by Mark Harris
In early September, Capra called Huston back to Pinewood for two weeks during which they, Veiller, and Hodson would attempt to write a fresh script. Hodson, outnumbered and outtalked, found himself “doing a little fighting to prevent our picture . . . becoming disbalanced in favour of America—after all, we did most of the dirty work and had twice as many casualties.” He also complained that the screenplay the three Americans were drafting was “so long that . . . if we took War and Peace and Gone with the Wind and this script, we’d have a great trilogy.” But he came to like Capra and his team. “The generosity of the Americans when we write something that tickles them is unbounded,” he wrote. “We had some blunt talk over who did the fighting in Tunisia and a day or two later Frank Capra came down to Pinewood with the suggestion that we ought not to be worrying who did the fighting, but we should make a film whose real theme is the unity of the Allies and the need for carrying on that unity into the days of peace. He wasn’t sure we should agree, but we’re 100% for that.”
Capra’s notion to emphasize future cooperation in a postwar world, was, everyone agreed, the ideal solution for the last third of the script. He was now happy with the progress of the film, but also terribly lonely; he wrote to Lucille almost daily. Mail traveled slowly and unreliably, so personal wartime communication, except for the rare cable, was a jagged, fragmentary affair in which responses to letters often arrived late or out of order. “Please,” he wrote to Lucille on September 16, their daughter’s sixth birthday, “cable me once in a while just to tell me you are alright. There are moments when I get panicky about you.” Capra, Huston, and Veiller were all in their rented flats on Hill Street that night when, for the first time since their arrival in London, they heard the piercing rise and fall of air raid sirens, and then gunfire. “This is the real thing,” he wrote in his journal. “Bombs drop in the distance. Hyde Park guns shake the building. Tony and John go outside like most newcomers. Old ladies and children cower in the hallways. Maids and valets talk reassuring to them. . . . I was scared but I was more sick at the thought of these dear old ladies and little girls being mangled. How far has man gone mad? Will we never learn to get along better than to drop bombs on each other? Surely God didn’t mean that to happen? Please God put love and understanding into the hearts of men.” Thirty years later, Capra said that that night, as he shivered on the street, “war lost its glamour for me.”
By the beginning of October, with the Americans and British both working around the clock at Pinewood, the new picture was almost finished, but the mood of all involved had darkened considerably. Veiller was, according to Capra, “unhappy” with the compromised documentary they had produced, Capra found himself “unmoved and not very excited about anything—we’ve done our work well so what the hell,” and an exhausted Huston asked Capra for permission to take a few days off and travel north.
Capra himself was “really weary both physically and mentally” by October 7, when, in the middle of “a bright [moonlit] night, cold as hell,” he was caught in a second air raid. “The searchlights are frantic,” he wrote. “They get a German once in a while and hold him while the ack-ack keeps popping . . . it all seemed so inefficient to me. Thousands of shells going off but never seeming to hit anything. . . . I wonder how much longer the common people of the world are going to stand for this. I suppose [it will continue] till the German people realize the futility of war. . . . What a crime.”
The next morning, Capra screened Tunisian Victory to see whether the Ministry of Information would approve it. He was in no mood to be judged. “British big wigs . . . All frozen faced and tight assed gents who try to make you feel like a burglar,” he wrote. “What keeps me from telling them all to go to hell I don’t know.”
While Capra awaited their verdict, he came up with a new assignment that he felt would reinvigorate Huston, and would also remove him from what had become a distracting web of personal entanglements. “Between his genius and his social life,” Capra told Lucille, “he’s pretty much of a disorganized man.” During his time in London, Huston had met with Eric Ambler, a young, hard-nosed British spy novelist whose work he much admired. Ambler was only thirty-three, but he had already published half a dozen best sellers that used contemporary political events as the backdrop for cloak-and-dagger adventure, and his work had drawn the attention of Hollywood. Orson Welles had just cowritten and produced an adaptation of Journey into Fear, and Huston himself had done a draft of another Ambler adaptation, Background to Danger, for Warner Bros. Ambler was a committed anti-Fascist who had stopped writing and entered the war as a private in 1939; he had since risen to become a high-level assistant in the British Army Film Service.
In London, Huston had approached Ambler about a possible collaboration on a Hollywood film once the war was over, but Capra had something else in mind. Weeks earlier, the Allies had begun Operation Avalanche, the attempt to liberate Italy that had begun with a landing on the country’s western coast. They had successfully taken Salerno and were now pushing inland. “The idea, dreamed up . . . by Colonel Frank Capra,” wrote Ambler, “was that John Huston and a US Signal Corps film unit should go with the Allied armies to Rome and make [a] picture . . . about civilian Italy under its new conquerors.” The Army Pictorial Service unit back at Fort Fox was then deep into preparation for two new training films, “Occupation of Friendly Countries” and “Occupation of Enemy Countries,” and Capra believed that it was time for the Signal Corps to expand its propaganda effort from the home front to foreign nations. His plan had the enthusiastic backing of both General Osborn and the Office of War Information. “It was from one of the OWI people that I first heard the bromide, new then, about ‘going for the hearts and minds’ of a population,” Ambler wrote. “There was, however, a snag. It had been agreed at some high-level meeting that all psychological warfare films for propaganda in occupied territories should be joint Anglo-American ventures. John Huston therefore needed a token Britisher.” Ambler was surprised, and not particularly pleased, by the assignment, but he had no choice, and the blow was softened by an immediate promotion; the British army made him a captain so that Huston would not outrank him. He and Huston left London at the end of October on an air force transport plane bound first for Marrakesh, then for Naples.
Capra’s time in England was also coming to an end. After some deliberation, the Ministry of Information and the British War Office told him they would approve the release of Tunisian Victory as a joint production if the War Department would do the same. They were as polite and gracious to him as they had been when he first arrived, even throwing him a farewell party on November 4, the day he left for Washington. “Well the British have passed the opus calling it much better than theirs,” he wrote Lucille. The strain of their long separation was taking a toll on both of them; Lucille had let him know she was unhappy about it. “Please snap out of it, sweetheart,” he wrote back. “I’m not away from you because I like to be. This is no picnic. . . . I’m certainly looking forward to seeing you again soon. It will probably be the biggest treat of my life. . . . This thing will be over sometime, but while it’s on we’ve got to stick it. Everyone in the world must carry his particular little share.”
The movie Capra was bringing back to Washington was unmistakably his own, but it was also an uncomfortably negotiated hodgepodge of realism and falsification, conflicting styles and voices, and British and American interests. At seventy-five minutes, Tunisian Victory is padded not just with the reenactments Stevens and Huston had shot but with overly studied images of British soldiers at work that also have the air of contrivance. The strength of both countries’ contributions comes in the film’s quieter moments—the soldiers in their off hours, the melancholy Christmas celebrations, the hunkering down in miserable weather. But the tone is inconsistent and the depiction of the operation itself is spotty. One of the great U.S. Army triumphs in the campaign, the climactic “battle of Hill 609”—a brutal, sustained, and ultimately successful attempt by General
Omar Bradley to gain control of one of the highest vantage points in Tunisia—is portrayed entirely through American recreations. In many places, narration is used to paper over gaps in the footage—a voice-over explains that “the lights burned all night” when Churchill came to see Roosevelt in Washington as the camera lingers on a long, distant nighttime shot of a lit White House. There are competing stretches of narration, one from an American GI (voiced by Burgess Meredith) and one from an actor playing a British soldier with a Cockney accent, and Capra allows viewers to eavesdrop on their stilted chat. Rarely during the war had the propagandistic intent of a film meant for general audiences been put forth on screen with such little art or attempt to disguise it. Capra’s insistence that Hitler’s rise was traceable to an intrinsic German appetite for thoughtless regimentation is given lengthy expression. “Suppose somebody said, put that fellow’s eyes out, or turn the ’osepipe on that Jew or on that woman,” says the Cockney to the Yank. “Would we do it? You and me, Joe, we may not always think alike, but we do think. You ’n’ me and old Alphonse”—the picture briefly cuts to a French soldier with the word “France” superimposed—“and the rest, we certainly think, all right.”
“You know, George, I got an idea,” replies the American. “Why can’t we, after the war—the same work gang, I mean—keep on swinging together? What couldn’t we do? . . . Buildin’ things up instead of blowin’ things up. Like, I dunno, dams in the desert and roads through the jungle.” Tunisian Victory ends with a montage of hands-across-the-ocean brotherhood. The last line is nothing if not Capraesque. “Boy oh boy, what a job,” the GI concludes. “Bringin’ back the smiles to kids’ faces.”
Capra felt that he had fulfilled his mission, but he also expressed an angry certainty that he would take the fall for whatever the movie’s inadequacies were judged to be. “I’m the hatchet man,” he told Lucille soon after he returned to Washington. “[I’m] trying to raise the efficience [sic] and most of all the prestige of the Army Pictorial Service, which has been hitting a new low, mostly because they’re scared to death to move or to argue. . . . I’ve been trying to tell them they must never lose an argument, right or wrong. The old technique I used to use against the producers.”
Capra had won, but his insistence on cementing the special relationship between British and U.S. propaganda forces with shoddy work had left a bitter taste behind. “No war documentary can be made with absolute integrity and truth,” Hodson wrote in his diary soon after Capra left. “Some reconstruction is inevitable if the story is to be properly told. . . . There are two schools of thought. The first says, ‘Preserve integrity—make it real . . . even if the resultant picture is poor.’ . . . The other school says, ‘Make a good picture. If the “real” stuff isn’t good enough, fake some that’s better. The result is all that counts.’ The second, as I understand it, is the American view, and [Tunisian Victory] pretty well conforms to it.”
SEVENTEEN
“I Have to Do a Good Job”
ENGLAND AND ITALY, OCTOBER 1943–JANUARY 1944
William Wyler and George Stevens came back to London at the end of October, just as Huston and Capra were leaving. Wyler’s return was tense and urgent—the result of a summons by cable from Eighth Air Force commander General Eaker that read simply, “You come back or I get a replacement.” Wyler had spent the summer and early fall at home on the West Coast working on 25 Missions, but his stubborn, methodical, painstakingly slow progress had not escaped the attention of his commanding officers. Some of the delays were unavoidable: The backlogged processing labs at Technicolor had taken weeks to blow up his film from 16-millimeter to 35-millimeter, essential for a movie that Wyler was now sure he wanted to play in “thousands of theaters all over the country.” But the director, upon his return to Hollywood, had also reverted to “Forty-Take Wyler” form, working at his own pace to get exactly what he wanted and worrying little about the prescribed schedule.
In late August, the crew of the Memphis Belle had finally ended its national rallying tour and arrived in Los Angeles to work on the picture. Wyler saw their visit as an occasion to honor their achievement, and as a treat, he and Talli threw them a welcoming party at his home, asking each crewman in advance which Hollywood star he most wanted to meet. Nobody turned down his invitation—by then, the ten flyers, the youngest of whom was only nineteen, were celebrities in their own right, and for an evening they happily chatted and flirted with Veronica Lake, Hedy Lamarr, Olivia de Havilland, and Dinah Shore. The next morning, they met with Wyler and his postproduction team. Wyler listened to their suggestions, made a few changes in the lines he had planned to have them record, and started rehearsing them. He had to work around their availability—the navy was still putting the crew through its paces with daily appearances at Lockheed and Douglas aircraft plants along the Southern California coast, and by the time Wyler had finished recording their voice-overs and filming some brief insert shots, it was September and he still hadn’t written a narration script or gotten close to assembling a rough cut.
Wyler may have been in no hurry to finish the film, but he wasn’t lingering in Hollywood because of any eagerness to return to the movie business. When Sam Goldwyn asked him if he was ready to come home yet—studios and producers were increasingly anxious to get their top-tier talent back in the fold—Wyler told him he intended to stay in the war for the duration. Goldwyn then asked him to sign a punitive amendment to his contract which stipulated that he was to resume work in Hollywood within sixty days of his discharge and gave Goldwyn the right to terminate their deal unilaterally if the war didn’t end by December 31, 1945.
By October, the army was growing impatient, for both the movie and the resumption of Wyler’s service abroad. He had been working on 25 Missions for more than three months, and it still needed original music, narration, sound effects, and further editing. He cabled Eaker asking for a sixty-day extension, and when he received the general’s stern one-sentence threat to remove him from his job, he decided it would be more politic to make his case in person. He got on a C-54 army transport plane and flew to London.
When Wyler walked back into air force HQ in Grosvenor Square, Eaker was soon mollified and reassured, and he gave the director everything he wanted—another two months in Los Angeles, a promotion to lieutenant colonel, and—after several weeks of further long-distance negotiation and cajoling—permission to release the film as a five-reel feature attraction rather than a twenty-minute short. But for the rest of the year, the army would be watching him more closely; particularly among officers in Los Angeles, a suspicion that Wyler was dragging his feet had taken hold. In December, he was accused of showing up two hours late for a sound effects recording session, and received an army reprimand that in some particulars sounded as if it could have come straight from Hal Wallis or Sam Goldwyn. “The recording crew . . . was given a shooting time of 1900,” the memo read. “Please note that this same crew had been on duty since 0800 the same day. Colonel Wiler [sic], who is in charge of this job, did not appear until after 2100. . . . Seventeen (17) takes were made. . . . This appears to me to be an unnecessary expenditure of man hours and material and an unnecessary imposition on the dispositions of a group of men conscienciously [sic] trying to do a good job.” Wyler wrote a dismissive response denying that he was late and reminding the officers who were monitoring him that the care he was taking was in the service of “recording sound to go over some of the scenes shot by Lt [Harold] Tannenbaum, 47-year-old soundman, who . . . lies in a grave on the Brest peninsula, buried by the enemy . . . [and who] considered no ‘imposition on his disposition’ too great when his country was at war and a job had to be done.”
Tannenbaum’s death weighed heavily on Wyler as he worked on 25 Missions and struggled to find a balance between the triumphalism of a hard-won air force success story and the lasting ache of losing a comrade in arms. He found himself shaping a film that was more somber, personal, and haunted than the one he had sketched out before his first
trip to Bassingbourn, and he struggled to find an appropriate tone for it. Late in 1943, he asked the writer Maxwell Anderson, whose credits included the play What Price Glory? and the screenplay for All Quiet on the Western Front, to watch the latest cut of the film and then try his hand at writing narration for it. Wyler had always planned to end 25 Missions with Captain Morgan and his men celebrating at the airbase after their final flight, and the voice-over that Anderson conceived for the scene was intimate and anguished.
“The co-pilot asks the pilot if he’s going to ‘buzz the field’? Fly ’round it, that is, to celebrate,” Anderson wrote. “The pilot shakes his head. They lost some ships. Glad as he is to get through and get his rest, he can’t celebrate—not with those fellows in mind he’s not likely to see again. . . . It’s not all happiness. . . . That night there is a party, with girls and drinks, and one veteran who hadn’t tasted liquor since he entered the air corps went quietly and happily under the table. But in the middle of the hilarity Captain Morgan, who had never been accused of sentimentality, was seen sitting in a corner of the room with tears running down his cheeks. The reason was simple. He had been in charge of allocating men to planes in his squadron. One of the crews he sent out had also only one mission to go—and they had not come back. If he had only given them another plane—or chosen some other pilot! . . . And somehow the girls can’t recapture the party after that.”