by Mark Harris
And almost on a whim, Capra had conceived and commissioned what would turn out to be by far the most popular series of training films made for servicemen during the war. Soon after he had arrived in Washington, he had commissioned one of the writers in his charge to draft a lighthearted script for a short called Hey, Soldier! in which a complaining private would be made to understand the importance of various army rules and regulations. The movie was never made, but, inspired by the way draftees were responding to the use of animation in the Why We Fight films, Capra reconceived Hey, Soldier! as a series of cartoons. He came up with a character called “Private SNAFU,” a grumbling, naïve, incompetent GI who would be featured in an ongoing run of short black-and-white cartoons in which—usually by catastrophically negative example that more than once ended with him being blown to bits—he would inform young enlistees about issues like the importance of keeping secrets and the need for mail censorship, as well as the hazards of malaria, venereal disease, laziness, gossip, booby traps, and poison gas.
To oversee the writing and production of the shorts, Capra recruited an editorial cartoonist from New York City who had been doing caustic satirical work for the left-wing newspaper PM. Theodor S. Geisel—later famous as Dr. Seuss—had first gotten Capra’s attention in early 1942, when he had depicted isolationist Senator Gerald Nye, one of his favorite targets, as a literal horse’s ass. Geisel was a strongly pro-Roosevelt German American who, in his single-panel sketches, had demonstrated an unerring ability to draw blood and get laughs at the same time. With a few strokes of his remorseless pen, Hitler became a tantrum-throwing infant and isolationism was reduced to a scrawny bird being blown to kingdom come after Pearl Harbor. In several memorable drawings, Charles Lindbergh was transmuted into an ostrich with his head in the sand and his butt—sometimes emblazoned with a disparaging message—waving in the breeze.
Capra sent one of his army writers, Leonard Spigelgass, to New York to recruit Geisel, and Spigelgass sent word back to his boss that “he has a remarkably good brain, and seems to me useful infinitely beyond a cartoonist.” Geisel, who had no animation or filmmaking experience, was sworn in as a captain in New York and brought west to Fort Fox, where Capra walked him through the animation studios. They ended up at the editing bays. “He gave me the tour,” Geisel said, “and the last thing he said was, ‘Here, Captain, are the Moviolas.’ I said, ‘What is a Moviola?’ He looked at me rather suddenly and said, ‘You will learn.’”
Disney and Warner Bros. had both put in bids to produce the SNAFU shorts, but Disney had insisted on retaining rights to the characters and images; Warners did not, and won. In a historically felicitous pairing, Capra teamed Geisel with a thirty-year-old animator named Chuck Jones. For the last couple of years, Jones had been developing a new character named Elmer Fudd in a handful of Merrie Melodies shorts. He had been refining Elmer’s appearance with each new cartoon, and had experimented with giving him different voices. Working with Geisel, he took some early character sketches and turned Fudd into Private SNAFU.
With Mel Blanc providing voices for the characters, Geisel writing the early scripts, and a team of animation directors that included not only Jones but Friz Freleng, Frank Tashlin, and Bob Clampett, the “Private SNAFU” shorts—twenty-six in all would be produced over the next eighteen months—were the funniest, most original, and unquestionably the raunchiest movies ever produced for the Signal Corps. Munro Leaf, a pacifist whose popular illustrated children’s story about Ferdinand the Bull had been widely viewed as an antiwar parable, also worked on the series, and Geisel and Jones took his great contribution—the advice that if they wanted GIs to pay attention, they should “make it racy”—and ran with it. That approach began with the explanation of the title in the very first cartoon—“SNAFU means Situation Normal All . . . Fouled Up,” says the narrator, inserting a droll pause before “fouled” that never would have passed muster with either the Production Code or Lowell Mellett. Geisel and Jones used the fact that the only audience for the cartoons would be adult men as a permission slip to break every barrier in the movies, and Capra gave them his blessing. The first SNAFU shorts, which introduced the main character—the private who was always wishing for things to be different and his fairy godfather, “Technical Fairy, First Class”—were made for about $2,500 each. Unfolding with proto-Seussian rhyming narration that played like an early draft of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, they included words like “hell” and “damn,” fleeting cartoon nudity, burlesque jokes, toilet humor, and sometimes lines that even its creators couldn’t believe they were getting away with. “It’s so cold it would freeze the nuts off a jeep!” wrote Geisel as a dare to Jones, who promptly storyboarded a cutaway to lug nuts falling off a shivering army vehicle.
Capra was on a winning streak—the SNAFU shorts were a hit with GIs around the world as soon as they made their first appearance in the biweekly newsreels his team was producing—but it seemed more and more likely to him that his war output would be limited to films that were seen only by men in uniform. Then he received a letter from Bob Heller, who had contributed to a couple of Why We Fight scripts and was now working at the army postproduction facility in Astoria. “I imagine you have seen Desert Victory,” Heller wrote. “Perhaps you’ll agree with us that this is the finest documentary that has come out of the war. . . . If we in America can evolve a use of combat film as effectively as this, we shall have done more than render our best services.” The crisis over the lost Casablanca footage and the Signal Corps’ increasing competiveness with England represented an opportunity for Capra. He took Heller’s words as a challenge to make a major, feature-length documentary for public release, and he decided that if the Signal Corps didn’t have great combat material from the now-completed North African campaign, they would simply have to falsify it.
He recruited two of his best men for the job. George Stevens was still in Algiers, wondering why he had traveled so far from home to film a battle that was already over. There and in Egypt, he had shot what little there was to shoot—home-movie-style scenes of his men going swimming, postcard images of striking landscapes, caves and carvings, and newsreel-ready records of the occasional color guard, dress inspection, or medal presentation. But over the last few weeks, he had had little to do but observe the differing operational styles of the U.S. and British forces, and he wasn’t alone in feeling that the English seemed to understand the terrain better than the Americans did. “Our . . . uniforms look like outing clothes the Wichita Kiwanis Club would use. . . . Nothing about them is functionally good,” he wrote in his journal. “We could be so much more sensibly garbed if we took some things from the British.” Idle and directionless, Stevens wrote letters home and planned drinking parties with his men. “Purchased 4 pints Mumm’s Champagne and one pint Courvoisier brandy at seven dollars for the brandy. Very expensive but I have been spending very little money—and the boys want to have a party Thursday night and the [champagne] will be my contribution. The brandy I will save for ‘medicinal purposes.’”
On June 4, Stevens was in the senior officers’ mess when orders from Capra’s office came through from his colonel. “He wants me to get our group together and shoot some re-enactment scenes to round out the film taken on the African Tunis campaign,” Stevens wrote. In fact, there was almost no good material from the campaign to “round out”—the best of it had already been used in Zanuck’s film—and the restaging would require a large-scale appropriation of troops and materiel. “We are going to use some infantry and five tanks,” Stevens wrote, “some motorized 75 mm artillery on half-trucks, scout cars, jeeps and the other vehicles necessary to simulate actual battle condition[s]. We are using an area along the water so that the shell fire can drop into the sea.”
Over the next week, Stevens organized his ideas for what the staged battle scenes should look like into different shots and scenes, filming them and noting each day’s work in his journal. In Algiers, he had sought out cameraman William Mellor, an ace Ho
llywood cinematographer who was being underused in the army—“they didn’t know whether to send him into the MP or the KP or what,” said Stevens. (Mellor would go on to win two Academy Awards for his Hollywood films with the director after the war.) Working to get Capra the action scenes he wanted, the two men filmed “already blown-up villages being blown up more, and tanks going in” to Algerian towns. The local residents “would always scream when you went through the villages in jeeps,” he recalled. “It was as good after the campaign as it was [during combat].” Stevens didn’t simply recreate the advance through Algeria; he transposed some of what the British had done into American accomplishment. “We took tanks and ran them through the water like they did when the British Seventh Armored Division cut off the Germans [who had built roadblocks designed to prevent the tanks from moving over land] by taking their tanks out into the water,” Stevens recalled, adding that doing so was a lesson in the realpolitik of competing propaganda efforts. “We . . . learned a little bit about how to live in the Army.”
Stevens made no effort to disguise the fact that he was staging the combat scenes, something that would have been evident to anyone with moviemaking experience at the time, as well as to sharp-eyed general audiences. His work is perfectly framed, with the cameramen often seeming to have advanced through a combat zone well before the actual soldiers, who are seen moving carefully across the frame from right to left, painstakingly working to seize a position the camera has already achieved. When there are explosions, the camera is positioned to catch them perfectly, and the image doesn’t jolt because the cameraman isn’t startled. (Sometimes even the advancing troops forget to react.) Most of the recreated scenes were filmed by Stevens and Mellor simultaneously from different angles, and in some of the shots the other camera is visible.
Stevens spent two weeks shooting for Capra, but not with great enthusiasm. In Algiers, he clashed with his superior officer, Colonel Melvin Gillette, a fifteen-year veteran of the Signal Corps whom Stevens thought was untrustworthy and unintelligent. Stevens badly wanted autonomy over his own group of combat cinematographers—a position akin to what Ford had in the navy—and he was unsuccessfully lobbying General Osborn in notes to Washington. He believed the overcautious Gillette was forcing the need for reenactments by keeping him and other Signal Corpsmen away from actual combat until it was over. “Although Gillette had agreed that I was to handle show my way,” Stevens wrote in his diary, “I did not trust him.” The corps, he added, “would give us everything we wanted (except freedom).” Stevens patiently explained to Gillette that letting him get closer to actual frontline fighting would not only provide the army with better material, lowering the odds that they would have to restage battles later, but also allow him to create more authentic reenactments if they were eventually found to be necessary. “We could make [the] greatest war picture by going through the action with troops, then coming back and simulating action with the next wave. Later I wished I hadn’t told him this great trick,” Stevens admitted in his diary, “but he’s probably too dumb to know its value.”
Stevens sent Capra all of the film he shot, but he couldn’t wait for his unhappy time in North Africa to end. When orders came through for him to move on to Iran, he was elated. “25th Day—Escape From Algiers,” he wrote. It took him two weeks of ground travel to reach his next posting in Animeshk, a town near the Iran-Iraq border that had for the last two years been used as a way station for refugee Poles, most of them women, who had fled their country and were now awaiting safe passage to India or South Africa. In Animeshk, the lucky ones were able to pick up a little money by working as washerwomen or mess hall servants. The unlucky ones worked as prostitutes. Venereal disease was widespread. It had been half a year since Stevens left the United States to begin his service, but this was his first look at the human consequences of war, and he was unnerved and repelled. He wrote of entering “a foul, filthy little village where the children follow you and with great persistence cry for baksheesh and old crones claw at you as you pass through . . . one tries desperately to avoid their touch because of the typhus lice they both carry.”
Animeshk served as a kind of Allied crossroads where U.S. and UK forces would go about their business, barely interacting with either the villagers or the Russians whose military supply convoys would frequently pass through. Nothing Stevens saw there felt particularly coordinated or effective to him. “The trucks have just been assembled and on the door in chalk is marked the things that the inspector found out of order,” he wrote. “One item on [the] door just read ‘Fucked up.’ The adjective of two armies. The British and American.” There were ways to pass the time—at night, the officers would drink and occasionally join the GIs to watch late-arriving movies like Wake Island and How Green Was My Valley—but for Stevens, whose only real assignment in the war thus far had been to fake it for Capra, the sense of aimlessness in this new Persian outpost only exacerbated his frustration.
“Alright,” he wrote in his journal, “I have been [in the army] for six months now. . . . Needed that experience to discover what difficulties might be encountered in getting my job done under conditions new to me. . . . Now, starting all over again.” In notes to himself that July, for the first time, he enumerated his goals. One was to show home-front moviegoers exactly what the army was doing—“If you have bought a two bit war stamp this is our show. This is what you are getting for your money.” More than most other directors, Stevens also believed that part of his duty was to ready Americans for a time after combat. The Signal Corps, he felt, should “prepare the civilians, by sharing the soldiers’ experiences, for resuming relationship with men who have been away” and “make the casualties easier to bare [sic] for those who have suffered bereavement.” But he believed those goals were achievable only if the reality of battle was brought to movie screens as soon as possible. “Construct a celluloid monument to those who have been the ones to go,” he wrote in a set of instructions to himself. “Show the war.”
Stevens was more and more certain that nobody based in Washington, including Capra, had the knowledge it took to make good decisions about what needed to be filmed on the ground; his experience staging battles and faking advances had led him to the conviction that the Signal Corps was badly misusing the men it had recruited from Hollywood. “Gave up my personal film projects to make films for the war dept of the highest possible caliber,” he wrote in a draft of a letter intended for General Osborn. In his early days working on silent westerns, he reminded the general, he had been “a cameraman on the most formidable outdoor projects. . . . Twenty-five years getting ready for—this job. Now I am ready.” He told Capra’s boss Lyman Munson that the Signal Corps was a disorganized shambles: “We should have gone to [Pantelleria, in Sicily] and filmed destruction of guns and gun emplacements—showing greater damage done by our firepower.” Instead, “we wait for someone higher up to tell us what to do. We are never told because no one higher up presumes to know what to tell us. The great American ability to make movies,” he concluded, is “lost in our war effort.”
His complaints were ignored. In Washington, Capra was still hell-bent on turning the Allied victory in Tunisia into a feature film, and Stevens’s work had gotten him only halfway there. For the next phase of his project, he turned to John Huston, who was passing the summer in New York doing little other than carrying on a public flirtation with Marietta Fitzgerald and fighting for the theatrical release of Report from the Aleutians. Capra told him it was time to get back to work, and summoned him to Washington along with Lieutenant Colonel Jack Chennault, a cameraman who had been with Huston in Adak.* The men were told that their new job was to restage the rest of the Allied operation in Tunisia without ever leaving the United States.
Huston and Chennault were first flown to the Mojave Desert in Southern California, the closest visual match for Tunisia that Capra could find. They were ordered to “‘manufacture’ a North African film and be quick about it,” Huston wrote. With Capra traveling
alongside them and supervising them every step of the way, they went to an army base called the Desert Training Center, where many American soldiers assigned to North Africa were sent before going overseas in order to become accustomed to desert conditions; the army also used the center to field-test equipment and dry-run tactical operations. Huston was given a large cast of “extras”—GIs who had not yet shipped out—and told to start filming. “We had troops moving up and down hills under fake artillery concentrations,” he said; “the worst kind of fabrication.” While Huston focused on shooting ground troops, Chennault was given command of several P-39s, low-altitude single-engine fighter planes that he sent into the air and then had bomb and strafe the desert as the cameras rolled. The army gave Huston some dummy tanks—metal frames with painted canvas stretched over them—and he shot from a distance as Chennault’s planes bombed the empty shells.
Capra and Huston then went back to New York to do some editing work on the movie. Huston, who felt at home in the city, had been enjoying a playboy’s schedule that was barely distinguishable from the life he would have led had he never left Hollywood; he spent his days seeing friends or, on rare occasions, checking in at the army HQ in Astoria, his evenings in nightclubs, and his nights either at the St. Regis or at the Park Avenue apartment of wealthy friends. Capra, out of his element, was anxious for the movie to be completed swiftly. “The work is getting more complicated,” he wrote to Lucille. “It just seems we keep standing still . . . in this hot weather you never seem to get anything done. . . . The women have discovered John Huston’s place. They will have to move out [in order for him] to do any work. They simply barge in and take charge. . . . I hate this place and all the people.”
After a week, Capra dispatched Huston to shoot the most elaborately staged combat sequences he had yet commissioned. This time his destination was Orlando, Florida, where he and Bill Mellor, who had returned from Algeria, were to simulate the heavy bombardment of Axis fortifications in North Africa as well as aerial combat between Allied and German planes. “I set it up so that the fighters—which were supposed to be German planes—would dive so close to the bombers from which we were filming that you couldn’t possibly identify them,” Huston wrote later. “There were no casualties, thank God! . . . The bomber crews were sweating blood, and on several occasions were all for knocking down the attack planes. My camera crew was utterly bewildered by it all. I remember shouting to my first cameraman, ‘They’re coming in at two o’clock!’ and seeing him look at his watch.”