by Mark Harris
“I don’t know,” he said. “What do you want one for?”
“You won the Academy Award,” the reporter told him.
Wyler smiled and said, “Well, I’ll be damned.”
As congratulatory telegrams poured into air force headquarters and MGM took out trade ads congratulating “Major William Wyler” on what the Los Angeles Herald Express called “a clean sweep, almost like the year Gone With The Wind grabbed most of the honors,” Wyler allowed himself a moment to savor his victory. Sam Goldwyn told him it was “the most popular award ever made.” “Will, you bridesmaid!” joked Huston. And Talli wrote, “My darling, how I missed you tonight, but I love collecting Oscars. We must do it more often.”
“Darling terribly thrilled family enlarged by Oscar,” Wyler cabled back. “Must make postwar plans to build trophy room. . . . All my love and don’t let Cathy play with my new doll.”
“Now I feel I can win the war,” Wyler told his publicist Mack Millar. “Only hope it won’t take as long.”
Ford and Capra also emerged from the Academy Awards that night able to claim victory. Both men saw their skilled manipulation of the system pay off as two of the four Oscars for Best Documentary were awarded to The Battle of Midway and—although it still had not received permission for a theatrical release—Prelude to War.* But those awards came at a cost: Ford and Capra had each run afoul of Mellett, whose insistence on exerting his authority both in and out of Hollywood was rapidly making him one of the industry’s least popular figures. Mellett’s clout with the studios was undeniable; it was almost mandatory that he be invited to speak at the Oscar ceremony that evening, but his remarks and reassurances struck many of the guests at the Coconut Grove as hollow. “If the assembled industry people expected to hear anything new from Mr. Mellett, they were doomed to disappointment,” wrote the Hollywood Reporter the next day, “for he merely reiterated in his speech . . . the same things he has been saying right along—that the government has no desire or intention of telling the industry how to make pictures.”
The exception was, of course, pictures that were being made by or for the government, and even as Ford was reaping acclaim for The Battle of Midway, Mellett was causing him and the entire Field Photo Unit some serious embarrassment over December 7th. A year after being assigned to Hawaii, Gregg Toland had finally finished his first cut, and when Mellett was given an advance look at the resulting picture, he was horrified—and not only at its eighty-five-minute length or at Toland’s free use of reenactments to depict the Pearl Harbor attack (only a few moments of which had been captured by any cameras that day). The picture’s virulent and lengthy invective against Japanese Americans took the very ugliness the Bureau of Motion Pictures had tried to countermand after Little Tokyo, U.S.A. and reiterated it; any moviegoer who saw it would assume that racist hypervigilance against suspected domestic treachery had now become official government policy. Toland had used his film to excoriate the U.S. government and in particular the navy for its lack of preparedness before the Pearl Harbor attack, and also to suggest that the large immigrant population of Hawaii was rife with enemy agents.
December 7th went further than the most exploitative Hollywood picture in suggesting that every bilingual sign in a shop represented a threat to national security. Hawaii’s 150,000 residents of Japanese origin were, according to the movie’s narration, a grave menace: “Inch by inch, their sons and grandsons . . . began to penetrate into the industrial life of the islands. And all the time, their numbers kept growing. Yep, there are a lot of ’em.” In the fanciful, paranoid dialogue that the filmmakers had fashioned between Walter Huston’s Uncle Sam and Harry Davenport’s “Mr. C”—his conscience—Sam asserts that all Japanese immigrants live in “an American spirit,” and Mr. C snaps back, “A hyphenated spirit.” A long montage follows in which white people are seen chatting heedlessly about national security matters in front of placid Japanese barbers and gardeners who wear expressions of stereotypical inscrutability, the implication being that the walls have ears and every bystander is a spy. The Japanese in Hawaii even have access to a telephone book “published for them,” warns the narrator. “In Japanese.”
Mellett had suspected that December 7th would be unreleasable as soon as he was shown Toland’s completed script. At the end of 1942, he wrote to Undersecretary of the Navy James Forrestal that “this project, as a picture for public exhibition, should be stopped . . . not merely because it seems certain to be a very, very bad picture per se, but because the whole approach is, in my opinion, unwise from the government’s standpoint. It is a fictional treatment of a very real fact, the tragic disaster at Pearl Harbor, and I do not believe the government should engage in fiction.”
The completed film only confirmed Mellett’s worst fears. Ford and Toland had been loaned the very limited amount of footage shot during the attack, which included the bombing and explosion of USS Arizona, on which 1,177 officers and seamen were killed. But they had used it as a visual reference to create a version of the bombing of Pearl Harbor that employed model-plane Zeroes built by 20th Century Fox’s special effects department and Hollywood-style close-ups of American soldiers and sailors—some filmed in Hawaii, some on the Fox lot—firing back as the enemy strafed the harbor.
Mellett was the first prominent government official to raise his voice about issues of accuracy, policies of disclosure, and the ethics of reenactment in filmed propaganda. More than a year after Pearl Harbor, the War Department still had not formalized any policies for films that were made or released under its imprimatur. After he saw the film, Mellett took his complaints up the chain of command. While he believed the public should have the opportunity to view the documentary footage that Ford and Toland had overseen of the reconstruction of the Pacific fleet, it would have to be extracted from December 7th and shown in another form. Mellett marshaled the support of his boss Elmer Davis, who ran the Office of War Information and agreed with his assessment that “presentation of fictional propaganda . . . would seem to be an improper activity for the U.S. government.”
Ford was, for the first time since the war had begun, in the doghouse, and even the protection of Bill Donovan was an insufficient shield. December 7th had from the beginning been a project of special interest to Roosevelt, who saw news of the rebuilding of naval strength in the Pacific as vital to national morale. Now the film had come in long, late, and so inadequate that Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson agreed it could not be released. In the spring of 1943, Roosevelt issued a directive that in the future, all movies produced by Field Photo would be subject to censorship by the War Department. Toland, who had nursed hopes of using the movie to make the jump from cinematography to direction once he got back to Hollywood, was shattered; although he was still a part of Field Photo, he requested reassignment to South America, and he and Ford never worked together again.
As the film historian Tag Gallagher has noted, the strongly anti-Japanese tone of Toland’s cut may have been, rather than a reflection of personal bias or conviction, an attempt to justify Roosevelt’s internment policy. As it stood, the picture reflected the War Department and the administration’s conflicted instincts about how to depict Japan, Japanese nationals, and immigrants—the same problem that was continuing to bedevil Capra as he worked on the Know Your Enemy series. Ford had been concerned about the direction Toland was taking from the time he first arrived in Honolulu, but it remains unclear whether he distanced himself from December 7th only after the negative reaction or whether, absorbed in his own work after Midway, he had failed to give Toland much attention and was taken by surprise at how far off track he had gone. But there was no doubt that he was expected to shoulder a share of the blame for the movie’s failure.
Ford was returned to his office in Washington, D.C., and unofficially grounded there for the foreseeable future. With Toland gone, he and Robert Parrish worked to save face by attempting to reshape December 7th into something that could be shown publicly, and they wasted little ti
me or sentimentality in doing so. Two of his most trusted writers, Frank Wead and James Kevin McGuinness, started to work on a revised narration script for the film, and McGuinness advised Ford to take out anything that smacked of editorializing or fictionalizing: “Crowd in every interesting foot of the salvage operations . . . and finish off with a burst of glory when the battle wagons put to sea again.” Ford discarded Toland’s first forty minutes almost completely. He left in a brief appearance by Huston as a sleeping giant but removed an exchange in which Mr. C chided Uncle Sam by saying, “You’ve done a lot of vacationing this year.” Toland’s montage of Hawaii store signs with ominous Japanese lettering and his race-baiting history of the Japanese in Hawaii were also swept away. And Ford discarded the movie’s final act—a long scene set in heaven in which a soldier (Dana Andrews) who died at Pearl Harbor reminisces with other veterans of American wars and uses a particularly tortured metaphor to discuss the eventual outcome of World War II. “I’m puttin’ my dough on a ball slugger called reason,” says Andrews, “on a pitcher called common sense, on an outfield called decency, faith, brotherhood, religion. Teams like that are warming up all over the globe. They’re in spring training now. But when the season starts, they’re gonna be all out there, slugging, pitching, feeling their way to a World Series pennant called peace.”
By the time Ford and Parrish were finished, December 7th had been shortened from eighty-five to thirty-four minutes and remade as a more sentimental, straightforward, and unmistakably Fordian film—a less visually dramatic cousin to The Battle of Midway. As he had done in the earlier movie, Ford started with a vision of a quiet and unspoiled island that was soon to be marred by the sounds and sights of war. He filled the soundtrack with favorite songs, several of which, including “My Country ’Tis of Thee” and “Anchors Aweigh,” had been used in Midway. And he interrupted the picture’s newsreel-style narration for a sequence in which viewers meet some of the American sailors who died—an idea that had probably been his all along. “Who were these young Americans? Let us pause for a few minutes at their hallowed graves and ask them to make themselves known,” says the narrator. “Who are you boys? Come on, speak up, some of you!” The “boys” pointedly represent an ethnically diverse group—an Irishman from Ohio, a German from Iowa, a Jew named Rosenthal from Brooklyn, a black man from North Carolina, a Mexican American from just outside Albuquerque. In each case, we see pictures of the men and then footage of their parents, who are sometimes shown holding or sitting by a picture of their lost son. The mother of the black sailor (he is the only man not shown to have a father) is seen alone, hanging laundry on a line.
Ford replaced Toland’s racial provocation with a few lines indicating that the majority of Japanese Americans were loyal to the United States—one young man is shown after the attack replacing his “Banzai Café” sign with a new one reading “Keep ’Em Flying Café”*—and he had the narrator lecture “Mr. Tojo” that Pearl Harbor only “served to further complicate the already complex life of the Japanese in Hawaii.” And instead of Toland’s eviscerating depiction of the navy as being asleep at the helm, he inserted a reference to “the Axis style of war—a stab in the back on a Sunday morning.” The War Department still didn’t want the movie shown publicly—thirty-four minutes was an awkward length for exhibitors, and the picture was by then considered damaged goods—but Ford’s changes were sufficient to win December 7th approval for exhibition to servicemen and munitions workers later in 1943. Although Mellett had succeeded in thwarting the general release of the movie, his overriding point about the ethics of using staged war scenes in a film that purported to be a documentary went unaddressed. As for Ford, he was back in the good graces of the navy, but he was still stuck at a desk. As spring gave way to summer, he wondered when, if ever, he would get another chance to be at the center of the action.
Mellett had managed to keep his fight against December 7th out of the papers, but his battle with Capra over Prelude to War soon made its way into the press. After Pearl Harbor, the isolationists in the House and Senate had retreated into embarrassed silence for a time, but they were now resurfacing in opposition not to the war itself but to Roosevelt, accusing him of stoking fear and fury among Americans in order to keep himself in power—and of using war propaganda to do it. In February, Senator Rufus Holman, an Oregon Republican, denounced Prelude to War as “personal political propaganda” that was intended only to secure a fourth term for the president. In doing so, he brought the War Department’s whole filmmaking strategy into question and won sympathetic attention from many who felt that in a time of national belt-tightening, government moviemaking was a profligate use of limited resources that resulted in self-indulgent nonsense. “I want our generals to put their time in winning battles rather than fighting psychological warfare,” he fumed. “Does the administration have the nerve to say that our fighting men don’t know why they’re fighting the war?”
A strain of yahooism that had temporarily been quieted after Pearl Harbor was now reasserting itself with a vigor that caught many in Hollywood off guard. And despite the fact that the Bureau of Motion Pictures had only recently released its own version of a “why we fight” movie, Mellett shocked the filmmaking community when he chose to make common cause with Holman publicly. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Mellett aired his conviction that Prelude to War should be shown only to servicemen since it “played too many notes of hate for general audiences”; he also said that he welcomed Holman’s push for congressional hearings on the question of government propaganda. The contretemps marked the first time since the start of the war that the Office of War Information and the War Department had openly opposed each other over the question of filmed propaganda, and even after Prelude to War was nominated for the Academy Award, Mellett had shown no signs of budging from his position.
Suddenly, the entire program that had brought so many filmmakers into military service was being called into question. An informal coalition of former isolationists, skeptics about the ethics of propaganda, anti-Hollywood rhetoricians, and members of the entertainment press who wanted the movie industry to resume business as usual combined in an unlikely drive to stop virtually all government-sponsored film documentation of the war. The directors who had suspended their careers and only months earlier had been characterized as patriots for doing so were now being dismissed as dilettantes and thrill seekers who were selfishly shirking their real duty, which was to entertain the public. The Roosevelt administration “should see to it that the best workers, the great artists of the movies, are kept right where they belong” in Hollywood, wrote critic Leo Mishkin in the New York Morning Telegraph. “John Ford is doing his own essential industry no good by sailing around the world with the Navy. Frank Capra and William Wyler haven’t been heard from in the movies since Meet John Doe and Mrs. Miniver. Darryl Zanuck is now editing what, stripped of all verbiage and hullabaloo, is essentially only a newsreel of the invasion of Africa. . . . But none of them is making movies for the American people.”
They would now be called to account. In early 1943, for the first time since the Nye Committee hearings before Pearl Harbor, Congress decided to summon some of Hollywood’s biggest names to Washington, where they would be expected to defend exactly what they were doing in the war and why they were doing it.
FOURTEEN
“Coming Along with Us Just for Pictures?”
WASHINGTON, ENGLAND, AND NEW YORK, MARCH-JULY 1943
When Time magazine put Harry Truman on its cover in March 1943, it referred to the Missouri senator as America’s “billion-dollar watchdog” and stated that the bipartisan committee he chaired represented “the closest thing yet to a domestic high command.” Truman’s task force—everyone called it the Truman Committee, although it was officially the Senate Committee Investigating National Defense—was charged with overseeing all expenditures related to the war, and its chairman’s sharp eye for waste, sloppiness, and corruption had, in the fifteen months since
Pearl Harbor, turned the previously low-profile fifty-eight-year-old into one of the country’s most popular politicians. “The goal of every man on the committee is to promote the war effort to the limit of efficiency and exertion,” he said—but it was also to throw a harsh spotlight on all areas in which those qualities were lacking. “It doesn’t do any good to go around digging up dead horses after the war is over, like the last time,” Truman told journalists. “The thing to do is dig this stuff up now, and correct it.”
When Truman turned his attention to Hollywood, the industry knew he wouldn’t be vulnerable to counterattack, shaming, or mockery, as Dies, Nye, and the isolationists had been a couple of years earlier. And in truth, nobody in Hollywood or Washington was entirely sure what the best defense of the war’s various propaganda programs might be. America wanted accurate pictures of and about the war, but the reputation of filmmakers in uniform was still fragile and subject to quick and temperamental revision: Headlines would characterize them as selfless heroes one week and preening nuisances the next.
Darryl Zanuck had not helped matters. Since his return from Tunisia, he had devoted most of his energy to transforming his assignment in North Africa into a one-man show. Early in 1943, he published a book about his experiences, Tunis Expedition; although Zanuck donated his royalties to Army Emergency Relief, eyebrows shot up at the introduction he had commissioned from Damon Runyon, who vowed that “no man alive takes his duty to flag and country more seriously than Colonel Darryl Zanuck. . . . Were [he] a newspaperman he would probably be one of the greatest war correspondents of this generation.” Such florid claims were more than the wide-eyed diary-like reminiscence that followed could sustain. (“All of Algeria reminds me of California” and “I still can’t seem to understand that this is really a battle and I am in it,” were typical Zanuck aperçus.) Tunis Expedition’s alternating tones of gee-whiz boy’s-book innocence and self-aggrandizement were too much for many critics to stomach. “One would like . . . to have heard something more between Colonel Zanuck’s hour-by-hour adventures about the men who were taking the pictures, and what they thought and felt, and what their problems were,” wrote the reviewer for the New York Times in one of the gentler critiques of the book.