by Mark Harris
Huston knew that what he was shooting was “trash” and approached it as something of a joke. “Looking back on it, it was absurd, and I was also aware of its absurdity at the time, I’m afraid. But Frank was undertaking in all seriousness to make a proper picture out of it, and . . . he was very skillful at concealing his deceit.”
In August, with postproduction work on Tunisian Victory almost completed in New York, Capra and Huston were called back to Washington for a meeting with the War Department and General Surles of the army’s Bureau of Public Relations. “We all met and looked at the material, which was just disgraceful,” said Huston. And then he and Capra were given the bad news: The film they had shot would now be employed not only to deceive the moviegoing public, but to bully America’s closest ally as well. The army had gotten word that the English were in the final stages of creating a documentary sequel to their own Desert Victory called Africa Freed!, with which Tunisian Victory would surely suffer in comparison. Surles told Huston and Capra that their next assignment was to convince the British to abandon their own picture in favor of a collaborative enterprise with the United States. As bait, they were told to use what they had just shot in California and Florida to demonstrate the high quality of the contribution that the Signal Corps could make. “The English were told that we had North African material,” said Huston. “And since we were allies and so on, wouldn’t it be a great gesture of friendship, making the bonds even stronger, if this was a joint English-American production?” In early August 1943, Capra was asked to step back from his full-time responsibilities running the 834th Signal Service Photographic Detachment and concentrate full-time on this mission. He turned his administrative job over to Anatole Litvak and prepared to leave Washington. A few days later, orders came through dispatching him and Huston to London, footage in hand, to make their case to the British Army Film Unit.
SIXTEEN
“I’m the Wrong Man for That Stuff”
WASHINGTON, HOLLYWOOD, AND ENGLAND, JUNE–DECEMBER 1943
The crew of the Memphis Belle beat William Wyler back to the United States by ten days. Their arrival in Washington, D.C., on June 16, 1943, felt like a movie; in fact, it had been scripted like one. The army planned to herald the Belle’s unblemished twenty-five-mission record as a symbol of success through perseverance, which, deep into the second year of America’s involvement in the war, had replaced readiness as the most important idea that army propagandists could promote. “With a new wing and a patched-up tail, a Flying Fortress glided down before a cheering crowd at National Airport today,” reported the Associated Press. “She is the first combat bomber to fly home from the European theatre under her own power.” Newsreel cinematographers were present to record the landing, and H. H. Arnold, the general in charge of the air force, greeted the ten men personally and told reporters that “the grandest thing of all is that . . . only one man, the tail gunner, was wounded.” With that, Captain Robert Morgan, the bomber’s pilot, was whisked off for a very public reunion in Tennessee with Margaret Polk, the young woman who had inspired him to give the plane its name; at the navy’s behest, the couple obligingly told the reporters who were swarming them that they would wed in August. (Once they were out of the spotlight, their relationship ended almost immediately, and by August, Morgan was engaged to another woman.) The air force had a great story to sell and ten young war heroes to help sell it; from Memphis, the crew and the Belle itself embarked on a six-week morale-building tour of factories, flying schools, and airbases that would take them across the country before they returned to the capital.
Wyler’s homecoming was quieter. The journey across the Atlantic, via military cargo transports that stopped in Iceland, Greenland, and Nova Scotia, had been fitful and almost dreamlike; Wyler was alone for much of the time, sleeping when he could, staring at the aurora borealis in awe from his airplane window and feeling slightly disoriented, after months on a British airbase, by the lightheartedness and comfort of the celebrity life to which he was, by degrees, returning. In Reykjavik he stayed in officers’ quarters that had once been a flophouse for homeless men. In Newfoundland, he had a meal with Irving Berlin, who was visiting Canada. And when he finally arrived in New York around midnight a week after he left London, he barely had time to sleep and shave before Sam Goldwyn was taking him to lunch, Elsa Maxwell was buttonholing him for a conversation, and he was expected at a dinner given by Wendell Willkie to honor Walter Lippmann. “DEAD (tired),” he wrote in his daybook after that night’s gala. “Long speeches & shows to get money from all the rich for the war. It’s depressing to think that’s the only way they can get it, with a big dinner show and lots of glamour.”
Talli had made her way to New York, and finally the two were reunited in a tender moment that both of them experienced in almost cinematic terms. “I was standing in the door of a room at the Plaza Hotel at the end of a long hall,” she said, and suddenly there in the distance was her husband emerging from the elevator bank, confused. “I got the room number,” he recalled. “I couldn’t find it at first. Finally, I saw Talli. . . . It was a little unusual. We had to run to each other.”
The Wylers went to Washington, where he was to be interviewed for the radio broadcast Army Hour, about what it was like to fly missions over France and Germany. “Fear,” he told the reporter. “Just plain, honest-to-God fear. Afraid to die, a feeling you realize you’ve never had before if you’ve never been shot at. But there’s another feeling that is also strong—and it helps a lot. As you look around and see a sky full of Fortresses—as you look down and see the enemy coast—you’d rather be where you are than down there. . . . This fear comes in spells—and never when you are busy. First, it grips you just after briefing—in those minutes before take-off. When you get into the plane, you are full of confidence, in the ship, in the crew, in yourself. Then there are minutes, which seem like hours, and hours, which seem like days—before you reach the target, and after you’ve left it, on the way home.”
As Wyler started to think about what he wanted the documentary he was tentatively calling 25 Missions to convey, he hoped to reproduce that combination of adrenaline, terror, and exhilaration, as well as the complicated and intense bond of the Belle’s crew. In the air, he said, “you’re inclined to worship the skipper, adore the ship, and look on all the other men on board as brothers. They depend on each other. They save each other’s lives every day. They’re human, naturally, and they make mistakes, but they’d rather get killed than let each other down. I heard a waist-gunner say, ‘I’ve got a whole new family. . . . There’s ten of us, and I know ’em better than I know my own brothers and sisters, and it’s just as tough to lose one.”
Wyler was determined to use only the footage that he, Bill Clothier, and the late Harold Tannenbaum had shot on their missions with the 91st Bomb Group; there would be no backlot recreations or miniatures in his movie. But it would be necessary to create a complete soundtrack from scratch, since the bone-shaking roar of a B-17’s four engines made audio recording in the air impossible. Even so, Wyler strove for verisimilitude, and in July he convinced the air force that after the Belle’s publicity tour was over, the crew should be flown to Los Angeles, where they themselves would record the comments and instructions they had spoken to one other over the bomber intercom. Wyler wrote an extremely simple script, in keeping with his memories of the terse communications used aboard the plane—“Fire at 1030 coming round,” “Got ’em,” “Upper or lower”; he also stayed true to the language the men used (“Come on, you son of a bitch!”). He would supervise the dialogue recording himself to keep the men sounding unforced and natural.
Wyler and the Signal Corps had originally envisioned 25 Missions as a twenty-minute short, but as he began to piece together the sixteen thousand feet of 16-millimeter film he had brought back from Europe, he became excited enough to start planning a longer picture of forty or fifty minutes. He cabled Beirne Lay, advising him that the footage’s “complete authenticity and [the
] fact that Morgan and crew have become national heroes” (they were now doing aerial acrobatic shows in the South and Midwest as part of their victory tour) were ample justification for a more substantial film. And before he left Washington to work on the movie at home in California, he met with Capra and showed him the best of the footage he had compiled. Capra loved it—“very exciting air stuff,” he reported to his wife, who was still living in Los Angeles with their three young children.
As Wyler prepared for ninety days in California that would give him time he badly wanted with Talli, Cathy, and Judy, Capra packed to leave for England, uncertain of how long his mission to strong-arm the British into collaborating on Tunisian Victory would keep him there. The time he spent away from home was beginning to tug at his conscience; he had been largely absent for almost two years, and he had barely seen his youngest child, two-year-old Tommy, since his first birthday. “Just a last-minute note,” he wrote to Lucille, “to tell you that the happiest moment of my life will be to get back to you and the children. Dear Tommy,” he added, “even though you can’t read I know you can feel how much your daddy loves you.” But as he explained, there could be no turning back. The Tunisian project, he wrote, “is a tough job—we didn’t have much film. . . . It’s up to me. I’m to make a deal for all future joint [British-American] operations. . . . This looks like the opportunity, and Surles has given me the power to make any kind of a deal I want to make. . . . It looks like I’ve finally got a free hand.”
Capra, Huston, and Anthony Veiller, a half-British, half-American screenwriter in the Signal Corps whose presence was intended to help ease tensions and smooth over cultural differences, arrived in London at a moment when English tensions were running especially high. “Politically, the war is going stale,” wrote George Stevens, who was also in London briefly on his way back from Iran for a sixty-day leave in the United States. “People . . . are more and more turning their thoughts toward the resumption of normal peacetime activities.” In London, some politicians were urging a relaxation of air raid precautions and even advocating an end to nighttime blackouts. But the prevailing atmosphere was still one of vigilance. Hundreds of sixty-foot long “barrage balloons”—a network of stationary blimps designed to thwart low-flying German bombers—hung in the skies over the city, a constant reminder that London was now beginning its fifth year in peril. Goebbels had promised a relentless bombing campaign in reaction to RAF airstrikes on Germany, and there was fearful talk in the streets and the newspaper columns about rumors of a new Axis “secret weapon.”
The American filmmaking delegation was prepared for the British to be resolute and knew they would resent U.S. interference with a movie they had already completed, but Capra and his men had not crossed the Atlantic with a particularly well-organized master plan about how to present themselves. “I didn’t even have time to buy a razor,” said Huston. “Everything in the Army was always done in a rush—same psychology prevails as [in] the movies.” And their English hosts were already braced to resist any American complaints that the United States had been treated unfairly in their new movie. A month earlier, the British Army Film Unit had preemptively rebutted any possible charge of “intentional bias” by warning OWI liaison Sam Spewack that their film Africa Freed! would have almost no “representation . . . of the part played by the Americans in the Tunisian campaign . . . due entirely to [the] lack of satisfactory film material of American troops in action.” Spewack told Capra that the British had agreed to emphasize American valor in their film’s narration, but he sent an urgent cable saying that the Signal Corps would have to step in immediately to stop the picture from giving an “inadequate impression of [the] joint operation. . . . British most anxious to release this month and will do so unless Capra appears soonest.”
Capra and Huston had barely checked into Claridge’s when things started to go sour. At his first meeting with the British, over dinner at the hotel to discuss the joint venture, Capra got into a heated argument with James Hodson, the writer of Africa Freed! Hodson made no secret of the fact that he believed the Americans were there to co-opt a British success story. Nor did he share Capra’s comfort with the use of extensive reenactments in documentaries. The next day, Capra and Huston were invited to see Africa Freed! They “said it was a swell picture and I think they were sincere in that,” wrote Hodson. “But they think we ought to have a joint film.”
The movie was “very good, but American representation nil,” Capra wrote in his diary that night. “Said so. British claim we gave them no film. Very true.” In response, Capra had tried to go on the offensive, suggesting that the British had their own footage of American troops that they had not only kept out of Africa Freed! but had withheld from the United States in order to weaken the American film Tunisian Victory, something for which no evidence existed, but which he seems to have talked himself into believing. The British denied it. “Something screwy here,” Capra wrote.
Over the next few days, Capra bickered with the British over the fate of their movie. “Dialectics,” he wrote. “They want to talk of future instead of this picture. We threaten to leave. Finally British have big meeting with MoI [the Ministry of Information]. Joint picture on. MoI and some American agency to have final approval” (authority over army propaganda was, by late summer, so convoluted that even Capra couldn’t guess what division of the War Department would eventually sign off on the film). In his journal, he spared a moment of sympathy for the makers of Africa Freed!, whose work would now be completely shelved so that the United States could save face. “[British] film boys heartbroken,” he wrote, “as they feel they have [a] fine picture which will now be . . . taken over by Americans.”
Huston had sat through the week of contentious meetings glumly, and was acutely aware that his own side had acted in bad faith. He thought that Africa Freed! was a strong movie full of “good, authentic material” and he hated his part in its dismantling. “I must say I didn’t have much heart for any of this,” he recalled. “They had a picture quite ready to show, and it was delayed for us.” As soon and as often as he could, Huston left Pinewood Studios, where the British and American filmmaking teams were now attempting to work together, and escaped into London. “England was just wonderful during the war,” he wrote. “You always wanted to stay up all night. You never wanted to go to sleep.” Quickly, he fell into a mad romance with a married twenty-year-old starlet named Leni Lynn, chasing her through London showbiz society, dazzling her with notes, flowers, and promises, then leaving her with a parting gift of diamonds. At the same time, he slept with a Canadian journalist who turned out to be a vicious anti-Semite, “the blackest bitch I’ve ever encountered,” and a possible Nazi agent; she left him with a parting gift of gonorrhea. And as much as possible, he avoided any further work on Tunisian Victory and tried to forget his contribution to it.
When it became clear that Capra, Huston, and Veiller were going to be in London for months rather than weeks, they moved out of Claridge’s and into a set of flats in a house on Hill Street near Berkeley Square. But they were rarely home at the same time; Huston spent his nights out while his boss worked late into the evening at Pinewood. In England, Capra was all business; even on the rare occasions he partook in London’s social life, he ended up feeling alienated and homesick. “Party at John Mills’ house,” he wrote. “Bob Hope, Frances Langford and others there. Much food and vodka. I got claustrophobic and walked home in blackout. Got lost and fell down. Impossible [to] get cabs after 9 p.m. . . . Just realizing how far away I am from home.”
As Capra began weeks of collaboration with his British counterparts on ideas for a new version of their film, he kept his guard up. Every time he thought a deal for an Anglo-American coproduction was firm, he would learn that it was subject to the approval of yet another layer of British army bureaucracy. More than once, he lost his temper. “Shock of my life,” he wrote at the end of August. “The British haven’t decided on joint picture yet. Some bloke called Tritton [Gene
ral Surles’s counterpart, the head of public relations in the British War Office] demands to see the film. . . . We bring over [our] film, show it, then they decide. . . . I blew up.” Aware of the appalling quality of the American reenactments, Capra insisted that the British make a deal without seeing his footage. “I will show no film to anyone until I know joint picture was on or off.”
Remarkably, even within the privacy of his own diary, Capra was able to make himself believe that he was holding out as a matter of principle rather than of strategy. “Now convinced we’re right,” he wrote. “Our point is co-operation whether either side had any film or not, not only when it suits. . . . British annoyed at not being able to have their way. Their idea of co-operation is to do it their way. I’m the wrong man for that stuff.”
Eventually, a new and final deal was reached; the British and American film units would make all of their footage available to each other. England’s footage of the actual campaign and Capra’s staged reenactments would be pooled into a new coproduction, and once a rough cut had been completed, both countries would have the option to request changes or even cancel the project entirely. The arrangement satisfied Capra, who was happy to roll up his sleeves and devote himself to an actual movie instead of another bargaining session; he soon relaxed and his initial pugnacity gave way to open admiration. “Tough people, these English,” he wrote to Lucille. “It’s certainly not the same country we used to know. The people are just grand the way they put up with everything without any complaint. In fact they all go out of the way to be nicer and more pleasant.” In his diary, he added, “[I] never cease marveling at British people. They are like golf balls. Soft cover and hard cores—each layer getting harder and harder.”