Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
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The poor reception of It’s a Wonderful Life cut Capra to his heart. The public’s indifference to his film felt to him like evidence that during the war years he had lost his greatest gift, the ability to anticipate what average Americans might want to see and give it to them. Capra had given up four years of his life to serve his country, but he had not been engaged in the same fight as his colleagues. They had gone to war; he had gone to Washington. They had sought truth with their cameras, though they had sometimes failed to convey it; Capra’s task had been to package and sell it. The difference in their duties had not seemed significant during his time in the capital when, for all of his complaining, he had delighted in being in charge. Every decision had been high-stakes, and every propaganda picture had seemed like a make-or-break act of patriotism. But in the war’s aftermath, Capra was lost. As alienated, uncertain, and confused as Wyler had been upon his return home, his instinct to follow his own path helped him rediscover his place in a new America. Capra couldn’t find that place; he had barely left the country, but he could no longer recognize it.
Stevens, Huston, and Ford went their own ways and seemed not to worry about whether or not the public would follow them. Their experiences during the war had strengthened their resolve to let nothing compromise their work, not even popular taste. As Wyler had done, over the next few years they would infuse their movies with their own personalities—Huston gave vent to his sardonic cynicism in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Stevens peered into the ugliest recesses of human nature and personal ambition in A Place in the Sun, and Ford, ever iconoclastic, chose to eschew the prestige of films like The Grapes of Wrath and instead embrace the degraded genre he loved best, shaping his own vision of America through the majestic, elegiac, morally complex westerns that, though they would win him no awards, would eventually form his most enduring legacy. If Capra could not follow them—if he could not even find a way to follow his own heart—it was in part because, alone among his colleagues, he never imagined that the war would change him, or the world. He had always assumed it would be an interruption—a long, ghastly pause after which everything would return to a normality that he instead discovered had vanished.
The social realism that audiences craved after World War II—the dramas about alcoholism and mental illness and anti-Semitism and racism that would catapult a new generation of directors like Billy Wilder and Elia Kazan to the forefront of Hollywood picturemaking—was not a road that Capra could have taken even if he had wanted to. He had spent too many years trying to convince Americans and himself that there were no problems that could not be solved by hard work, good cheer, and a burst of spirited rhetoric. Eventually, his belief that movies should be uplifting calcified into didacticism. He never turned sour or nasty about his fellow filmmakers, but he didn’t know how to do what they were doing, which seemed to be all that people wanted to see. So he stopped. After It’s a Wonderful Life, he barely worked at all. He directed only five more movies. None of them were particularly successful. In 1961, after remaking his own 1933 comedy-drama Lady for a Day as Pocketful of Miracles, he decided to retire.
In the postwar years, Wyler, Huston, and Stevens were emboldened not just in their professional lives but as private citizens who had the power to galvanize public attention; although they were now out of uniform, none of them had lost their taste for a good fight. In the late 1940s, they became active in the industry’s central political cause of the postwar years, the fight against the resurgent House Un-American Activities Committee, and they united in public opposition to the blacklisting of suspected Communists that had begun in Hollywood. Just months after the release of The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler gave a nationally broadcast radio address in which he said that in the current climate of paranoia and mistrust, he never could have made the picture that had just won him the Academy Award. HUAC, he said, was “making decent people afraid to express their opinions. They are creating fear in Hollywood. Fear will result in self-censorship. Self-censorship will paralyze the screen. In the last analysis, you will suffer. You will be deprived of entertainment which stimulates you, and you will be given a diet of pictures which conform to some people’s arbitrary standards of Americanism.” Soon after his speech, he and Huston, who also believed that a “sickness [had] permeated the country,” joined forces to spearhead Hollywood’s Committee for the First Amendment, a group that lobbied for free expression and an end to red-baiting. Capra did not join them; he could never shed his fear of being labeled a Communist sympathizer, and his infrequent public political comments had been mostly restricted to nervous declarations that he was stoutly against Communism and had never even voted for Roosevelt.
Like Capra, Ford declined to put himself at the center of political controversy or activism in the years following the war. Except for one memorable showdown in 1950, when all five men joined forces to thwart Cecil B. DeMille’s attempt to institute an anti-Communist loyalty oath for the members of the Directors Guild, Ford kept his own counsel, largely continuing to avoid the company of fellow filmmakers. In 1952, he won a fourth directing Oscar—a record that still stands—for The Quiet Man. Military life figured in more than half of the movies he made in the twenty years after his navy service, but except for the light comedy Mister Roberts, he avoided returning to the rigors of combat in World War II as a subject.
Capra and Ford had never been particularly close. Both men were Catholics, and when they saw each other, it was most often on Sundays, when their wives would convince them to come to mass. But ten years after Capra retired, when he decided to write his autobiography, it was Ford to whom he turned with a request that he write the introduction. By then, Ford was in his seventies, himself retired, enfeebled and largely bedridden. He surprised and touched Capra by providing a foreword in which he called his colleague “a great man and a great American . . . an inspiration to those who believe in the American dream,” and “the greatest motion picture director in the world.” After a series of strokes that left him incapacitated in his final years, Capra died at ninety-four, in 1991.
Ford had made his last movie in 1966, but until the end of his life, he talked enthusiastically of trying to direct one more picture—either a dramatic feature about the war in the Pacific, or a movie about the OSS that he had promised Bill Donovan he would make just before Donovan’s death in 1959. Ford died in 1973; he was seventy-nine years old. A threadbare flag from the Battle of Midway was draped over his coffin and then presented to his wife.
Huston and Wyler remained close friends for the rest of their lives, and when Wyler died in 1981 at the age of seventy-nine, Huston delivered one of the eulogies, leaving the lectern early when he was overcome by grief. After The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler directed a dozen more movies, including The Heiress, Detective Story, Ben-Hur, for which he won a third Academy Award, and Funny Girl. He retired in 1970 after illness forced him to withdraw from directing the “unusual war story, different from most that have been made” that he had developed and long hoped to film, Patton. His memorial service was held in the theater of the Directors Guild of America, where hundreds of his colleagues came to pay their respects. Bette Davis and Roddy McDowall sat side by side. “This entire town should be at half-mast,” Davis told McDowall. “When the king dies, all the flags are at half-mast.” Until his final years, Wyler kept in touch with the crew of the Memphis Belle, always answering their letters and inquiring about their lives and families.
Huston won Academy Awards for both directing and writing The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, his first postwar picture, which was released in 1947. He went on to direct three dozen more films, making him one of the most prolific filmmakers to come out of World War II. Unlike many of his colleagues in the Signal Corps, he expressed no desire to make a combat film, but over the next forty years, he frequently explored the subject of bravery and cowardice under pressure in movies ranging from The Red Badge of Courage to The African Queen to The Man Who Would Be King. Huston worked steadily until his dea
th at eighty-one in 1987. He never stopped petitioning the government to allow the release of Let There Be Light. The Pentagon rejected the formal request he submitted in 1952, reiterating that the documentary was a violation of the privacy of its subjects, and rebuffed him again in 1971. Finally, after intervention from Vice President Walter Mondale, the army agreed not to stand in the way of an unauthorized showing of an old print of the movie in 1980. It opened the following year in New York City and is now preserved, along with Huston’s other wartime film work, in the National Archives and at the Library of Congress.
In 1948, George Stevens finally returned to directing with the gentle and well-received comedy I Remember Mama. Two years later, he won his first of two Academy Awards for his direction of A Place in the Sun, his long-planned adaptation of An American Tragedy. “As time went on,” he said, “I kept feeling I should do a picture about the war. All the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their experiences—Ford, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the experience.” As the years passed, Stevens became troubled by the growing popularity of violent westerns among children, something he had first noticed in Germany immediately after the war, when he watched little boys in cowboy hats play with cap pistols. In 1953, as a response, he made Shane, the somber drama about the effect of a roving gunslinger on the lives of an isolated frontier family. He called the movie “a Western, but really my war picture. . . . In Shane, a gun shot, for our purposes, is a holocaust. And when a living being is shot, a life is over.”
In 1975, Stevens, who was seventy, helped to plan a gathering of the surviving members of his SPECOU unit, who had come from around the country to celebrate with him. Just before the reunion, he died suddenly of a heart attack. Many of the veterans who had traveled to California to see him attended his funeral, as did dozens of his colleagues. “I just loved the man and I’m sure he loved me,” said Capra soon after his death. “And when I die . . . I’m certainly going to look George up. . . . I think we’ll start another Liberty Films up there. We can make pictures in heaven and send them down. And maybe we can get out of heaven once in a while and go to some of those other places, just like George went to hell in the Army when he went to Europe.”
Shortly after the war, Stevens packed up all of the color footage he had shot overseas, from North Africa to D-Day to Dachau, and drove it to a Bekins storage facility in North Hollywood. The footage had never been shown publicly. He carefully labeled each canister with titles like “Eyewitness at Dachau” or simply “Atrocity.” He retrieved the reels only once, in 1959, when he was preparing to direct The Diary of Anne Frank. Alone in a screening room, he started to watch what he had shot, but turned the projector off after the first minute, returned the canisters to North Hollywood, and locked them away once again. Only his son and a few close colleagues knew of the existence of the film. It remained in storage until his death.
William Wyler with his three-time star Bette Davis and Henry Fonda during production of Jezebel: “Yes, I lost a battle,” Davis said of their later creative tussles, “but I lost it to a genius.” (Photofest)
George Stevens. “He’d sit there and listen with that look,” Joseph Mankiewicz said, “and you could go mad trying to convince him of something.” (Photofest)
Ford (left) with Henry Fonda on 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, which won him his second of four Academy Awards for directing. (Photofest)
Frank Capra studies the script on the set of 1939’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He was Hollywood’s highest-paid director at the time. (Everett Collection)
Ford aboard his ketch, the Araner. During the war, he leased it to the U.S. Navy, which used it to patrol the Pacific coast. (AP Photo)
“Yes. This really happened.” Ford’s documentary The Battle of Midway was the first film to bring combat footage to moviegoers on the home front.
Ford with some of the men of Field Photo. Well before Pearl Harbor, he trained them to serve in the navy’s film unit. (Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection)
Ford (center) on the set of They Were Expendable, with Robert Montgomery and Richard Barthelmess. (ZumaPress.com)
(From left) Anthony Veiller, Huston, Maj. Hugh Stewart of the British Army Film Unit and Capra, after the American team was sent to London with faked footage of the North African campaign. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
Capra at his desk at the War Department in March 1942. Upon his arrival in Washington, he promised to have Why We Fight scripts finished in weeks. (AP Photo)
In England, Capra (right) confers with Capt. Roy Boulting of the British Army Film Unit on footage for Tunisian Victory. (Ministry of Information Photo Division Photographer/IWM via Getty Images)
With little money available from the army, Capra fleshed out the Why We Fight films with footage from Axis propaganda movies.
Capra in London. “Tough people, these English,” he wrote. “Soft cover and hard cores—each layer getting harder and harder.” (AP Photo)
Wyler and actor Henry Wilcoxon (center) rewrote the vicar’s climactic sermon in Mrs. Miniver as a stirring Churchillian call to duty after the war began. (Everett Collection)
Wyler (left) with Lt. W.J. Stangel and Capt. Thomas Wallace (the husband of actress Carole Landis) after Wyler was posted to a British air base. (Hulton Archives/Fox Photos/Getty Images)
Gen. George Marshall, chief proponent of the filmed propaganda program, meets Lucille Ball. (Thomas D. McAvoy/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Texas Congressman Martin Dies was one of the first politicians to seek—and win—publicity by claiming that Hollywood was overrun with Communists. (Thomas D. McAvoy/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
The war at home: Long Island doubles for the Pacific jungle in an army training film shot near the Signal Corps Center in Astoria, New York, in 1943. (Photoquest/Getty Images)
The soundtrack for The Memphis Belle was created in a Hollywood studio, but all of the aerial footage was shot during combat by Wyler and his men.
Huston (left) with his Juarez cowriters Wolfgang Reinhardt and Aeneas Mackenzie and producer Henry Blanke. The movie was his first foray into political filmmaking. (Everett Collection)
(Clockwise from top right): Lee Patrick (in doorway), John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, and Mary Astor on the set of the director’s 1941 breakthrough The Maltese Falcon. (The Kobal Collection)
Huston’s affair with Olivia De Havilland, whom he directed in 1942’s In This Our Life, was an open secret in Hollywood. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
Huston and the actor Edward G. Robinson at a wartime party given in honor of Madame Chiang Kai-Shek. (John Florea/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
Although San Pietro was presented to the moviegoing public as a wartime documentary, all of the film’s combat footage was staged.
A veteran institutionalized for combat-related psychological trauma is interviewed by a doctor in Huston’s Let There Be Light, which was suppressed for thirty-five years.
Stevens with Katharine Hepburn on the set of Woman of the Year (1942). After the war, she urged him to return to directing comedy; he never did. (Everett Collection)
Stevens’s military passport. He was the last of the five directors to enter the war, and the last to return home. (Margaret Herrick Library/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
A sketch of the running poker game Stevens played while stationed in Europe. From left: William Saroyan, Irwin Shaw, Stevens, Robert Capa. (Collection Capa/Magnum Photos)
Stevens (center, without helmet) and Irwin Shaw (right foreground), as American G.I.s and civilians celebrate the liberation of France. (Margaret Herrick Library/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Stevens’s filming at Dachau included several segments of direct testimony to the camera from freed prisoners. (Margaret Herrick Library/Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences)
Italy, 1944: An Army Pictorial Service cameraman films a burning DUKW (“Duck”), an amphibious vehicle that was shelled by German planes. (U.S. Ar
my/Getty Images)
Walt Disney (right) discusses the use of animation techniques for an instructional film about naval flight training. (Mark Kauffman/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
A giant miniature of Tokyo Bay used in an army film that was intended to brief air force crews about Japanese targets. (National Archives/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)
1945: Jack Warner (center) cuts a welcome-home cake for returning contract players (from left) Wayne Morris, Ronald Reagan, Gig Young, and Harry Lewis as they bid farewell to the K-rations on the table. (Bettmann/CORBIS)
During the war, former newspaperman Lowell Mellett ran the OWI’s Bureau of Motion Pictures and clashed frequently with filmmakers. (Thomas D. McAvoy/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)