Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

by Mark Harris

  Cooper also took some persuading. Warners’ Hal Wallis had decided to partner with Lasky after one of the studio’s deputies convinced him that the story of Sergeant York could be adapted into a variation on one of the actor’s biggest hits; on the lot, they were already calling it “Mr. Deeds Goes to War.” But at forty, Cooper felt he was too old to be believable in the scenes that depicted York’s backcountry youth; besides, he said, “I don’t think I can do justice to him. He’s too big for me . . . he covers too much territory.” In one sense, Cooper was right. The character of York, and his story, were being asked to do double duty—the movie, which Howard Hawks was to direct, was conceived not only as an inspiring tale of how one man’s personal code served him before, during, and after combat, but as a recruiting poster for the next war. Sergeant York was a film with an unconcealed ideological purpose: It was intended to persuade the tens of millions of Americans who detested war, and who held what was still a majority opinion that the United States never should have entered World War I, that supporting American intervention against Hitler did not mean that they had to abandon their convictions.

  And in spreading the message that pacifism need not equal isolationism, Warners found a surprising ally in York himself. The sergeant had been a frequent speaker for the Emergency Peace Campaign, and as late as the summer of 1939, in a speech at the World’s Fair in New York City, he had argued that America should concentrate on problems within its borders, not overseas. But the start of the war in Europe had changed his mind, and by early 1941, as the film neared production, York had become a fervent and public interventionist, making headlines with his declaration that “Hitler can, will, and must be beaten.”

  The first two screenwriters on the project had titled their treatment “The Amazing Story of Sergeant York.” But what had begun as pure inspirational drama now needed a different, more forcefully dogmatic approach. For that, Warner turned to John Huston, who had in the two years since the Juárez debacle become one of the studio’s most proficient and successful screenwriters. Huston’s interest in world politics remained as keen as it had been in 1939, and his command of Hollywood politics had improved considerably since the days when he watched Paul Muni run roughshod over his script. After Juárez, Warner had put Huston to work rewriting a screenplay about the biologist who had discovered the first effective treatment for syphilis. Huston thought the original script “was shit,” and that the director assigned to the film, William Dieterle, would be no more capable of standing up for himself on the set than he had been during Juárez. But this time, Huston won the allegiance of the movie’s leading man, Edward G. Robinson; he skillfully turned the picture from a romance into a scientific detective story, and won a bitter arbitration battle to protect his screenwriting credit.

  The movie, Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet, was accorded a reception strong enough to win Huston a more high-profile assignment—the screenplay for Raoul Walsh’s gangster melodrama High Sierra, an adaptation of W. R. Burnett’s crime novel about the last heist of a gangster who has just been released from prison. Huston loved the book and pitched himself to Warner hard, telling Hal Wallis that he knew exactly how to capture the novel’s special early-noir quality, which he identified as “the strange sense of inevitability that comes with our deepening understanding of the characters and the forces that motivate them.” The only problem was that Warner had offered the leading role to Huston’s old nemesis Muni. The actor, who had little use for writers in general and still less for Huston, resisted his hiring, demanded that Burnett be brought in as a cowriter, and then fatally overplayed his hand by rejecting the draft Burnett and Huston handed in. Warner, aware of his diminished box-office allure and tired of his petulance, fired Muni from the picture that day. After George Raft also dismissed the script as unworthy of his talents, the studio gave the leading role to a contract player who had never quite managed to find a niche. “I want you to give the utmost attention to the building of Humphrey Bogart,” read an internal studio memo written on July 17, 1940, the day Muni’s contract with Warner Bros. ended. “Let us see if within the next two or three months we cannot have the country flooded with Bogart art and column breaks . . . predicting great success for him as a star.”

  By December, Huston was headed toward a screenwriting Oscar nomination, his first, for Dr. Ehrlich, and High Sierra had turned out so well that he was able to convince the studio to put him back together with Bogart and give him his first chance to direct. Warner liked Huston’s idea—a remake of a property that had already been filmed twice, The Maltese Falcon—but Wallis asked him to take on the rewrite of Sergeant York first. Huston was brimming with confidence when he accepted the assignment; after ten years of false starts and personal crises, his career was finally taking off. Initially, Warner put him together with a cowriter, his old friend Howard Koch. But, said Huston, “I took that picture over. I worked alone on it.” After meeting with Alvin York a couple of times, Huston proceeded with the studio’s mandate to make the film “not a success story, as virtually all screen biographies have been,” but the “story of a hell-raising mountaineer who is a conscientious objector but goes to war anyhow and becomes a hero.”

  Huston’s work on Sergeant York was not subtle. He added battle scenes, he deemphasized York’s postwar life as a progressive education reformer, he amplified York’s heroism to such preposterous proportions that three dozen of his former platoon mates had to be paid off by Warner to keep quiet about it, and he infused the scenes of York’s rural life with so much hayseed comedy that Abem Finkel, one of the screenwriters he had replaced, wrote an outraged memo to Wallis deploring the new script’s “blundering stupidities” and predicting that Warner was in for a “helluva mess” if the movie went forward.

  In later years, Huston would sound faintly embarrassed about his work on Sergeant York. In his expansive autobiography An Open Book, he devotes only three lines to the movie, and he told Howard Hawks’s biographer, the critic Todd McCarthy, “I don’t believe that the film delivers a terribly profound and relevant message. . . . We weren’t trying to make All Quiet on the Western Front. That was a film which set out to show the First World War in all its horror, all the better to shock the viewer so that he won’t repeat it.” In fact, Huston understood precisely the ideological force of what he was being asked to do, and proved himself a willing instrument in the creation of the boldest piece of pro-intervention propaganda that had yet emerged from a Hollywood studio. In Sergeant York, he and Hawks consciously tried to replace All Quiet on the Western Front’s version of World War I with a new piece of mythmaking in which the Great War was indeed great—not pointless but noble—and the sacrifice it entailed was not senseless but heroic.* “I ain’t a-goin’-a war. War is killin’! And the Book’s agin killin’! So war is agin the Book!” says York in the movie. After going into battle and becoming a hero, he explains his change of heart: “I’m as much agin killing as ever . . . but I figured them guns was killing hundreds, maybe thousands.” “You mean you did it to save lives?” says his commanding officer incredulously. “Yes, sir—that was why.”

  The declarative bluntness of much of Huston’s dialogue was matched by the publicity campaign that led up to Sergeant York’s opening. Ads announced that the movie was made as “a result of World War II’s menacing threat to democracy,” and on July 2, 1941—just ten days after Germany had invaded Russia and one day after America’s second prewar wave of draft registration had begun—Warner Bros. staged a New York City premiere at the Astor Theater that looked more like a full-dress military parade than like the debut of a Hollywood movie. The studio corralled as many World War I veterans, including members of York’s old platoon, as it could accommodate, and invited dozens of active-duty officers up from Washington as well. The list of opening-night attendees included Eleanor Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie. York, the guest of honor, was greeted personally by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, and Warner arranged for Gary Cooper to receive a “Distinguished Citizenship M
edal” from the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

  The point that Sergeant York was a look both backward and forward was almost impossible to miss, and while few critics claimed that the movie was an artistic masterpiece, most hailed it as an exceptionally effective means of delivering a message. “The suggestion of deliberate propaganda is readily detected here,” wrote New York Times critic Bosley Crowther, calling it “a little naïve” but “good native drama.” The New Republic referred to it as a “stunt picture . . . about the army and arming in a time when people damn well have to think about the army,” Time called it “Hollywood’s first solid contribution to national defense,” and Variety praised it as “a clarion film that reaches the public at a moment when its stirring and patriotic message is probably most needed. It is as timely as a White House fireside chat.” Warner had planned a gradual release for Sergeant York, but the movie turned into a national phenomenon almost immediately, becoming the highest-grossing film in the country while it was still playing in just a few cities, and demolishing the recently minted Hollywood axiom that audiences weren’t interested in war-related pictures.

  But the movie’s success was also the last straw for a cadre of isolationist politicians. Throughout the first half of 1941, Burton K. Wheeler, a Democratic senator from Montana, had been nursing his anger at President Roosevelt’s support for greater involvement in the war, predicting that Hitler “would plough under every fourth American boy.” When newsreel producers declined to give equal time to his speeches despite his petitioning, he took it personally and warned Hollywood that if it did not pull back its commitment to producing “propaganda for war,” he would propose legislation designed to mandate “a more impartial attitude.”

  Wheeler had a strong, though unofficial, ideological ally in Joseph Breen, a virulently anti-Semitic Catholic who had until recently run the Production Code Administration and had privately referred to Jews as “dirty lice”; these days, Breen was especially affronted by the Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, an organization he contended was “conducted and financed almost entirely by Jews.” As the threat of war grew more imminent, Hollywood’s Jewish leadership had become less fearful about attacks from those who questioned their loyalties. In April, an urgent invitation to a dinner for elderly Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann was sent to “all important members of Jewish faith within motion picture and allied industries”; it was signed by either the Jewish heads or the senior Jewish executives of all eight studios, a collective assertion of identity that would have been taboo in the industry even a year earlier. (William Wyler was among those who attended.) The counterreaction was fierce. Wheeler and his fellow isolationists decided to make common cause with anti-Semites (there was already plenty of overlap between the two groups) and stepped up their rhetoric to include ever more pointed references to the ethnicity and religion of the men who ran the movie business.

  A confrontation that Hollywood had long been hoping to avoid was finally ignited on August 1, when Gerald P. Nye, a Republican senator from North Dakota, made an invective-laden speech to the isolationist group America First in which he directly attacked the “foreigners” who ran Hollywood, especially those with “non-Nordic” last names. He accused the industry of promoting the war in “at least 20 pictures . . . produced within the last year—all designed to drug the reason of the American people, set aflame their emotions, turn their hatred into a blaze, fill them with fear that Hitler will come over here and capture them, [and] rouse them to a war hysteria.” Among the films he cited were Sergeant York and Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. He went on to address the motives behind the films, deploying analogies of disease and infection that had become ominously familiar. “In each of these companies there are a number of production directors, many of whom have come from Russia, Hungary, Germany and the Baltic countries . . . these men . . . can address 80,000,000 people a week, cunningly and persistently inoculating them with the virus of war. Why do they do this? Well, they are interested in foreign causes. . . . Go to Hollywood. It is a raging volcano of war fever. The place swarms with refugees.” Nye reminded his listeners, who included a national radio audience, that it had taken “the great Christian churches” to purge Hollywood of indecency a few years earlier, when the Production Code had been instituted, and he concluded by asking, “Are the movie moguls doing this because they like to do it, or has the government of the United States forced them to become . . . propaganda agencies? . . . Are you ready to send your boys to bleed and die in Europe to make the world safe for Barney Balaban and Adolph Zukor and Joseph Schenck?”*

  Nye’s message was incoherent—he was at once accusing Jews of leading a propagandistic conspiracy and claiming that they were acting on orders from the government. He did not even attempt to encode or couch his beliefs in “acceptable” language, and his tone drew sharp responses from both the film industry (one trade publication said he had spoken “in the best storm trooper fashion”) and from newspaper editorial writers on the left, who called him an anti-Semite. But his speech reflected the reality of a divided American populace; as war grew likelier, polls showed that fully half of all Americans believed that Jews had too much power in the United States. Perhaps emboldened by the rise of America First, which even had a small membership in Hollywood, Nye was prepared to back up his incendiary language with action. The day he gave the speech, he and Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri introduced a resolution to hold Senate hearings to investigate the origins of “propaganda [that] reaches weekly the eyes and ears of one hundred million people and is in the hands of groups interested in involving the United States in war.” For good measure, the resolution threw in a charge of monopoly, predicated on the argument that Hollywood studios were in collusion not only with the Roosevelt administration but with one another. Hearings were set to begin September 9. The movie industry was about to go on trial.

  Although the accusation that the studios were propagandists dominated press coverage, the monopoly issue was potentially more serious for many reasons, including the fact that any number of independent theater owners could testify to it; that charge reflected a provable concern that had been expressed by Roosevelt’s own Justice Department. But since the committee itself was clearly treating the issue of monopoly as something of an afterthought, the studio chiefs gambled that they could ignore it and concentrate instead on rebuffing the attack on their movies and their motives. To build their case, they obtained the support of an unlikely high-profile ally when the industry’s official lobbying group, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, hired Wendell Willkie to represent it at the hearings. Willkie, who received $100,000 for his services, had been the Republican nominee for president a year earlier, but after his loss to Roosevelt he had become something of an outcast in his own party for his support of the Lend-Lease Act and of the president’s war policies. In the spring of 1941, after publicly debating Charles Lindbergh in the pages of Collier’s magazine, he became the most prominent Republican politician in the country to take a firmly pro-intervention stance.

  The studios could not have picked an advocate who was better immunized against charges of being a stooge either for Hollywood or for the administration. Roosevelt himself was already deeply invested in strengthening the ties between Hollywood and Washington that war would necessitate, and was keeping a close eye on Willkie’s involvement with the impending hearings. He had recently appointed Lowell Mellett, a former newspaperman, to serve as a liaison between the movie industry and the War Department; two weeks before the hearings began, Mellett wrote to the president that under Willkie’s tutelage “the best men in the industry are ready to go into these hearings fighting. They say they’ll proclaim they are doing everything they know how to make America conscious of the national peril; that they won’t apologize—just the reverse.”

  Privately, some in Hollywood thought appeasement would be a wiser strategy. As the hearings approached, the Hays Office rushed to gather statistics demonstrating that only a handful
of 1940’s features had been war-related, and hoped to reassure Washington that “the essential service of motion pictures is entertainment.” But Willkie, who relished a good fight, rejected any strategy that smacked of apology, and he was instrumental in convincing the industry to go on the offensive. In a series of late-night meetings with the studio chiefs, he encouraged them to speak forthrightly about their lives, their patriotism, even their Jewish identities. He had the backing of Hollywood’s trade unions—just before the hearings, the Screen Writers Guild fired off a telegram questioning their constitutionality—and of its trade papers, including the Hollywood Reporter, which scorned and rebuked the senators almost daily. Some accidents of timing helped Willkie as well; the first anniversary of the Blitz, widely noted in newspapers and newsreels, drove home the danger that the world faced from Hitler just two days before the hearings started. That was also the day the president’s mother died, creating a wave of public sympathy and muting the possibility that what was known as “the Nye Committee” would be able to come out of the gate on day one with a barrage of anti-Roosevelt invective.