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Jun. 10th, 2015 05:37 pmWhen it comes to nonfiction, the stuff I seem to be most drawn to these days is a.) books about WWII and b.) behind-the-scenes books about theater and movies and television, so it is exactly not a huge surprise that I ended up reading Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. GIVEN GIVENS.
Five Came Back is basically a braided biography of five directors -- John Ford, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Huston, and William Wyler -- all of whom left Hollywood around the time of Pearl Harbor to enlist in the army and make war propaganda.
The stories of the directors are indeed fascinating, especially Wyler, Stevens and Huston. Huston faked/reenacted a bunch of footage for documentaries where the American photographers didn't manage to be on the spot to get anything worthwhile, despised himself for it, and then came home and made what he thought would be a redeeming documentary about psychiatric treatment for returning soldiers, at which point the Army promptly went UH NOPE and refused to let anyone see it for thirty-five years. Stevens, originally, a director of light-hearted comedies, ended up trekking around with the units that discovered the concentration camps, and made the documentaries that were shown at Nuremberg to convince the prosecution of the Nazi crimes; for the rest of his career, he pretty much never made another comic film. Wyler -- who was German Jewish to begin with -- almost got court-martialed for punching out a guy who made anti-Semitic remarks, tried so hard to get good footage from the inside of a fighter plane that he lost his hearing from the noise of the engine, and then had to come home and figure out how to be a director who couldn't hear dialogue or soundtracks. This story would be really depressing if he hadn't then gone on to make a bajillion famous films anyway and got more Academy Award nominations than any director in history. Also, his really cute-sounding marriage -- literally running into each other's arms when he first saw her while he was on leave! -- appears to have lasted happily until his death at the age of 79 (though the book didn't tell me that, I had to check it on Wikipedia.) Way to go, Wyler!
HOWEVER, as compelling as all these human stories of profound change during wartime are, the most interesting part for me was the story of the corpus of war propaganda itself -- all the back-and-forth between the directors and Hollywood and the government, trying to figure out what the heck they were even doing. Like, what kind of films are they even trying to make? What truths are not OK to tell? If you're making anti-Japanese propaganda, how racist is too racist? (Spoiler: you have to be really damn racist before you get too racist, but the LINE WAS APPARENTLY INDEED THERE.) And speaking of racism, how about trying to make a recruitment documentary for black soldiers in a deeply racist white America, what does that look like? What kind of things can you show to soldiers, and what can you show to the general public, and what kind of things can't you show to anybody? Sorry, Huston, but nobody wants to hear that going to war can fuck you up. Everyone who came back is fine. EVERYTHING'S FINE.
An added bonus: almost all the films discussed were produced by the government, which makes them officially public domain. If you're bored and you're curious about the time Dr. Seuss, Chuck Jones, and Frank Capra teamed up to make raunchy training cartoons, check out Private Snafu, aka Elmer Fudd Teaches You What Not To Do In the U.S. Army.
Five Came Back is basically a braided biography of five directors -- John Ford, George Stevens, Frank Capra, John Huston, and William Wyler -- all of whom left Hollywood around the time of Pearl Harbor to enlist in the army and make war propaganda.
The stories of the directors are indeed fascinating, especially Wyler, Stevens and Huston. Huston faked/reenacted a bunch of footage for documentaries where the American photographers didn't manage to be on the spot to get anything worthwhile, despised himself for it, and then came home and made what he thought would be a redeeming documentary about psychiatric treatment for returning soldiers, at which point the Army promptly went UH NOPE and refused to let anyone see it for thirty-five years. Stevens, originally, a director of light-hearted comedies, ended up trekking around with the units that discovered the concentration camps, and made the documentaries that were shown at Nuremberg to convince the prosecution of the Nazi crimes; for the rest of his career, he pretty much never made another comic film. Wyler -- who was German Jewish to begin with -- almost got court-martialed for punching out a guy who made anti-Semitic remarks, tried so hard to get good footage from the inside of a fighter plane that he lost his hearing from the noise of the engine, and then had to come home and figure out how to be a director who couldn't hear dialogue or soundtracks. This story would be really depressing if he hadn't then gone on to make a bajillion famous films anyway and got more Academy Award nominations than any director in history. Also, his really cute-sounding marriage -- literally running into each other's arms when he first saw her while he was on leave! -- appears to have lasted happily until his death at the age of 79 (though the book didn't tell me that, I had to check it on Wikipedia.) Way to go, Wyler!
HOWEVER, as compelling as all these human stories of profound change during wartime are, the most interesting part for me was the story of the corpus of war propaganda itself -- all the back-and-forth between the directors and Hollywood and the government, trying to figure out what the heck they were even doing. Like, what kind of films are they even trying to make? What truths are not OK to tell? If you're making anti-Japanese propaganda, how racist is too racist? (Spoiler: you have to be really damn racist before you get too racist, but the LINE WAS APPARENTLY INDEED THERE.) And speaking of racism, how about trying to make a recruitment documentary for black soldiers in a deeply racist white America, what does that look like? What kind of things can you show to soldiers, and what can you show to the general public, and what kind of things can't you show to anybody? Sorry, Huston, but nobody wants to hear that going to war can fuck you up. Everyone who came back is fine. EVERYTHING'S FINE.
An added bonus: almost all the films discussed were produced by the government, which makes them officially public domain. If you're bored and you're curious about the time Dr. Seuss, Chuck Jones, and Frank Capra teamed up to make raunchy training cartoons, check out Private Snafu, aka Elmer Fudd Teaches You What Not To Do In the U.S. Army.
