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

by Mark Harris

  Huston had spent the first months of 1943 fashioning a singular and personal film that, in its final form, played as a clear compromise between the movie about the Aleutians that he wanted to make and the movie he thought the army expected from him. The first scenes of Report from the Aleutians are intended to immerse moviegoers in the fogbound, forbidding natural landscape that had so awed him when he arrived there. The camera lingers on mountains, ice floes, volcanoes, and what appear to be near-constant cyclones and windstorms. Huston took a page from Ford’s Battle of Midway in presenting war as the despoliation of nature; narrating the footage himself in an extravagantly written voice-over that almost never lets up, he informs audiences about “bird life on the island—scavenger ravens,” the only natural residents of a place that he tells us is “as remote as the moon and hardly more fertile . . . next to worthless in terms of human existence.” Always attentive to the play of fading light on the barren horizon, Huston then introduces the men and their mission, working to create the sense of dislocation and slowed-down time that he had experienced on Adak during his months there. As his camera seeks out oddity and unlikely beauty (a soldier carrying a guitar, a rainbow shimmering as a fighter plane touches down on the runway), Report from the Aleutians brings those who see it to a part of the World War II front unlike any that had been featured in gung-ho newsreels—a quiet, distant world in which “customary military formality is relaxed with plain civil necessity taking its place.” Letters from home arrive, but they’re already out of date. Food shipments reach the men, but never any vegetables. USO shows and outdoor movies may provide relief for American troops somewhere overseas, but they never get all the way to Adak. While Huston nods to the melting-pot unity of “down-eastern accents . . . Texas drawls and low-Western twangs and Brooklynese, bookkeepers, grocery clerks, college men and dirt farmers,” all of whose differences are swept away by the job at hand, he turns the first twenty minutes of Report from the Aleutians into a melancholy, almost poetic portrayal of waiting and watchfulness, of the lonely languor of the American fighting man who has no one to fight.

  At the film’s midpoint, Huston’s tone and style change so abruptly that what follows feels like a different movie, almost as if, having explored his own interests, he had now decided to deliver the required assignment. The second half of Report from the Aleutians is about risk and accomplishment, and looks remarkably like the early storyboards he had drawn. Reconnaissance experts study aerial photographs and pick their targets. Bombs are hoisted into bays as the narration provides information about their size and power and the preparedness of American troops. Pilots and bombardiers—corn-fed hotshots in leather helmets and goggles—grin at the camera. And then, at the film’s climax, moviegoers are taken on a bombing run. The conclusion of Huston’s film is efficient, energetic, and somewhat impersonal—even the narration changes, as Huston’s own distinctive, bluff cadences give way to the more reassuring and authoritative voice of his father, who had done so many Signal Corps voice-overs by this point that for most of America his was the default voice of inspirational army documentaries.

  Huston had ended Report from the Aleutians on an irresolute note—necessarily so, since the mission to retake Kiska and Attu from the Japanese was no closer to being completed when he left Adak than it had been when he arrived there. But in May, after he finished the movie, U.S. forces engaged in a fierce and protracted battle to drive the Imperial Army off the islands. Five hundred American soldiers died, as did twenty-five hundred Japanese, but when it was over three weeks later, the Allies had retaken Attu.

  All month, Americans had been reading daily dispatches from the Aleutian battlefront in newspapers and eagerly following the progress of their troops. Suddenly, Huston’s film, which had been all but forgotten by the Signal Corps and the OWI, represented the most exciting “morale picture” that the War Department had had to offer exhibitors and audiences since The Battle of Midway. And once again, Mellett got involved. One week into the battle for Attu, he saw Huston’s movie and reported to his bosses that “it is a picture the people will want to see and have a right to see without delay—it is actual news of the war.” But Mellett also felt that at forty-four minutes, the film was much too long to gain any traction with exhibitors, who had made it clear after Prelude to War that they weren’t interested in showing anything from the Signal Corps that was longer than two reels—roughly twenty minutes.

  Mellett was pleased to see footage that showed the “bombardment of Kiska” (actually a composite of several small-scale missions that had taken place months before the battle had begun in earnest) as well as the “construction job on the American island base,” but he found Report from the Aleutians “excessively theatrical” and called it, not inaccurately, “a hybrid Hollywood-Army product.” Moreover, he didn’t believe that Huston was capable of cutting his own picture down to size. Mellett took it upon himself to ask Zanuck to edit the movie, and Zanuck promised to try, but, bogged down in the Truman Committee hearings and his own impending departure from active duty, he had been “unable to accomplish the reduction.” Mellett then turned to his own deputy Sam Spewack and asked him to take Huston’s film and turn it into a short that could be released to theaters immediately. By June, he had Spewack’s sixteen-minute version of Report from the Aleutians in hand, and he asked General Surles for permission to release it to the War Activities Committee for distribution right away, telling him that “it is certain to be more successful in the theaters than the 44-minute version could be.” Surles would have none of it; Huston, knowing his movie was threatened, had moved quickly to arrange screenings of the full-length cut for major critics in New York City, and Surles told Mellett that reaction among reviewers was “universally favorable” and that “it is our view that the complete version is essential to the telling of the story.”

  Huston hadn’t simply shown critics the movie; he had made sure they understood that it was in jeopardy, and they lost little time in rallying to his side. “The U.S. Army, which has consistently trailed its British allies in the making of war documentaries, moves up a peg,” said Variety in an influential piece that was the first review to be published; the paper’s reviewer expressed concern that the film would “suffer from the severe shaving demanded by the WAC. It hardly can be expected in that length to retain the fine, friendly, human quality which, contrasted against that bleak background, is its strength.”

  As the weeks dragged on, the Bureau of Motion Pictures became the subject of furious attacks in the press for its interference and obstruction. In the New York Times, Theodore Strauss, who had been shown Huston’s cut, called the delay “deplorable” and lamented the fact that Report from the Aleutians had not been shown “when it would have been most timely. . . . The public has been badly served. For two months at least a fine war document has been withheld . . . because of a disagreement which should have been resolved in a very brief time.” The press was especially prickly because the reports from the actual battle of Kiska and Attu had been heavily censored. “This is not the time or place to discuss the merits of that,” Strauss wrote, but he and many others argued that both Huston, “one of the finest of Hollywood’s younger directorial talents,” and cameraman Rey Scott, whose bravery in flying nine missions Huston had also shared with the press corps, were being as ill-treated as the public. “Men with honesty and talent can bring close to us the realities of the war,” he concluded. “It is frustrating when their efforts are ensnarled in red tape and wasteful argument back home.”

  The clash over Report from the Aleutians was Lowell Mellett’s last fight. He had expended all of his political capital and had run out of allies. The War Department saw him as an obstructionist. Exhibitors had tired of his hollow reassurances and found him to be an ineffective guardian of their interests. And to the studios, he was a power-hungry autocrat with an ungovernable appetite to control the content of their movies and the shape and scale of their businesses. They had never quite forgiven him for his s
uggestion that they conserve resources by halving their output and abolishing double features—an argument that Mellett had been typically unwilling to let drop until long after it became clear that it was falling on deaf ears.

  For all his pettiness and clumsiness, Mellett had used his office as a powerful and influential force in steering dozens of Hollywood scripts toward a slightly more progressive and internationalist view of the world. With good intentions that he often undercut with heavy-handed tactics, he had spent the year and a half since he agreed to run the bureau imploring filmmakers for Hollywood and the War Department alike to avoid jingoism, cautioning against films that would fuel race hatred among moviegoers, and warning directors, to almost no avail, about the ethical dangers of reenactment. But by the summer of 1943, the Office of War Information had become the scapegoat for anyone who was suspicious of official propaganda efforts, and even as Mellett was engaging in a test of wills with Huston, his influence was collapsing. When it came time for Congress to approve a budget for the 1943–44 fiscal year, the Bureau of Motion Pictures fell victim to a coalition of House Republicans and southern Democrats. Some congressmen were convinced that Roosevelt was overreaching and using his network of information agencies to create a permanent presidency for himself; others were certain that the OWI was filled with Communists who had insinuated their ideology into everything they touched. By a two-to-one margin, the House voted to slash the OWI’s budget drastically and to defund the Bureau of Motion Pictures completely.

  Even as he packed up his office in July and prepared to leave his unsalaried job and return to Washington as one of the president’s administrative aides, Mellett attempted, one last time, to take care of what he called “unfinished business” on the day he resigned, reminding his boss Elmer Davis that Report from the Aleutians “could have been completed back in April” and that the War Department’s insistence on releasing the film at its full length would mean that only “a limited number” of moviegoers would see it. He was right: Despite generous praise for Huston’s work, it was not a success when it finally opened theatrically in August on a double bill with a “B” melodrama called Bomber’s Moon, almost three months after the battle for Kiska and Attu had last been in the headlines. Once again, the American public, so hungry for war footage in newsreels, had shown little interest in paying to see it.

  Although the OWI managed to retain a presence in Hollywood, it would no longer have much to do with directors who worked for the Signal Corps. With Mellett’s departure, the World War II propaganda effort lost the closest thing it had to a watchdog and ombudsman. For the next two years, filmmakers would be on their own. The question Mellett had often said was more important than any other—“Will this picture help us win the war?”—would be all but forgotten, and the propaganda effort would enter its darkest and most troubling days.

  FIFTEEN

  “How to Live in the Army”

  NORTH AFRICA, HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA, AND WASHINGTON, SUMMER 1943

  The sorriest and most shameful episode in the history of army propaganda efforts during World War II—a misbegotten project that ended up consuming and compromising three directors on three continents—began with a single piece of bad luck. In November 1942, when Darryl Zanuck went to Algeria to oversee the army’s attempt to film the North African campaign, he decided to maximize his chances of obtaining good footage by breaking the photographers under his command into several small crews and sending each to a different city. Other than Ford, the most experienced Hollywood director Zanuck had working for him was Anatole Litvak, and so it was Litvak who got one of the mission’s plum assignments: He was the first filmmaker sent into Casablanca, where General Patton led thirty-five thousand American troops in the landing that initiated Operation Torch and the battle in which the Allies successfully took control of the port city from the occupying Vichy forces. For the documentary Zanuck intended to produce, the fight for Casablanca was important not only as the opening gambit in the campaign to retake Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia, but also as the most spectacular show of Allied military force since the start of the war. Patton and his men would provide the first real chance for army filmmakers to show moviegoers at home the strength of American ground troops on the offensive.

  Although Zanuck was later criticized for his decision to assign only a couple of men to a site as important as Casablanca, he had done his best with relatively limited filmmaking resources; at the same moment that Patton’s forces were arriving, seventy thousand more ground troops, Ranger battalions, and parachutists were coming ashore at four different points in Algeria, all of which were several hundred miles east. Zanuck didn’t want any major deployment to go unphotographed, and that day, Casablanca happened to be the location where the most vivid images were captured. Litvak, like the other men under Zanuck, had filmed with a handheld 16-millimeter camera equipped with a Kodachrome magazine clip; it was light, easy to use, and ideal for capturing long stretches of battle and sudden firefights since it could be reloaded quickly. As soon as the city had been taken and the Allies started moving east, Litvak packed up all of the reels he and his co-cameraman had shot and put them aboard a navy transport vessel bound for Europe. Shortly after Litvak stepped off the ship to return to shore, it was hit by a German torpedo and sunk. All of his film was lost.

  In later years, several people involved with what would become a large and carefully coordinated effort to reenact the North African campaign for use in army propaganda claimed that they made the decision to fake it because the army was afraid to admit to Roosevelt that only two men had been assigned to Casablanca. But it seems unlikely that there was any large-scale attempt to keep the truth from the White House: Zanuck bluntly reported the loss of Litvak’s footage in his book Tunis Expedition, which was published in April 1943, and the fact that he had no footage of Patton’s landing in Morocco was also apparent in his indifferently received documentary At the Front in North Africa. The deficiency of the Signal Corps’ overall effort was underscored by the U.S. release, just a few weeks earlier, of Desert Victory, a documentary that had been produced by the Army Film Unit of Britain’s version of the OWI, the Ministry of Information. When they got their first look at the British film, critics and audiences were astonished; they had seen nothing so action-packed or immediate from any American moviemakers since the war began. Time called Desert Victory, which depicted the push toward Tunisia with an understandable emphasis on British fighting forces, “the finest film of actual combat that has come out of this war,” and the magazine’s critic James Agee reiterated his praise in The Nation, writing that “there is hardly a shot which by any sort of dramatizing, prearrangement or sentimentalization gets in the way of . . . magnificence.” The movie, he wrote, amounted to “a stunning textbook on how to make a nonfiction war film,” the clear implication being that America’s wartime filmmakers should take it as an opportunity to learn from their betters.

  The acclaim Desert Victory received extended to the British not only as filmmakers but as warriors. “The casualties they suffered in its production,” wrote David Lardner in the New Yorker, “can perhaps be justified by the confidence it will instill in their allies. . . . It demonstrates, at least to the layman, that, given equipment and time for solid preparation, this particular United Nation can wage one nifty campaign.” So exciting was the picture that most reviews were willing to overlook the fact that it had made some judicious use of reenactments to depict key moments in the drive to retake Tobruk in Libya. “The captious will certainly find room for criticism of a film sold as 100% McCoy battle footage, for some of it, to anyone familiar with picture-making, is obviously not that,” wrote Variety’s reviewer. “It’s the overall effect, however, that counts.”

  To the men in charge of filmmaking for the army, that effect was twofold: The success of Desert Victory, with its deafening nighttime gun battles, lines of soldiers advancing through the dust and sand, and terrifying Luftwaffe bomb strikes, provided further evidence that the Bri
tish were continuing to outstrip the Americans in the quality and impact of their war filmmaking. More ominously, it suggested that if the army didn’t improve its pictures, American moviegoers might be left with the impression that the British were leading the Allied effort to win the war. The proudly Anglocentric Desert Victory placed great emphasis on the second battle of El Alamein in Egypt, which had ended in an Allied victory in November 1942 before the Americans had even arrived; by contrast, Zanuck’s film had failed to make any kind of case for the leadership of U.S. forces in the region. As far as the War Department was concerned, the propaganda campaign could not be allowed to rest there. A second film would have to be made—and not by Zanuck—that depicted the U.S. Army leading the Allies to victory in Tunisia.

  For that, the Signal Corps turned to Capra, who by the time Zanuck’s movie opened was yearning for the kind of public validation that he now understood he would not be likely to achieve with the Why We Fight series. In some ways, Capra’s division had never been stronger. Although his hopes that all of the Why We Fight installments would be released theatrically had died with the box-office failure of Prelude to War, the next three chapters were now finished and being shown to all new army recruits. In addition, to a remarkable extent given his shoestring budget, Capra was making good on the overall plans he had mapped out a year earlier. He had assigned a fresh team of writers and directors to come up with new approaches for two of the stalled projects about which he cared most deeply, The Negro Soldier and Know Your Enemy—Japan. He had also begun production of a newsreel, at first titled The War and soon renamed Army-Navy Screen Magazine, that would keep GIs around the world up to date on military events and international news every two weeks for the next two years, until the end of the war in Europe.