Celluloid Warriors.

Capra, Huston, Wyler, Stevens Ford.

Five Came Back, Laurent Bouzereau’s   big budget three part Netlix - Amblin 2016 documentary on the  Hollywood directors who joined up for US Government WW2 film making - sounds like a great idea. Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, George Stevens and John Ford between them had contributed the core of important American film at the peak of it’s success and influence. 

 

Even with a few dummy runs like the Russian Bolshevik Revolution anniversary features or their Turksib, The Tennessee Valley Authority Films and the Olympics movies, there had never been an attempt to pour state effort, on this scale and using talent of this quality, into non fiction film making . However I found myself having reservations about Five Came Back's treatment of the subject.

When John Huston lists out this peer group early on, he includes Anatole Litvak. As far back as the sixties I was looking round for a subject for a monograph, someone who was under-documented and had done exceptional work. I homed in on Litvak - think Mayerling, Tovarich, All This and Heaven Too, Confessions of a Nazi Spy, Blues in the Night, The Snake Pit, Decision Before Dawn, Anastasia and Act of Love. Phew! Maybe he was so co-operative because he knew that he’d missed the attention that was being lavished on other  filmmakers.

More recently French critics questioned why, when he was on their door step for decades, no one went to see Litvak. My efforts didn’t count. I can’t help wondering if there is something going on there that I don’t know about or maybe “Six Came Back” just wouldn’t have matched the title they purloined from the old John Farrow movie.

There is an account of Litvak’s WW2 productions in my “I’ve Been in Some Big Towns: the Life and Work of Anatole Litvak.”

Here Litvak gets a passing mention for his work on Why We Fight - the Battle for Russia which they correctly cite as the best work in the cycle. I guess that puts him ahead of John Sturges, Dimitri Tiomkin, Suart Heisler, Irwin Shaw, David Miller, William Hornbeck, Garson Kanin and a list that we’ll probably never see filled out.

Documentation of  Hollywood participants in WW2 Military documentaries is unfortunately sparse. We have to pick up information round the edges, like discovering here that wartime newsreel stories went through the Capra unit where they would presumably have been edited under Hornbeck’s supervision. Curiously the Private Snafu 'toons, made for the forces in Warners’ Termite Terrace, get more detailed attribution.

I also had reservations on the idea of using present day film makers as commentators - Guillermo del Toro, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Paul Greengrass and Laurence Kasdan. Celebrity movie makers are notoriously thin on their knowledge of film history. John Houseman had to be told who Max Ophuls was when they were paired on Letter from an Unknown Woman. Vinente Minelli didn’t know that his cameraman Harry Stradling had shot his favourite movie, La Kermesse Heroique, and Elia Kazan fumed at being stuck with a photographer who’d never done anything significant, unaware that Norbert Brodine had filmed Of Mice & Men, The Divorcee, the silent The Sea Hawk  - and the Australian Officer 666.

Walter & John Huston.

The celebrity commentators do get in some nice moments - Spielberg endorsing John Huston, saying he would have loved to have been the one to fight Errol Flynn over Olivia De Havilland. Coppola had already commented war cameramen in the sequence in his Apocalypse Now. Having Meryl Streep do unobtrusive narration adds to the star power.

Also the use of out-takes and having leader film as punctuation, is a style which gives Five Came Back episodes individuality. The film delights in stories of the subjects outwitting the studio heads, military brass and politicians, smuggling censorable footage in lunch boxes or including a mid shot of Roosevelt’s soldier son in a troubled production previewed at the White House.

  San Pietro

One subject which the production addresses is faking - studio and model shots added to Ford’s Pearl Harbor material. The tedious British Tunisian Victory or Leni Reifenstahl’s Triumph of the Will were considered more imposing models than the features the Hollywood directors knew. Like Steven Speilberg, I’d always thought of Huston’s 1945 (The Battle of) San Pietro as the gold standard in authentic combat filming but we now learn that it was shot three days after the Italian town had been taken by the allies, filming staged hostilities and the camera swerving to pick up casualties occurring out of it’s field of vision with absolute plausibility. Huston never fessed up on that one. This raises the question of whether the discovery makes his achievement more or less substantial.

Five Came Back, being a 21st Century production, the question of race was always going to be prominent. This was particularly relevant to Wyler, being a Jew who might have been executed if he was shot down on one of his B-25 bomber flights over Germany and, when a Major, punched out a doorman for anti semitic abuse. He had the choice of being sanctioned or facing a court marshal for conduct unbecoming an officer. The European campaign eventually took him back to the Wyler family’s home village in Merleuse where he could still film the sign from his father’s bar, though his entire family had been transported.

Mrs. Miniver - Greer Garson & Dantine

Wyler backed off making The Negro Soldier, when the briefing was to create a film that was as as de-ethnicised as possible at a time when black servicemen were afraid of KKK assaults on their training camp. We can’t miss the prominence given black soldiers in Huston’s long suppressed Let There Be Light but Five Came Back repeats the charge of Japanese racial vilification, making their point with animation clips and a particularly vivid montage of Know Your Enemy - Japan’s all kind of Japanese repeating the Banzai salute. It’s often noted that, in contrast, Germans and Italians were not interned in WW2 America but Wyler dug in his heals on making Helmut Dantine’s shot down flyer in Mrs. Miniver a brain washed fascist, over Louis B. Mayer’s objections.

The makers resist the temptation to turn John Ford into the star. We learn that, like Frank Capra, his solution to the challenges of his military obligation was to go on a bender and they describe his sympathetic treatment of real-life P.T. Boat Commander Robert Montgomery and abuse for war time civilian John Wayne, while filming They Were Expendable in 1946. Like Wyler, Ford was injured making his films.

George Stevens appears to have been the most deeply marked of the directors they cover. This project benefits from his unit’s making shots of him wearing his steel helmet in war-ravaged Europe, and the family archive which retained the material.  Stevens later commented that he would not have made 1939’s Gunga Din, with its scenes of combat as a schoolboy adventure, a year later when the reality was becoming evident. His escapist comedies and musicals from the nineteen thirties seemed trivial after filming the Dachau Camp. Stevens’ coverage there was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials. I’d never seen some of this before. It is profoundly disturbing. 

Post-war, Stevens abandoned a comedy project (On Our Merry Way?) in a search search for significance. We get this effectively elaborated in his son’s remarkable 1984 documentary A Film Maker’s Journey, which sets a standard against which all films of this kind must be measured. 

Capra in particular was incensed to find that, while he had been involved in the war effort, he’d gone from America’s most revered film maker to “Frank Who?” They claim that the grimness in It’s a Wonderful Life is a result. This ignores the shift in tone already evident in his thirties films, particularly Meet John Doe. The filmmakers are shaky on film history, unwilling to call out the fatuity of Wyler’s Mrs. Miniver or Wuthering Heights while omitting his substantial 1932 Bill of Divorcement, Dead End  or The Heiress. 

Something which I didn’t know, having being told that acceptance for these war time documentaries American theatre showing was their triumph. They had flopped. The public was happier with Mrs. Miniver. It’s a Wonderful Life was also a failure ruining Liberty Films. It only found its audience subsequently through public domain airings on TV.

Capra with silent 35 mm. camera.

The point at which Five Came Back moves out of the ordinary is the ending where they connect their subjects’ actuality shooting with footage from their fiction films. The celebration montage for the end of the war is one of the most involving pieces of film that we have.

Maintaining the high note, they wind up with Capra’s so nice awards acceptance speech “Because only the valiant can create, only the daring should make films and only the morally courageous are worthy of speaking to their fellow man for two hours and in the dark.” That rates a cheer. I wonder who scripted it.

Also

Many of the WW2 US War Office films are on You-Tube. I’m including information on some of the less well known.

William Wyler dodged a bullet when he pulled out of 1944’s The Negro Soldier finally directed by then Capt. Stuart Heisler. It is one of the least satisfactory of these productions.  It is obviously filmed using Hollywood fiction film conventions and equipment.

The film frames actuality with self conscious dramatised material, as a black preacher, Oscar Micheaux actor Carlton Moss who also wrote the film, conducts a service for a self-conscious all black congregation giving them quotations from Hitler’s twenty year old manifesto about the inferiority of the negro race and having the mother in the congregation read the letter from her soldier son, represented on the star banner near the studio interior pulpit. 

Mix from Old Glory to the Swastika banner to contextualise the prize fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling (this is a bit mean) before running through American history - the almost obscured black rower with Washington crossing the Delaware in the famous painting, soldiers in the Spanish American War, Cuba, Panama, the 1st US Troops to receive the Croix de Guerre etc. They cite U.S. black achievers - Polar Explorer  Matthew Henson, inventor George Washington Carver and contemporaries like Jesse Owens and Marian Anderson. This material will be recapped in CBS’s imposing 1968 Black History - Lost Stolen or Strayed. We get to the military scenes with blacks inducted, trained and fighting, a female unit drilling with its black officer & the Tuskegee airmen - climaxing in split screen shots of units marching.

The handling is disappointingly routine and it seems unlikely that the film had an influence. It may have re-assured black Americans.


More imposing is 1947’s U.S. Army Air Corps documentary Thunderbolt directed by Wyler & Capt John Sturges, then a studio film editor.  The cutting of the flying scenes is remarkable.

James Stewart introduces the two year old coverage of the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber aircraft. It was used in missions based in Corsica to break the stalemate in the Italian campaign by zapping enemy supply routes in Italy two hundred miles behind the front at Monte Casino and Anzio. There's a nod to history and the terrain that “exhausted Hanibal’s elephants and Caesar’s legions.”  Front-line bombing had failed (“wrong use of air power”) so they hit communications. “They boast that Italian trains ran on time - not these trains.”

A marginal example of the work of two major filmmakers, maybe it is possible to see their hand in the unusually grim touches - examining flack & bullet holes, crews comment that the flight is a plane short when no one saw it shot down, Italian kids edited to appear to be looking at a decayed body (“they saw things not meant for children to see”), the burning wreck (“a P-47s burning and there’s a  man in it”) or using remaining ammunition on farmers and buildings.

They spend considerable time in the on-ground activity that spaced the two hour missions, with the Americans keeping pets and creating a resort with buildings and a dammed river beach, because there was no one to stop them, and the one piece of location synch. filming - the Colonel‘s country club drunken singalong. The attempt to personalise the fliers isn’t completely successful, though it does come with  the voice-over regret “These are your years... the time to get started.”

Blown up from 16mm. in Technicolor, it has an evocative score by Wyler regular collaborator Gail
Kubik - who only made corporal.

Litvak’s Operation Titanic is a little remarked additional product from the Why We Fight team, recognisable from Disney animation, the Tiomkin sound (Song of the Volga Boatmen, Johnnie Came Marching Home & Aulde Lange Syne) and its final Liberty Bell. It is one of their best efforts, even if it’s tempo does slack at the end.

The opening suggests the scale of the air war - 20 000 tons of equipment and four months of preparation, 8oo B-17 Flying Fortresses over Berlin in one raid - and gives the misleading message “none of those planes returned to their bases.” It reveals Shuttle Bombing, as arranged in the Tehran pact of 1943, with American flying fortresses leaving Italy and Britain to bomb Germany and German controlled European targets and landing and refurbishing in Russia, rather than returning under fire with their load discharged, “the triangular super highway in the sky.” The claim is that there was no target inaccessible to them and the enemy had no idea where the attack would come from. This is particularly convincing in the simple probing arrows animation.

Operation Titanic

The characteristic two-second edits, close up typing or rubber stamps, go with striking images. The Brass, in apparently studio filming, is less convincing than the often excellent location material gathered by twenty-five library researchers - the locomotive shadow falling on the fields it passes, the “Kill Hitler” painted bomb, brought back in the loading sequence. Narration adds “We were still in enemy skies.” or “Over the snow covered mountains of Persia ... ruins, a silent reminder that enemy boots had marched two times here.”  

This one took Ukrainian Litvak back to Russia for the first time since his twenties departure. He flew on bombing raids and his input on the Russian material is a major asset. The film is particular interesting in the depiction of the contact of Americans (“a thousand tourists from 48 ‘states” briefed “be soldierly and neat at all times”) and the Russians, with women and even uniformed children among the support group. Sign language, cards, baseball, pin-ups, chewing gum in exchange for choral concerts. “The unshakeable unity of the Allies.”

The coverage of co-operation with Russians could prove a post-war embarrassment to those shown and the film was suppressed for decades.

 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022

B Movies

 

Instead of using Reveille With Beverly as a forties B film that locates itself, I should have waited for The Smiling Ghost. Even without the one reference to the draft this is instant 1941, right down to scenes shot in a cutaway car, a character in an iron lung or jokes about tying a bow tie.

The contract lead players, the brassy orchestrations and even the editing, with characteristic soft edge wipes, brand it Warners. Though it’s meant to be a crazy family comedy, it lapses into film noir - the train pulling into the deserted station at night, the door that opens to throw the shadow of a gunman, lightning striking in the fierce rain storm - mixed in with horror movie - opening the mausoleum vault, the family mansion with the secret passage and a distorted face peering from behind the painting. The actual smiling ghost scenes are really quite scary.

The plot (don’t look too closely - this is a studio first half) has Wayne Morris, besieged by creditors but selected from a newspaper advert. his sidekick Willy Best placed over the pay ‘phone. The rich Bentley family require someone on a do-anything basis and he’s chosen, even with feeble jokes about his hair cut. Turns out they’ll pay a thousand dollars to anyone who will announce being engaged to heir Alexis Smith, become ”The Kiss of Death Girl” now that three of her financés have been struck down. Wayne forges ahead. “You’ve heard of her?” “I’ve heard of a thousand dollars.” Sure enough a fiendish monster lurks.

Contract technicians deliver state of the art production values. Director Lewis Seiler was an old hand. He’d done some of the best Tom Mix films. He paces the piece nicely and chooses the angles well. They needed someone not over-endowed with sophistication to take on this one. I cracked the killer’s identity in his first minute.

David Bruce, Brenda Marshall.

The leads are perfect in parts tailored for them, a still robust Wayne Morris “attractive in a kind of boyish way”, spoiled heiress Alexis Smith and intrepid girl reporter Brenda Marshall wearing a massive hair piece. The studio contract talent takes up the slack, the ubiquitous Alan Hale, Lee Patrick, Bogart’s secretary in The Maltese Falcon here glamorised, and David Bruce who was with Marshall in Singapore Woman.

However check the reviews. As with companion pieces like Ben Stoloff's The Hidden Hand or Bill Beaudine's Face of Marble, the one who everyone remembers is black comedian Willy Best, though he’s submerged in the second panel of cast credits. Along with Mantan Moreland and Steppin Fetchit, he does the craven (shot of knees knocking or sprinting away from danger), comic darkie comedy that people like Bill Cosby, Melvin Van Peebles and Spike Lee piled abuse on. The then most prominent black male players in Hollywood delivered variations on this racial stereotype. 

Willy Best

Since the nineteen sixties people have found it appalling. Watching them now it’s possible to see that, despite the dreadful material given them, all these actors would dominate their films. They’d even get laughs. Willy Best (in The Ghost Breakers opposite Bob Hope, who thought his timing was the most polished of anyone he’d worked with) here even makes the one character trait they give him, his support of Morris, register sympathetically.

The Smiling Ghost is a nostalgia piece for a few elderly viewers, a curiosity and a rich hunting ground for thesis writers. I found it a kind of quick revision on all those now forgotten double feature program fillers I once waded through in the hope that they would repay the time.

Then, because it was there, I looked at the 1936 Crime Patrol and it made an instructive comparison with The Smiling Ghost, both program first half movies, one from Warners at full cry and the other from the penny pinching Harry Knight Productions.

Without the standing sets, in-house production departments and contract personnel, director Eugene Cummings (his only credit) has to make do with actual streets and warehouses with a small studio to house his billiards club, doctor surgery and boxers' dressing room decors. Designer Paul Palmentola would live in infamy for his work on the Katzman serials. Here we can see him busting a gut to match the undercranked stock footage stadium wide shots and simulating a Drive-In restaurant with one clip-on tray the waitress collects from the car door. Like a lot of the people trapped on these derisive budgets, he was not without skill. They needed it just to get by.

Leading man is Ray Walker - think a poor man’s Jimmy Dunne, who was a poor man’s Don Ameche. Walker attacks the part with energy and registers sympathetically. He would have a long career subsiding into often un-credited bit parts. Leading lady, one time Zeigfield Girl Geneva Mitchell was presentable and the support cast offered a  surprise with silent comic Snubb Pollard playing his henchman part straight.

Max Wagner with Pollard.

The plot has boxer Walker running foul of small time crime boss Wilbur Mack, by refusing to throw a fight (“All my friends are betting on me”) and being recruited into the police by the prospect of working with an ex champion at their gym. No training montage in this picture, Walker just appears on a neighborhood beat in uniform. (compare the introduction to combat in The Deer Hunter)

Intriguingly the use of anonymous players in unmodified period motor transport in real city fringe settings gives the piece a plausible tackiness and Cummings' straightforward handling manages reasonable pacing. There’s even the odd surprise, as when the store clerk follows the robber into the street and lets off a couple of rounds at him. However Cummings can’t defeat dialogue like “Don’t try to think, fat head! We got to lay low till this blows over.”

Coming at it with minimal expectations, I quite enjoyed this one. Without wanting to over-sell it eighty years after the event, Crime Patrol and the B movie conventions in which it is made, stand up better than a lot of more ambitious work. I can understand why more than a few veteran regular movie-goers prioritised these, recognising them as tailored for their own undemanding tastes.

The You Tube copies on these are OK - and The Hidden Hand is very nice.

Barrie Pattison 2022

SQUID GAME.

There's no denying the attention getting ability of Netflix' Ojing-eo gei / The Squid Game. Beyond that,  it raises the possibility that we are watching the future of screened entertainment - a (South) Korean series delivered by a streaming service in the original language with sub-titles (the bad guys speak English) in pin sharp 16.9 that blows away the presentations of multi million dollar movies. It appears to have burrowed into world wide awareness.

We have to consider what exactly is happening here and where it came from. The work  really extends the line that runs through Nineteenth Century pulp serials, Fantômas and Dr. Mabuse, Republic and Sam Katzman, Superargo and Diabolik, Santo and Psycho. The imagery is as imposing as theirs - pastel shade Escher mazes, armed, bee featured, scarlet suit heavies, a criminal mastermind in a cubist black face mask (great piece of design). We get a fantastic secret headquarters run by a fiend with a hidden identity. Somewhere along the line, this has got mashed in with the Asian ultra violence cycle - Takashi Miike's Koroshiya 1/Ichi the Killer, Park Chan-wook's Oldeuboi/Old Boy and Chinjeolhan geumjassi / Sympathy for Lady Vengeance and their rip-offs, with Most Dangerous Game / Hounds of Zarroff and the Battle Royales bringing up the rear.

 I will admit to being sucked in, though I only intended to dip into a couple of episodes. They managed to manufacture the most seat gripping cliffhanger that I've run into in all this body of work.

Intriguingly Squid Game comes largely free of Marxist content. The worker heavies are backed by obscenely wealthy V.I.P. gamblers. Deadbeat dad hero Lee Jung-jae is a victim of his own destructive gambling habit, exploited by proletarian Seoul crims who make him sign a deed to his organs in his own blood. His wife is about to take their child to the U.S. out of his reach, though the kid enjoys his fast food birthday party her mum wouldn't have allowed. Even when he makes a killing at the track, this is lifted by girl pick pocket Hoyeon.

In the pit of his desperation, our hero is joined by briefcase man Gong Yoo who he shifts down the subway bench to avoid, saying "I don't believe in Jesus." Turns out the stranger offers the two envelope game where a loss gets a slap and a win a bundle of bank notes. The stranger leaves the business card with the circle, triangle and 'phone number which introduces the Squid Game, an ultra sadistic variation of the childrens' playground activity that opens the series in black and white.

 It's not till the participants get onto the playing field dominated by the giant swiveling fairground doll and see losers gunned down, that they realise what they are into. Characters include aged Oh yeung-su, thug Heo Sung-tae and the lead's old school chum Yoo Seong-ju, who has lost speculating his company's millions. Shrewish Kim Joo-Ryung makes a particularly vivid impression and figures (doubled) in one of the piece's two sex scenes.

Lee Jung-jae & Kim Joo-Ryung

In a character-istically cynical development, players who exercise an escape clause determine that the outside world is more menacing than the game environment. As desperation increases, loyalties fray and standards dissolve. 

Design factor is impressive - the stark dormitory where the beds get stacked in a replica of the maze entrances and cartoon depictions of the games appear on the walls. Bodies are incinerated in pink gift ribbon decorated coffins. Interloper cop Park he-soo penetrates the control area with its luxury observer lounge adorned with human shaped cushions and occupied by glitter faced speculators.

The piece builds to the ferocious episode Four (out of nine) and the general consensus is that it falls away from there. We get the impression the writers painted themselves into a couple of corners - unable to work out plot elements - though the revelation that playing the game is the ultimate incentive isn't bad and, as always in mini series world, needing to keep their options open for a sequel.

Ojing-eo gei / Squid Game.

 

 

 

Showrunner Hwang Dong-hyeok has form after his admired features, the 2011 Do-ga-ni / Silenced (spot Kim Joo-Ryung) and 2014's Soo-sang-han geun-yeo / Miss Granny. His attack is marred by already familiar touches - Stanley Kubric is in there, with the evil patrician turning away from the life and death struggle like Lawrence Olivier in Spartacus, and it's a liberty to make use of "The Blue Danube" again, while the heavy waving from the departing subway carriage immediately calls up distracting memories of William Friedkin's The French Connection. Even so, series drama attention now focuses on Hwang, after an act that it won't be easy for him to follow.

I leave this one with an alarmed feeling that I have seen the future and it might be working. 

 

Barrie Pattison 2022