screenplay also won, and Russell took home Best Supporting Actor, as well as an honorary Oscar.

  It’s A Wonderful Life went home empty-handed, a disappointment that was only underscored by the swift and stark verdict of the moviegoing public. As Best Years continued around the country, theaters were packed; the film became essential viewing and the occasion for an extended national examination of America’s obligations to the men who had served in World War II. By the end of its run, it was the second-highest-grossing movie in history. But postwar audiences had little fondness for It’s a Wonderful Life. “Frank, I’m worried,” Capra’s partner Briskin wrote in a cable. “Just our luck if the gravy train slows down now.”

  The movie’s failure at the box office proved to be fatal for Liberty Films. Capra had gone almost 50 percent over his $2 million budget, and staked far too much of his fledgling company’s capital on It’s a Wonderful Life’s success. By Oscar night, he, Stevens and Wyler were already struggling to refinance their company by agreeing to cut their weekly salaries by two-thirds and committing to make five pictures each for Liberty instead of three. Their gambit failed; within a year, Capra would reluctantly sell Liberty to Paramount Pictures, where all three directors would henceforth be tied to the kind of long-term studio contracts they had hoped never to sign again. Liberty, said Capra, had turned out to be “the most gentlemanly way of going broke, and the fastest way, anybody ever thought of.”

  Capra was devastated by the collapse of Liberty and, with it, a dream of independence he had had since before the war. But Stevens, who was still not ready to make a picture, was glad to be relieved of what was becoming considerable financial pressure, and Wyler’s disap
pointment was only mild. “It was a good idea,” he said. “It didn’t work out.” Wyler spent little time mourning its demise; instead, for the first time in many years, he looked to the future. With the success of The Best Years of Our Lives, his war, and his homecoming, were over. He never complained about what his years in combat had cost him; he spoke only of how enriched he felt. He had gone into the war as a respected technical perfectionist; he had come out, he said, interested only in making movies that reflected his deeper understanding of human yearning and vulnerability. “This is the kind of picture I couldn’t possibly have done with conviction if I had not been in the war myself,” he had said just before Best Years opened. He was frank about how much of an effort the production had been, but he explained with great passion a belief that he would hold to for the rest of his career—that without serious struggle, filmmaking was pointless.

  “Somebody should be on fire about any picture made, or it shouldn’t be made. If somebody doesn’t feel that certain thing, the miracle never happens,” he said. “The trouble with Hollywood is that too many of the top people are too comfortable and don’t give a damn about what goes up on the screen so long as it gets by at the box office. How can you expect people with that kind of attitude to make the pictures the world will want to see?”

  Epilogue

  Frank Capra never forgave himself for his decision to sell Liberty Films, and he believed that he never recovered from it. “I got cold feet,” he said, “and I think that probably affected my picture-making forever after. Once your daring stops . . . you’re not going to make the proper films anymore. That is, I couldn’t. When I sold out for money . . . I think my conscience told me that I had had it. All we had to do was hang on, to accept much less money and make nothing but quality films. That’s what my partners wanted to do and what we should have done. . . . As the cowardly reigning apostle of the crusade, I went back on my own idea, having lost my guts and courage. It was the beginning of my end as a social force in films.”