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