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

by Mark Harris

  NINETEEN

  “If You Believe This, We Thank You”

  HOLLYWOOD AND ENGLAND, MARCH–MAY 1944

  In early 1944, after two years of war, the studios, which had become ever more deeply entangled with Washington, began, first gently and then forcefully, to reclaim their autonomy and to reassert themselves as servants of popular taste rather than of the national interest. In the months after Pearl Harbor, they had been quick to meet the government’s request for pictures about battlefield bravery and home-front sacrifice. But more and more, American moviegoers were turning away from war pictures and toward other genres for entertainment—musicals, comedies, religious epics like The Song of Bernadette, historical biographies like Madame Curie—or to pictures that exploited the war not as their primary subject but as a backdrop, at once topical and exotic, for foreign adventure or intrigue. In March 1944, the Best Picture Oscar went to Casablanca, in which the war was used to provide atmosphere and raise the stakes for romance. Some in the industry expressed surprise that a mere piece of genre entertainment could sweep past films that were thought to be either more hard-hitting or more high-minded, but the win for Casablanca reflected changing tastes both within the movie business and outside it; films that dealt directly with the realities of combat or global politics went home empty-handed, and were increasingly being ignored by audiences as well.

  Some critics decried what they saw as Hollywood’s expedient abandonment of responsibility in favor of escapism, and bemoaned the eagerness with which studios were now acceding to the general public’s seeming lack of curiosity about what was happening in the rest of the world. “We suffer . . . a unique and constantly intensifying schizophrenia which threatens no other nation involved in this war,” James Agee wrote in an essay bitterly titled “So Proudly We Fail” about Hollywood’s abrogation of its duty to educate moviegoers and soldiers alike. “Those Americans who are doing the fighting are doing it in parts of the world which seem irrelevant to them; those who are not remain untouched, virginal, prenatal, while every other considerable population on earth comes of age. In every bit of information you can gather about breakdowns of American troops in combat . . . a sense of unutterable dislocation, dereliction, absence of contact, trust, wholeness, and reference . . . clearly works at the root of the disaster.”

  But moviegoers felt, if anything, overexposed to the war and its ramifications. Aside from the barrage of newsreels and morale-building shorts that preceded practically every main attraction, there were the pictures themselves; at the end of 1943, an Office of War Information report noted that out of 545 feature films currently in production or development, 264 had content that was related, either directly or tangentially, to the war or to the OWI’s propaganda objectives. But as the pictures started to falter financially, the studios put the brakes on dozens of war-themed scripts. “Hollywood has finally thrown up its hands in despair at attempting to keep pace with headlines,” wrote Mildred Martin in the Philadelphia Inquirer; she cited “downright apathy on the part of audiences” and contended that “the imminent invasion of Europe seems to have been the last straw [since] neither writers, producers, nor directors are in any position to forecast on film the real-life drama of that campaign.”

  The Oscar ceremony held in the spring of 1944 at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood paid dutiful tribute to the troops, as it had for several years running: After “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, ten rows of seats were raised by elevator onto the back of the stage; the invited soldiers and sailors who filled them would remain there as guests of honor for the evening. But the show’s nod to the war effort was more perfunctory than it had been recently. A year after Lowell Mellett had addressed the room, there would be no renewed call from the OWI for the studios to keep their movies on message, nor were any cables of encouragement from Roosevelt or George Marshall or Wendell Willkie read out at the podium that evening. Hollywood was, in a way, reclaiming ownership of itself, and the filmmakers it chose to honor were, for the most part, those who had stayed home. Although Capra, Stevens, Huston, and Ford were all responsible for nominated movies, the opening of the envelopes mostly brought them disappointment. The only American picture to win a documentary prize that evening was, ironically, one that nobody particularly wanted to claim: Ford’s recut version of Gregg Toland’s December 7th took the statuette for Best Short Subject.

  Capra and Ford had walked away as cowinners of the Best Documentary Feature award a year earlier, the beneficiaries of Academy president Walter Wanger’s agreement to have twenty-five nominees and four different winners. That largesse was, it turned out, a one-year-only experiment. This year, just five movies were nominated. Huston’s Report from the Aleutians was in the race, as were Capra’s Why We Fight installment The Battle of Russia and War Department Report, an OSS propaganda film produced by Ford’s Field Photo Unit with narration by Walter Huston, who announced at its outset, “This is not a propaganda film.” The word was tainted again—anathema to politicians, studios, and moviegoers. Those three pictures, as well as a fourth armed forces–produced film called Baptism of Fire, all lost. The Oscar went to Desert Victory, the British film that Capra had tried so hard to outdo.

  And with Tunisian Victory now just a couple of weeks from opening, critics were already telling him that he had failed. Everyone who wrote about the Anglo-American coproduction that Capra had spent the better part of 1943 overseeing found something different to dislike about it. The New York Times thought its account of troop movements was “deficient,” “inaccurate,” and “dubiously described,” and questioned the relevance of a film that was arriving in U.S. theaters a full year after the campaign had ended. The battle action that Capra, Huston, and Stevens had contrived in Tunisia, California, and Orlando was, according to the New Yorker, “all a bit too much like other guns and planes and bombs in the movies and not particularly indigenous to the Tunisian campaign.” Time faulted Capra’s unchecked taste for narration, including the “unfortunate . . . off-screen voices of a British and a U.S. soldier philosophizing vaguely about the postwar world.” Manny Farber complained that “the continuity has been chopped practically to confetti. The film seems to have been worked by several thousand cooks, each of whom decided to throw in another commentator, some more maps, and some business he found exciting in another documentary.” And Agee left little doubt as to what that other documentary was. “The film,” he wrote in The Nation, “never escapes for more than a few seconds at a time into the sort of pure tragic excitement which Desert Victory proved a war film can be. . . . I . . . felt that the people on the screen and in front of it were being unconsciously patronized; and judging by the run of British and American films I have seen, I feel pretty sure whose national disease that is.”

  Public tastes in war documentaries were changing as quickly as they were in Hollywood features. Oversaturated with booming declarations of patriotism, gung-ho optimism, and arm-twisting voice-overs about the American way of life, moviegoers were now looking for filmed coverage of the war that felt concise, direct, and unsparing. Just as Tunisian Victory opened, a Marine Corps short by Louis Hayward* called With the Marines at Tarawa also reached theaters. Its account of the November 1943 battle to retake a two-mile piece of a Pacific atoll, a staggeringly bloody four-day siege in which seventeen hundred marines and navy men had been killed, gave audiences a picture of the war they had not seen before in a report that was sober and even at times discouraging. (Two of the fifteen marine cameramen who worked on the short had been killed in action.) For the first time, a picture from the armed forces gave audiences a long, unblinking look at dead bodies—not only ugly piles of Japanese corpses, but young American men splayed across the sandy ground or floating slowly back and forth in the shallow, bloodied surf. “This is the price we have to pay,” the terse, pared-down narration concluded, “for a war we didn’t want.” Tarawa was, as the New York Times put it, “overpoweringly real,” and, combined with the unexpected and startlingly swift bo
x-office failure of Tunisian Victory, it marked a turning point in America’s nonfiction films about the war.

  George Stevens, who was still in London preparing his SPECOU team for the Allied invasion of France, was also up for an Academy Award that night—his first nomination ever—for directing The More the Merrier. Yvonne Stevens attended the banquet, ready to pick up the prize for her absent husband just as Talli Wyler had done a year earlier; she brought eleven-year-old George Jr. to the ceremony as her date. Stevens lost to Casablanca’s Michael Curtiz, moving young George to write his dad a disappointed letter that read in part, “Casablanca stinks, we was gypped.”

  “I feel like a big loafer letting [you] down like that,” Stevens wrote to Yvonne when the results reached him weeks later. “We didn’t hear anything about it where I was at the time and I certainly didn’t know my darlings were going. I would have felt very blue thinking about their disappointed little faces as they walked out of the theatre. . . . That junk seems so far away and unimportant, that Academy Awards hooey, that I didn’t even worry about it. Which I would have done had I been home. Then, all of a sudden, I realize my dear family was there and it made me wish terribly that I had won. I felt bad about disappointing George. . . . I thought probably the disappointment was good for him. But I can assure you it was not very satisfactory philosophy. Then along came his ‘we wuz robbed’ letter . . . and I didn’t worry any more about my boy. I remembered that the black cloud on his face when Babe Herman struck out only lasted an hour or two and then the sun would come out and light up all those freckles of his like neon.”

  Stevens wrote to his son separately, as he almost always did. “You are all a lot of big shots going to high-powered affairs like that. I bet we darn near won it,” he told George Jr., “and I must agree with you on the fact [that] as long as we didn’t win it we must have been gypped—dem bums weel moider em! Did you get the two games that I sent you for your birthday? . . . I packed them as well as I could but paper is very scarce.”

  Stevens was privy to few specifics of the coming invasion; he used the scarce information that was shared with him to make provisional plans for how SPECOU might be best deployed to create a film record of an Allied landing that some thought might happen in May, others in June. While he and his team waited for the call to mobilize, he had little to do but study French (many of his fellow officers were boning up), play poker in a running game that included Irwin Shaw, Bob Capa, and Bill Saroyan, and read and write letters. More than any of the other directors who went to war, Stevens kept up a near-constant correspondence with his family, and his letters to Yvonne and George Jr. from the spring of 1944 reflect a deep longing to be a part of their daily lives. While he was stationed in London, Stevens bound all of the correspondence from his family into a book that he would page through and reread whenever he was lonely or sad, and his responses were long and conversational. “Hello my pal,” he wrote to George Jr. “This letter is from a Dad that is missing his boy very much this winter. I think [of] an awful lot of things that we could be doing together. For instance playing ball, seeing a couple of basketball games, perhaps a couple of Hockey games, have a game of golf together, having a trip down to Palm Springs in the Zephyr, . . . ‘Ahh oui, c’est la guerre.’ But I’m not worrying, my boy, mom and you and I will make up for the lost time after this dreary war is ‘terminer.’ And [after] I have been home long enough to forget all about the whole miserable affair, and long enough to earn a few bucks to keep us all in shoes and sufficient groceries, I am going to take you and our darling ‘mere’ on the biggest and most wonderful trip that you or I or anybody has ever been on. . . . There is much that I want to tell you but of course it is impossible to write home about [those] things. . . . Adolph might be listening. P.S. I’m learning a few French words and trying them out on the dog. That’s you.”

  Even from a distance of thousands of miles, Stevens fought to remain engaged and connected as a father. He would joke and conspire with his son, tease him, turn his schoolwork into a battlefront and the war itself into a boy’s adventure. Sometimes he would ride George Jr. about his grades (“What’s this D in Gym? Flat feet! Well pick them up. I’m not kidding”), congratulate him for his achievements (“Third in his class of many boys. First in his father’s regard and affection”), and fill his letters with gentle maxims, caution, and advice: “For Jeep’s sake be careful with that thirty pound bow and arrow son,” he wrote soon after George Jr.’s twelfth birthday. “Remember people’s eyes are the most precious thing they have got. I guess I’m forgetting that you are a big boy and know how to take care of yourself, but nonetheless we can be unthinking no matter how old we get.”

  Only in his letters to Yvonne, who was working in an army hospital in California, did Stevens betray the sadness and uncertainty that lowered his spirits and kept him awake at night. “These have been dreary months, these last,” he wrote her, “and if it hadn’t been for your letters . . .” He wrote “life would have been nothing,” then struck it out and replaced it with “there would have been nothing to think cheerfully about.” Stevens’s army duties often felt pointless to him, a morass of plans, logistics, and paperwork that led to nothing. He had been struggling to secure promotions for Shaw and Bill Mellor, but he felt unheeded and frustrated. “You know that I find much [of] this difficult to believe in fundamentally,” he told Yvonne. “The fellows in our work overseas are really the orphans. . . . We never know what is going on in our outfit back home, have to do a large amount of guessing . . . and a thing that really gets our boys goats, they give out all the promotions to the fellows back home answering the telephone. Anyway . . . I have the soldiers privilege of gripeing [sic]. . . . I don’t do it with anyone but you.”

  In England, Stevens took pleasure less in the society of fellow officers than in occasional trips to the theater or long walks alone at twilight. Like Capra, he came to feel a deep admiration for the cheerful toughness of Londoners in wartime. After attending a “panto,” one of the many seasonal variety shows that went up on London stages over the winter holidays, he was moved to hear the entire crowd gaily singing the chorus to a comic number about rationing, “When Can I Have a Banana Again?” “How the audience . . . enjoyed this little joke,” he wrote in his journal. “No moaning about being blasted from homes, losing hundreds of their people in one blast—they just reduced the war to this simple little inconvenience. . . . If only Goering in 1941, while confidently dispatching his Luftwaffe legions to the destruction of London[,] had been a seer and could have looked ahead to this result, he would have realized the futility of all that blasting total war of his. He succeeded only . . . in depriving Londoners of their bananas and cream for breakfast & gave them a great joke on themselves.”

  What is strikingly absent from Stevens’s letters during this period is any interest at all in Hollywood or thoughts about the resumption of his career after the war. Unlike Ford, who was already actively considering his return to the director’s chair, or Huston, who would check in frequently with Warner Bros. throughout the war to make sure the studio was keeping The Treasure of the Sierra Madre warm for him, Stevens apparently pushed movies far from his thoughts. In May, his agent Charles Feldman wrote his client a letter trying to turn his mind back to Hollywood and warning him not to be seduced by the idea of making a combat movie. “[They] have been taboo in Hollywood for the past year. The production companies insist that the public does not want war pictures.” David O. Selznick put out a feeler to Stevens about signing him, and Warner Bros. and 20th Century Fox expressed their interest as well.

  Stevens was indifferent. While overseas, he barely even went to a picture, having been told by a friend that in the absence of many of their brightest talents, the studios were now producing and releasing “the lousiest crap imaginable.” But on April 18, he made an exception and arrived at the USAAF screening room for a 6 p.m. showing of a movie by one of his Signal Corps colleagues that had just opened in the United States days earlier—and he l
oved what he saw. “We ran the first print to come here of the Air Force’s film ‘Memphis Belle,’” he wrote in his journal, “the film Willie Wyler put together out of the stuff he and Bill Clothier shot with the 8th Air Force last year. It is a very good film, one of the best war films our side has made up until now. Memorable shot: A great Flying Fortress spinning to its end. This is cultivated and played for suspense as the narrator counts the parachutes as they come out and blossom white against the sandy panorama of the distant ground below.”

  It had been more than a year since Wyler had flown on his first missions over France and Germany, and since then he had done little but work on Memphis Belle. After discarding Maxwell Anderson’s script, he had struggled to find the tone he wanted, a narrative voice that incorporated some acknowledgment of vulnerability and frailty, even if it was accomplished through humor. At one point, he considered a printed onscreen introduction that, with a wink or two, completely subverted the declamatory, chest-thumping opening titles that were by then a standard feature of war documentaries: “The makers of this film wish to apologize for certain shortcomings in those sequences that depict bombing missions,” Wyler’s proposed prologue read. “They were photographed under adverse conditions, which is to say, people were shooting at us. This regrettable lack of cooperation robbed us of many of the finer details of camera work, such as intimate views of the destruction wrought by our bombs, or close-ups of enemy pilots plummeting in flames. It will be observed that, in the scenes photographed under combat conditions, the camera sometimes shakes and quivers. This was due to the concussion of flak and gunfire, and not to any unsteadiness on the part of the hand that held the camera. If you believe this, we thank you.”