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Jun. 10th, 2015 05:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWhen 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.
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Date: 2015-06-11 03:56 am (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-06-11 06:39 am (UTC)I am so glad you read this book! I adored it. It is a shelf away from me as we speak. Also it made me very fond of William Wyler, about whom I had known pretty much nothing personally before picking it up. I want very much to see The Best Years of Our Lives now.
I also adore Private Snafu, but that should not surprise anybody.
[edit] Speaking of Huston's Let There Be Light, have you seen the short film about PTSD née combat fatigue that Gene Kelly starred in?
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Date: 2015-06-11 12:05 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-06-11 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-11 05:00 pm (UTC)It's Summer Stock: An American Theatrical Phenomenon by Martha Schmoyer LoMonaco, being a history of (surprise) summer stock theater.
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Date: 2015-06-11 06:43 pm (UTC)It's worth it for the thread on Wyler alone. Seriously, I knew him as a director with no information about his life except the guess that he was Jewish, and he's fascinating. (And as far as I can tell, got the best ending of anyone in the book, despite the permanent disability thing.) It's also just a very well-written history. It has a lot of novelistic features, but not so much that it ever tips over into fiction rather than hookily structured documentary.
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Date: 2015-06-11 06:47 pm (UTC)It's one of the incredibly famous films I haven't seen! Five Came Back makes a strong case for it as a deeply personal project of Wyler's, which makes sense to me. It came around on TCM recently, but I held off because I want to see it on a big screen where I can appreciate Gregg Toland's cinematography.
That movie made me forgive him for Wuthering Heights, which was GODAWFUL.
I really think I would have liked that movie better if Wyler had gotten his original choice for Heathcliff, Robert Newton intead of Laurence Olivier.
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Date: 2015-06-11 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2015-06-12 12:14 pm (UTC)I have not seen the Gene Kelly combat fatigue film! Nor heard of it. :O Thank you for the link!
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Date: 2015-06-12 12:15 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2015-06-12 06:02 pm (UTC)You know, since you didn't move to Virginia, we could conceivably watch it together.
Thank you for the link!
Enjoy! It came to my attention in 2013, which I think may have been when it was made available on the internet; it's the equivalent of a training film in that it was made only for an audience of enlisted men coping with combat fatigue and medical professionals helping to treat them, so it was an effectively lost film from the end of the war until the National Library of Medicine dug it out of the archives a few years ago. Gene Kelly is very good in it, and because of the context, it's allowed to be much more more realistic, much less bombastic, and much nastier than a Hollywood production dealing with the same material would have. I still side-eye some of the things Kelly's psychiatrist says, but that's a matter of the field having moved on considerably, not the script being stupid. Kelly's great.
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Date: 2015-06-12 07:31 pm (UTC)Also, you've moved this book up on my to be read list. It really sounds interesting.
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Date: 2015-06-13 07:26 pm (UTC)Though, I mean, given that this was the VERY RATIONALE used for internment it's not exactly a shining example of ethics and open-mindedness on behalf of the US. And then again, there was another film that was made that was already quite racist and the government was like, "NO, THIS IS FOR SOLDIERS! NOT RACIST ENOUGH! MORE ANTI-JAPANESE PROPAGANDA PLEASE!" so, you know, it varies.
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Date: 2015-06-13 07:28 pm (UTC)That sounds fascinating. And, man, moment of appreciation for whichever archivist at the NLM paused long enough in whatever they were doing to notice that this film was interesting and should potentially be digitized.
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Date: 2015-06-13 07:54 pm (UTC)E-mail me! Let us make this happen! Do you have a television?
(I ask because we watch everything on my laptop, which is really not fair to good cinematography.)
And, man, moment of appreciation for whichever archivist at the NLM paused long enough in whatever they were doing to notice that this film was interesting and should potentially be digitized.
Agreed! I just did a brief Google-search to see if I could find anything about the rediscovery of the film—and didn't, at least not anything that would tell me who actually noticed it, but I did find a three-part interview about the film with Kelly's daughter, who is a practicing psychotherapist. It's great. (Kerry Kelly Novick is very sympathetic to the actor who has to play the psychiatrist, because he doesn't have much to work with.)
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Date: 2015-06-13 08:24 pm (UTC)The degree to which anti-Japanese racism was casually acceptable—and the degree of caricature with which it was expressed—continues to amaze me, in the way where "amaze" means "horrify and actually upset." I tuned in once on TCM to a wartime comedy starring Danny Kaye; I didn't get all of the plot, but he's a goofy hypochondriac who gets drafted, shipped to the South Pacific, humorously cock-blocked by a plot twist where his girlfriend also enlisted and now outranks him, meaning no fraternization; it's all the usual you're-in-the-army-now shenanigans plus bonus double-talk from Kaye until the third act lands them on a Japanese-occupied island and all of a sudden Kaye becomes the hero by impersonating the Japanese commander with nothing more than a pair of Coke-bottle glasses and an offensive accent and the buck-toothed, dumb-as-a-brick Japanese soldiers are so fanatically hierarchical that they all follow him around the island like lemmings until he's either disposed of them by leading them into their own booby traps or gotten them to surrender to the Americans and if you have a really good image of a person staring in total shock at a thing they were not expecting from their Technicolor RKO musical, it goes here. The internet tells me that was Up in Arms (1944), Danny Kaye's first feature film. DAVID KAMINSKY I AM VERY DISAPPOINT.
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Date: 2015-06-14 03:33 am (UTC)The other thing that really struck me from this book was the anecdote where Huston -- left-wing, liberal, close friend of Wyler's -- freaks out at his driver/cameraman when they're in a stressful combat-ish situation and calls him a "goddamned Jew," or something along those lines. And then the other cameraman is like "DUDE LIKE DO YOU WANT TO GO HANG OUT WITH NAZIS OR WHAT" and Huston apologizes with a great deal of embarrassment, but -- well, if this were a work way of fiction, I would be impressed in a technical narrative way with the author's paralleling of that event with Wyler's similar but completely opposite explosion at the anti-Semitic doorman, but as it is, it's a thing that really happened.
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Date: 2015-06-14 07:42 pm (UTC)Yes! Which is why it's very difficult to plot in ways that are true to life, because we have completely unreasonable expectations for fiction.