The Big Screen

by David Thomson

  There were those who said no country capable of making To Be or Not to Be was going to lose the war. Yes, it was anti-Nazi, in a very witty way, but it was also a movie about show business—first things first, for Lubitsch: sex or show business—as if to say, war is no excuse for losing your priorities. So let’s not forget that it is in the years of war that Hollywood produced some of its best comedies. To Be or Not to Be is a member of that class—and you’d have to include To Have and Have Not (1944), which makes passing references to Vichy and sometimes sniffs the proximity of war, and must have astonished the Hemingway unaware of having written a comedy.

  The more earnest Hollywood became, the more fatuous it seemed. Mrs. Miniver (1942) was entirely well intentioned, and based on short stories by Jan Struther about being a housewife in Britain during the war. It was directed by a serious man, William Wyler, played by Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, and by many accounts it assisted the task of persuading Americans to join the war. As such, it won Best Picture for 1942 and did terrific business. Still, it is ludicrous, especially in its claim that these Minivers are “ordinary middle-class people” who buy exotic hats and a sports car and live on an acre or two. Mrs. Miniver is unplayable today, and in 1942 it was derided in the Britain it is supposed to depict.

  There had been misunderstandings on Mrs. Miniver. The film was shot at M-G-M in 1941, before Pearl Harbor. There was a downed German flyer in the script, sheltering in the Minivers’ spacious garden. He was drawn as a decent type, but in the filming Wyler (who was Jewish and had been born in Germany) turned him into a Göring-type thug. When Louis B. Mayer saw the dailies, he called Wyler to his office. What are you doing? he wanted to know. “We don’t make hate pictures…We’re not at war…We have theaters all over the world, including a couple in Berlin.” The astonished director replied, “Mr. Mayer, you know what’s going on, don’t you?” Mayer paused and backed down, though Wyler suspected the boss might still reshoot the problem scene with another director. By the time the picture opened (on June 4, 1942, in New York, and a month later in London), Mr. Mayer had realized what was going on, and he stood behind his courage when Mrs. Miniver won Best Picture.

  But it was a hit because it came at the right moment. It opened in America just a few months after war had been declared, so it was the ribbon on a fait accompli. Luckier still in its timing, and far more entertaining, was Casablanca, a war film that follows the useful advice of having no battle scenes. Showing your troops the vaguest picture of what battle looks and feels like is generally less productive than giving them a movie in which the guys sit around and talk big.

  No one dreamed of Casablanca being the war statement it became. As the title of the play that began it all (Everybody Comes to Rick’s) suggests, it is about a nightclub in an exotic place, the capital of French Morocco. It is a love story set against the intrigue of a town where Vichy, the Nazis, and as-yet-unassigned Americans are waiting. It was purchased by Warners and set up as a Hal Wallis production that might suit several of Warners’ contract players.

  By now, it is a mythic work, and one of its legends is the credo of the factory: that if everyone does his bit, the film will feel as if someone made it. People tell stories about how George Raft or Ronald Reagan might have been Rick, with Hedy Lamarr or Ann Sheridan as Ilse. And “might have been” was a weather condition in the Hollywood factory. Still, most shrewd heads thought Rick was meant for Bogart, even if that wisdom came after he was seen in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. As for Ingrid, she did it because David Selznick told her to, and because he made a profit on the loan-out.

  Michael Curtiz directed the film, and that flamboyant Hungarian was the model of a factory system director who had a knack for turning every assignment into the same cheap silk. Auteurists have not raised Curtiz to the pantheon, in part because of the jokes told about his awful English and the way he would telephone his wife, Bess Meredyth, a screenwriter, whenever he had a problem. This is a little severe, or humorless. Curtiz is in a class of directors, along with Mitchell Leisen and Gregory La Cava, who seldom let a film down.

  The script for Casablanca was by several hands—the Epstein brothers, Howard Koch, Casey Robinson, and maybe others—and your parents can quote lines from the film as if they were set in stone. There’s Dooley Wilson singing “As Time Goes By” at the piano that holds the letters of transit, and Paul Henreid with an elegant scar on his face to prove he’s been in a concentration camp. There is also the hokum of a love triangle in which two top lovers agree to let each other go for the war effort. When it comes to Hollywood thinking, the money for ten destroyers is one thing, a second front another, but letting your best girl go because it doesn’t matter a hill of beans is what a real man was made for. Every boy deserved this Second World War.

  One of the delights in Casablanca is seeing how quickly Los Angeles had become a home for refugees: so there is Conrad Veidt (from Caligari) as Strasser, the German star who had to get out of Germany with his Jewish wife; there is Marcel Dalio (a Marquis not so long ago for Renoir), who knows how to bring up the right number at Rick’s roulette table; and there is Peter Lorre, still marked down for murder, even if he’s more viable as a victim now. All these engaging “supports” (including Sydney Greenstreet) have as their godfather Claude Rains, the one-time acting teacher at RADA (Charles Laughton was his student) who gave up London for Los Angeles and who was making his way through six wives as if they were just movies, becoming an epitome of cynicism as Captain Louis Renault.

  Ask the man on the street today to name a Hollywood picture, and Casablanca will be there in the first list. It’s such a nostalgia-encrusted classic that we are spared having to notice that it is fake, foolish, and fanciful beyond belief. Yes, it won Best Picture and it was blessed by one further bonus: just as the picture was ready to be opened, the Allied armies landed in North Africa and relieved another town, a real one, also named Casablanca, on November 1, 1942. There was no fooling the public: they knew providence had hit them and they went home singing “As Time Goes By” or “La Marseillaise.” A movie is just a movie, and if you insist on seeing the Second World War as a song contest made for heroes and magic, Casablanca is the best fun.

  When the real Casablanca was taken, Warners’ first thought was to add a new last shot where Rick and Renault, entering the mist of their “beautiful friendship”—the sort available in North Africa?—hear FDR announcing the Allied landing. But Rains was out of town. Other spectators thought the film was just fine as is. Maybe someone even suggested that a single note of the outside world could crush the butterfly. The picture opened on Thanksgiving Day 1942, just as Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca.

  On its first run, through 1943, Casablanca had rentals of $3.05 million. But in 1942, for Paramount, The Road to Morocco brought in $4.0 million. You will say there is no comparison: the Hope and Crosby picture is a silly comedy, whereas Casablanca is played in earnest. Maybe they’re closer than anyone thought in 1942, and let us remember that the number one box office attraction in the war years, and a man who endangered his own health by going to remote and dangerous places to entertain the troops, was Bob Hope.

  The sight of movie celebrities in uniform, or on the road with the USO, became common. Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck persuaded themselves into being honorary “colonels.” Bette Davis helped organize the Hollywood Canteen. Gable put on an air force uniform and missed four years of moviemaking. Jimmy Stewart flew on twenty bomber missions and had a nervous breakdown as a result. David Selznick was mortified that no service would risk taking him, so he wrote and produced his home front movie, Since You Went Away, in which Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, and Shirley Temple are women left at home, doing their bit, but really doing far too little for 172 minutes. It’s a film from the heart, lovingly made and unquestionably respectful of its subject, but then real-life melodrama intruded. In the movie, Ms. Jones has a soldier sweetheart going off to be killed. He was played by Robert Walker (Mr. Jones in li
fe). Behind the scenes, Selznick was having an intense affair with Jones that would ruin both their marriages. In truth, that was a more interesting scenario than Since You Went Away.

  At the end of the war, the realities of combat and service crept onto the screen—or if not quite the realities, then the smooth version of them. The Story of G.I. Joe (1945; by William Wellman, an air force veteran from the first war) had Burgess Meredith as war reporter Ernie Pyle, and Robert Mitchum at his best as a fatalistic soldier. A Walk in the Sun (1945) was one of the first dogged tributes to the foot soldier. And John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945) was a melancholy account of the holding action in the Pacific as MacArthur withdrew. It was based on real figures, and it stressed how Ford was always going to be more moved by defeat than victory. Of course, this feature film grew out of Ford’s actual service making documentaries.

  A group of the guys, the manly directors, did the same sort of thing. Ford made The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943). Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak did a series of documentaries, and John Huston made wartime reports and Let There Be Light (1946), the first halfway-candid account of shellshock, breakdown, and fear and the mess such things made of the real guys who were trying to be like John Garfield (Pride of the Marines, 1945) or Errol Flynn (Objective, Burma!, 1945). Five years later, John Wayne was the marine sergeant in Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), as if to say he knew what hell was like. Yet the Duke had carefully missed the war.

  Once the war was over, a deluge of war films began. In the bad years, Britain had made a series of responsible documentaries and feature films under the shadow of the real thing: In Which We Serve, The Way to the Stars (scripted by Terence Rattigan, based on his play Flare Path), The Way Ahead. There was a looseness in such films, as if to suggest the real untidiness of war. But secure in victory, the stiff upper lip turned to timber as the British film business sought out every positive incident from the war: Morning Departure (1950), The Wooden Horse (1950), The Cruel Sea (1953), The Dam Busters (1955), The Colditz Story (1955), Reach for the Sky (1956), Carve Her Name with Pride (1958), Ice Cold in Alex (1958). It was to ambush that advancing column that David Lean made The Bridge on the River Kwai, about different kinds of duty and military preoccupation, in which Alec Guinness’s colonel is recognizably a version of that husband, Fred, we met in Brief Encounter.

  Whenever the British made group films about the war, team spirit got in the way. But there are lonely individuals worth remembering. What about Trevor Howard’s brusque Calloway, the military policeman in The Third Man, and his gradual revelation that Harry Lime’s boyish charm may mask real evil and plots to give drugs to children? There isn’t another British film that catches the postwar European mood so well, not to mention the dirty smile on the face of Vienna. But Orson Welles was so seductive as Harry Lime that within a year of the film, he was playing Lime in a radio series where the black marketeer had become a hero.

  Or remember Richard Burton’s Leith in Nicholas Ray’s Bitter Victory (1957), a film that has precise desert action, the tragedy of killing your own wounded as you try to save them, and the sense of courage and philosophy being lost in a sandstorm. There is Alec Guinness’s George Smiley, a cold war fighter, to be sure, but a man who has seen his own faith and life erased by duty and its duplicities. Let me add another figure: Susan Traherne, the woman Meryl Streep plays in Plenty, adapted from David Hare’s smoldering play, a young heroine of the resistance who nearly goes mad in the subsequent betrayal of so many wartime rules.

  The wartime scenes in Plenty take place in France, and they involve a war of occupation. French cinema goes numb in the war years and comes back to life only with René Clément’s La Bataille du Rail (1946), which is not that far removed from the spirit of Italian neorealism. For France, the war was a devastating experience, not just the rapid defeat of the French army and the subsequent insignificance of French leadership. The war is a matter of resistance and its opposites, degrees of collaboration or compromise that reached as far as such leading filmmakers as Arletty and Marcel Carné.

  Over the years, a number of French films have observed the war years at home and found disturbing complexity. As early as 1947–48, in his debut film, Jean-Pierre Melville turned to Le Silence de la Mer (1949), Vercors’s novel about a smothered love affair between a French girl and a German soldier posted to her village. Melville had served in the Resistance, but Le Silence is remembered for its fairness and its view of the German as a human being. Decades later, in Army of Shadows (1969), Melville would deliver one of the classic films about the Resistance, in which there was no room for a sympathetic German. Instead, it is a cruel war in which the men determine that they must execute one of their own, played by Simone Signoret. There is another good German in Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), a war film and a peace film, and one of the first movies to grasp the international level of the conflict. There is also Bertrand Tavernier’s Safe Conduct (2002), which concerns the film industry during the war years and benefits from Tavernier’s research in that period.

  There are two other films that must not be forgotten and which are both marked by the impact of war and its consequences. Joseph Losey’s Mr. Klein (1976) concerns an art dealer in wartime Paris (played by the impassive but imperturbable Alain Delon). He is sure of himself and his tranquil life until he realizes there may be another Klein who is Jewish and who is being hunted. Mr. Klein is about paranoia and insecurity and the idea of doubling—almost as abstract things—but Losey knew how far those conditions, the modern terror, were a legacy of the war. Few countries suffered a more depleting self-exposure than France: to be occupied is a severe test and one that continues to help define America’s innocence or inexperience.

  The other unforgettable film is A Man Escaped (1956), by Robert Bresson. This is a film of hands, glances, bars, rope, sounds, and music. It is Bresson. But it is a war film, too, about a man who is being held by the German authorities and who faces execution. When he escapes finally, the effect is of sublimity—keyed to Mozart’s C-minor mass. It is a spiritual release, and one of the least-flawed moments of glory in the French war film.

  Alas, war films piled on that lacked Bresson’s tact. Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967) was a big hit, but it did not bother to conceal its own exploitation of stereotypes, heroism, action, and brutality. This was all the sadder in that Aldrich had made an earlier film, Attack! (1956), filled with authentic anguish. But The Dirty Dozen was much more influential, and one can feel its ugly gusto behind Inglourious Basterds (2009), one of the first films that did not seem to understand what happened in the Second World War but took the crudest films as a matter of record. One day that reality will be offset, because there will be no one left alive who was alive in the war years. Already the firsthand experience of the Great War has passed on. In which case, who can say that the effective record of the Second will not depend on films as mediocre and complacent as The Longest Day (1962), A Bridge Too Far (1977), The Guns of Navarone (1961), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and Patton (1970)—instead of, say, Bitter Victory (1957), Anthony Mann’s Men in War (1957), John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1968), or Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), all of which are less known than the “blockbusters.”

  Men in War is the Korean War, but that film is so distilled a study of a platoon on patrol (with an unseen enemy) that it could be any war, anywhere. A larger issue arises with The Conformist (in which there is a political assassination—one of the most distressing murders on film), but Bertolucci’s film mines the uneasy ground of what happened in Italy under fascism, and of the way weakness and ambition let tyranny thrive.

  War is combat now; the cult of military hardware is married to film’s code of special effects. Saving Private Ryan (1998) is unmistakably D-day (as if shot by Robert Capa), and the rifles made the correct noises. Whereas The Deer Hunter (1978) was a version of Vietnam vulnerable to charges of inaccuracy. The fact remains that both pictures see conflict isolated from politics
. In this light, the scary immediacy of Saving Private Ryan is let down by Spielberg’s muted but painfully proper political sensibility, while The Deer Hunter is colored by Michael Cimino’s feeling of what a self-determined ordeal had done to America.

  Saving Private Ryan trusts that its audience will agree—yes, this was a just war, and like Ryan, we need to deserve its sacrifice. But The Deer Hunter is braver in that, only a few years after actual withdrawal, it says we should not have been there and were there only because of our ignorance and the way that fed bellicosity. This is where we can see how far war and its links to modern terror are not going away. For just as in, say, The Best Years of Our Lives as much as in Saving Private Ryan, no one thinks to say Americans should not be fighting, so many modern films are still driven by the history that treats war and film as inseparable. The virtue or energy in Inglourious Basterds is Tarantino’s assurance that today the war cannot be contemplated without the song and slaughter of its movies—and the increasingly weird realization of how obedient, how accepting the public was then. War films today have yet to deal with the public’s loss of faith in movies themselves, and the comical yet hideous notion of how tidily battle can be handled. How do we retain patriotism, or anything that carries the same conviction? How do we see combat except as a war game?

  So war has become, on-screen, a metaphor for uncertainty and disorder. The magnificent lucidity of the battles in Saving Private Ryan is also youthful. How can anyone believe in such accuracy in shooting and tactics? The last battle in that film is wonderfully exciting, but its precision probably inspired some video games. Can we still believe in heroes and expertise in war? We know that war is confusion, panic, friendly fire, mistakes, and nothing fit for lucidity. It is just as Tolstoy said of the Battle of Borodino. Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down, in which a high-tech American mission is disrupted by Mogadishu rabble, is a more honest combat film, and accurate in its explanation of America withdrawing from Somalia. We have lived long enough to see that the vaunted heroics of the war movie can be a disguise for our political ignorance and helplessness.