by Mark Harris
Even Capra’s closest associates were confounded by the chasm between the man and his movie. At one point during the shooting of Mr. Smith, Buchman tried to draw Capra out about some of the ideas that mattered to him in the film, particularly that of the importance of maintaining vigilance in a democracy. “Go get fucked with your theme!” Capra snapped, arguing that his only obligation was to entertain the public. “Are you a Communist?”
“Are you a Fascist?” Buchman shot back. He wasn’t the only one who wondered. In July 1939, as Capra neared the end of production in Los Angeles, Edward Bernds witnessed him explode when he couldn’t get a large group of extras to pay attention. “These are the people, the fellows you want to do things for!” Capra sneered, baiting his pro-union colleague. The tantrum led Bernds to speculate in his diary that Capra’s real credo was that “the mob is so lazy, so stupid, so wrong-headed that only harsh leadership of energetic, able men (fascism) is practical. Sure F.C. feels something like it.”
If war was on Capra’s mind, there is little evidence of it in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. When Smith makes an ardent plea to “get boys out of crowded cities”—a favorite target of Capra’s scorn—“and stuffy basements for a couple of months of the year” so they can “build their bodies and minds for a man-sized job,” it’s not the job that many were speculating was imminent; Smith quickly explains that “those boys are going to be behind these desks” sometime soon. During the making of the film, Capra almost willed himself to ignore the front pages; for all its rhetoric, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington makes almost no mention of international events at all. Capra was locked away in an editing room on a September Friday working on a cut he was planning to test a few weeks later in New York City when he learned that Germany had invaded Poland. By the time he returned to work on Monday morning, Time had given a name to what had begun. The magazine, using its own coinage, was calling it “World War II.”
Capra still had a movie to promote, and he had no intention of allowing Mr. Smith to arrive quietly. On October 16, 1939, he presided over an invitation-only preview at Washington, D.C.’s four-thousand-seat Constitution Hall with a guest list that included 250 congressmen and about half of the ninety-six senators who were so pointedly lampooned in the film as thieves, boobs, and ineffectual fogies. In his autobiography, Capra, relishing every embellishment, recounts the story of how that evening unfolded as an inexorably mounting fiasco of tragicomic proportions, with cries of “Insult!” and “Outrage!” reverberating in the auditorium and a handful of walkouts eventually turning into a stampede that left more than a thousand seats empty. Capra claimed that the press corps, which was in attendance cheek by jowl with cabinet secretaries, Supreme Court justices, and elected officials, had turned on the movie because journalists “envied and feared film as a rival opinion maker” and were offended at being depicted as alcoholic layabouts; they “berated, scorned, vilified and ripped me open” after the movie ended, he wrote. Their contempt, in his telling, was rivaled only by that of the senators, who were affronted by the film’s suggestion that “graft could rear its ugly head in the august Senate chamber.”
The reality was less dramatic—newspaper reports at the time mentioned only minimal walkouts, no catcalls, and a polite though not effusive reception that included a round of applause at the end. But there was no disputing that Mr. Smith had made Capra some powerful enemies that evening. Kentucky senator Alben Barkley, the Democratic majority leader and a dead ringer for the Senate president played in the film by the veteran character actor Harry Carey, was particularly vocal, denouncing Capra’s work to the New York Times as “silly and stupid” and complaining that it “makes the Senate look like a bunch of crooks.” Republican senator Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. dismissed the movie as “ridiculous—just something from Hollywood,” and Senator George Norris, an independent from Nebraska, remarked, “I’ve been in Congress 36 years, but I’ve never seen a member as dumb as that boy.” “Not all Senators are sons of bitches,” complained another.
With some congressmen punitively suggesting to the press that it might be an ideal moment to advance anti–block booking legislation—a series of laws intended to loosen the studios’ collective chokehold on theater owners—Washington’s hostility to the movie industry was threatening to reach another of its now-frequent boiling points. Joseph P. Kennedy, then serving a brief term as U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom, weighed in as well, telling Will Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, that he considered the film “one of the most disgraceful things I have ever seen done to our country,” and warning Columbia’s Harry Cohn that “to show this film in foreign countries will do inestimable harm to American prestige all over the world.”
Capra wasted no time in launching a counteroffensive. Days after the Washington preview, he told reporters, “With all those things they’ve got to do down there, with the neutrality bill, and social legislation, with war breaking loose in Europe . . . the whole majesty of the United States Senate has to move against one moving picture. It’s amazing!” As soon as it opened, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington found all the defenders it needed; the New York Times spoke for most critics when its reviewer commented that the picture was protected by “that unwritten clause in the Bill of Rights entitling every voting citizen to at least one free swing at the Senate. Mr. Capra’s swing is from the floor and in the best of humor; if it fails to rock that august body to its heels—from laughter as much as injured dignity—it won’t be his fault but the Senate’s and we should really begin to worry about the upper house.” Even those who belittled the movie’s plot as “eyewash,” as the sharp-minded, sharp-tongued Otis Ferguson did in the New Republic, argued that “the Senate and the machinery of how it may be used to advantage is shown better than it ever has been.”
Although Mr. Smith was only a middling box-office hit at the time of its release, the movie’s warm critical reception reaffirmed Capra’s status as, in the words of the New Yorker, “the surest director in Hollywood” and “professionally, at least, a consistent champion of people in the lower income groups.” In interviews, Capra was becoming increasingly prone to lofty self-aggrandizement, and in early 1940, as the film opened around the country, he was moved to announce that “the underlying value of my movies is actually the Sermon on the Mount” and to reveal his desire to make a film in which “Mussolini . . . or the Prince of Wales . . . goes down to a bordello, and then a little trollop like Mary Magdalen tells him . . . to throw away your guns, throw away every goddamn cannon in the ocean, open up your borders.”
But in private, Capra was generally more modest and temperate. Even as he started making plans for his next film, he was deeply troubled by firsthand news of the war in Europe. For the last several years, he had corresponded with Lionel Robinson, a bookseller in London whose help he had enlisted when he decided he wanted to furnish his Brentwood home with more than $100,000 of rare and antique volumes and first editions. “My dear Frank,” Robinson wrote just weeks after England declared war on Germany. “I think you might like to know what is happening to us in London now that this dreadful war has been forced upon us. So far the expected has not happened and instead of being regularly bombed by enemy aircraft we have been subject only to an uneasy anticipation of them. . . . We shall of course remain in Pall Mall as long as we can but if, and when, the position becomes really dangerous we have arranged for temporary accommodation in Oxford . . . God willing . . . whatever happens the world of books will carry on.” Within a month Robinson and his family were forced to evacuate. “I am glad your wife and children are at least out of the center of things,” Capra wrote back. “Somehow, we feel over here this terrible thing will end without too much destruction. Maybe it is just . . . hope.”
His encouraging words notwithstanding, Capra was coming to believe that the war would not be a short one. And he was among the first of his colleagues to realize that film and filmmakers would have a crucial role to play. “I never cease to thr
ill at an audience seeing a picture,” he said in February 1940. “For two hours you’ve got ’em. Hitler can’t keep ’em that long. You eventually reach even more people than Roosevelt does on the radio.” After four years as Academy president, Capra had recently decided to hand the reins over to the outspoken liberal producer Walter Wanger, but he planned to stay active in the organization, and in the spring, he and the Academy’s Research Council met with James Roosevelt and began to formalize plans to oversee the production of a series of new training films for the Signal Corps. The meeting, and Roosevelt’s presence at it, helped to quiet some of the antistudio bluster coming from the capital, and would mark the war’s first official alliance between Hollywood and Washington.
Soon after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington opened, Capra made a career decision that would prove pivotal: He left Columbia Pictures, the studio that he had helped put on the map over the past decade, to become an independent producer-director. At first, he considered taking his new company, Frank Capra Productions, to United Artists, which at the time functioned as what would now be considered an independent distributor, bringing strong producers like David O. Selznick, Samuel Goldwyn, and Alexander Korda into the fold, then sharing costs and profits with them while letting them make virtually all the creative decisions on their movies. But when a deal with UA failed to materialize, Capra decided he would remain itinerant. He assumed, correctly, that any studio in town would be happy to have his next movie, and it took little time for him to get Warner Bros. to agree to cofinance the film he wanted to make, Meet John Doe.
Capra’s departure left Columbia with a huge void, and created an opportunity for George Stevens. When war broke out in Europe, Stevens was just ten days from beginning production on Vigil in the Night, the melodrama RKO had insisted he direct instead of The Mortal Storm. Vigil was based on a novel by A. J. Cronin, a Scottish physician turned writer whose best seller The Citadel had been the basis for an extremely popular MGM movie two years earlier. His new story, about a young British nurse who lets her sister take the fall after her carelessness causes the death of a child, was contrived and soapy. Three writers had worked on the screenplay, but none of them could do much to fix the scene in which an elderly gossip who threatens to expose the young woman conveniently goes over a cliff in a bus, or a preposterous last act that punishes the guilty sister by having the 1918 flu epidemic sweep through London.
Stevens never felt engaged by the material, but the start of war offered him an opportunity to make it relevant. Suddenly, stories of British grit and determination under fire had an immediacy that RKO hadn’t anticipated six months earlier; throughout 1940 and 1941, stories of English patriotism would become a staple of pro-intervention Hollywood filmmaking. With almost no time to overhaul the script, Stevens did whatever he could to bring it up to date once his cameras were rolling. He had already abandoned the World War I setting and reset Vigil in present-day London. Now he made sure that the street scenes were dressed with army recruiting posters. He had background extras appear in military uniforms. He even managed to insert a few lines that acknowledged present-day realities—“Do you realize we’re as close to war as we’ll ever be?” says a hospital administrator arguing for the conservation of resources. And in Vigil’s final scene, he planned to make the presence of war explicit: As the climax played out, the main characters would hear the speech that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had delivered just weeks earlier, on September 3, 1939, in which he announced over the radio that the British government had warned Berlin that “unless we heard from them by eleven o’clock that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany. You can imagine what a bitter blow it is to me that all my long struggle to win peace has failed.”
Over the next several years, directors, writers, and producers would become accustomed to revising their war movies on the fly, sometimes frantically adding or rewriting scenes just weeks before production ended or even scheduling last-minute reshoots to keep their work as reflective as possible of the latest breaking news. Since Hollywood pictures could reach theaters as little as six weeks after shooting was finished, timeliness, especially in the hundreds of movies that would be made about the war while it was still taking place, would quickly become of paramount dramatic (and box-office) value. By the middle of 1940, Walter Wanger and Alfred Hitchcock wouldn’t think twice about scrapping the ending of a movie they had already completed, Foreign Correspondent, and shooting a new final scene that acknowledged the bombing of Britain with an impassioned plea that the United States remain engaged and alert. (“It feels as if the lights were all out everywhere, except in America . . . It’s a big story and you’re part of it . . . Hello, America! Hang on to your lights! They’re the only lights left in the world!” the reporter played by Joel McCrea shouts over the radio.) With his hasty addition to the ending of Vigil in the Night, Stevens may have been the first American director after the start of the war to try to bring some of the immediacy of a newsreel to a Hollywood drama.
But audiences never got the chance to see Stevens’s finale. RKO head George Schaeffer flew from New York to Los Angeles to order the director to cut the scene in which the characters listened to Chamberlain’s speech. “In the film,” said Stevens, “the great irritation of the war overcomes the lesser irritation of their mundane activities, which is something I was really aiming for. . . . They wanted the [scene] cut on the basis that we brought up the idea of war, and America [was] not in war, and people would be so disturbed by the picture they wouldn’t go and see it. . . . It ruined the picture.”
Stevens later said he wished that Vigil in the Night, which was ignored by audiences and rejected by critics (“heavy and stolid” was one of the kinder verdicts), had never been released. In its promotional materials, RKO made no mention of the war at all, selling the movie, which opened in February 1940 as a soap opera, with the slogan “The world’s most famous doctor rips the veil from the hidden lives of those bitter women who know men too well!” Stevens may have felt all the more mistreated because the day Vigil had its first preview for the press, the movie he had really wanted to make, The Mortal Storm, began production at MGM with Frank Borzage directing.* This time, he did not keep his feelings to himself. In March, the New York Times reported that “after several weeks of friction that started when George Stevens was assigned the megaphone at RKO for Vigil in the Night, the director and the studio parted company today.” Within a month, Stevens had signed a two-picture deal with Columbia, which was so eager to replenish its roster of talent after Capra’s departure that it agreed to an unusual proviso: Stevens, wary of any further interference from studio chiefs, stipulated that the company’s notoriously meddlesome president Harry Cohn would not be allowed to visit his sets during production. Cohn, surprisingly, agreed, promising, “You make a picture here, and I’ll never speak to you.” But looking to the future, Cohn insisted on a new contractual rider of his own, one which, with some variations, would soon become an industry standard: If a war or national emergency resulted in the closing of American movie houses for more than a week, all contracts with talent would be null and void.
William and Talli Wyler were in Tijuana on a brief vacation with two of their closest friends, Wyler’s agent Paul Kohner and his wife, Lupita, when they heard the war had started. For the Wylers, the Labor Day weekend getaway was an attempt at a brief respite after a summer of upheaval. Wyler’s father had died in July 1939, shortly before Talli had given birth. Carl Laemmle, the grudging early mentor who had helped Wyler come to America and then seen him grow into the family’s greatest success, was gravely ill with heart disease and just weeks from death. Wyler had been working nonstop—he and Talli hadn’t even had time for a real honeymoon during their first year of marriage, and as soon as they returned to Los Angeles, Talli would have to begin preparing for their move to
a new home in Bel Air while Wyler started preproduction on The Westerner, Sam Goldwyn’s attempt to capitalize on the surprising success of John Ford’s Stagecoach. It was pure happenstance that the Wylers were out of the country when the news broke—they had been staying in San Diego and had just crossed into Mexico for a day trip to see a bullfight—but for Wyler it was a reminder that the border represented for so many not just a formality but a terribly significant barrier. While in Tijuana, they ran into Franz Planer, a respected cinematographer in Europe who had fled Austria and was now, like many refugees, watching weeks stretch into months while he was stuck in the no-man’s-land of a Mexican hotel, waiting for permission to enter the United States legally and hoping to obtain employment in the American movie industry.
As he returned to Hollywood, Wyler felt the war was closing in on him, but he shared his feelings with colleagues only when the pressure became too great to bear. When he declined repeatedly to contribute to Harry Warner’s pet cause, the Hollywood Community Chest, Warner gave him a private scolding. “I don’t know of anything that will breed more discontent . . . more resentment among those unfortunates who must be helped, than the knowledge that people with heaven blessed incomes refuse to extend a helping hand,” Warner told Wyler. “It is of such stuff that Communism is born. And brother, I’m sure neither of us want that in America. This is a pretty stiff letter to write, especially by one who is appealing for charity . . . but I’d rather thrash this out between ourselves than have the public learn that the ‘fantastically wealthy’ movie people are too self centered and too selfish to give a thought to their unfortunate neighbors.” The subtext, from one “brother” naturalized American to another, would have been easily understood by Wyler: Successful Jews in Hollywood had a special obligation to practice nondenominational good-neighbor philanthropy as an inoculation against the increasingly loud charge that the industry was, as one anti-Semitic senator would soon claim, “swarming with refugees” who were only “interested in foreign causes.”