Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
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Capra had been begging the army to let him go for almost a year. He wasn’t lying about being tired, but he was also motivated by the intense ambition that had propelled him to the top of the film business in the 1930s, and was now shading into panic as a new group of directors started to gain a foothold in Hollywood. “I want to remain active as long as I can be of service,” he had told Munson back in January. “Beyond that, naturally, I’d rather not stick around. . . . I wish you could . . . give some thought to my position as well as the position of such men as Litvak, Veiller . . . Huston, etc. These men all gave up careers and perhaps some of their future to volunteer for service. They will have to go back and compete with those who weren’t quite so patriotic . . . who stayed home and got the gravy during the greatest boom the industry ever had.” Capra was still trying to find partners for Liberty, the production company that he and Sam Briskin were launching; he had recently invited Leo McCarey, the director of Going My Way and one of the loudest voices among Hollywood’s increasingly assertive anti-Communists, to join him as a partner. He also put out a feeler to Robert Riskin, the liberal screenwriter who had written five of his biggest hits, but both men declined.
Munson kept stalling Capra, telling him that “to be as frank as I can . . . I just don’t know” when a discharge might be granted. But a week after V-E Day, Capra submitted a formal Application for Separation. At the time, such requests were considered using a mathematical formula: He was awarded one point for each of the forty months he had been in the army, an additional point for each of the four months he had spent overseas preparing Tunisian Victory, five points for receiving the Legion of Merit, and twelve points for each of his three dependent children. His total, eighty-five, was exactly enough to win him a discharge. On June 8, 1945, Capra left Fort Fox in Los Angeles for Washington, D.C., where he took his final army physical. Soon after that, he was summoned to Marshall’s office, where he learned he had been awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, an honor that the general himself wanted to present to him. The citation read in part, “The films produced by Colonel Capra under the direction of the Chief of Staff had an important influence on the morale of the Army.”
Capra was beside himself. “Surprise! Glorious surprise!” he wrote in his journal. “Gen. Marshall pinned on the DSM! I acted like an idiot, being completely speechless. I had to go out to the can and cry for 10 minutes. Nothing has ever made me so proud!”
That moment helped take the sting out of the tepid reception for War Comes to America, which was finally released in a few theaters; it was the third Why We Fight installment to be shown to civilians, but Capra had largely said what he wanted to say about the causes of World War II in the previous chapters and had turned this one into a protracted ode to American values. His first edit of the film had run over ninety minutes, and when General Osborn saw it, he gently suggested “substantial cuts,” telling Capra that while he thought the movie had “superb possibilities,” much of the material “describing what kind of people we are” could probably be eliminated, and so could some of the overwrought sentiment. “Don’t you think we might cut out the rows of cots in the maternity hospital?” he wrote. “To me they were a little reminiscent of the mass production of babies.” Capra got the movie down to just over an hour, but it still felt long; unlike the rest of Why We Fight, which had moved briskly through the rise of Germany and Japan and the start of the war in Europe, this episode began with the American Revolution and took its time moving forward. Perhaps because he was almost at the end of his service, Capra even decided to include a pat on the back to Hollywood in the picture. War Comes to America cites the release of Warners’ 1939 melodrama Confessions of a Nazi Spy as a prewar milestone, praising the film as a bold warning to a complacent nation with the commentary, “We sat in our theaters unbelieving as motion pictures exposed Nazi espionage in America. Could these things really be?”
But by 1945, no moviegoer needed to be chided for prewar complacency, let alone shaken out of it. Confessions of a Nazi Spy seemed like a movie from an infinitely more innocent era, and the Why We Fight series, which had been designed to explain to soldiers the reasons America was entering the war, held no appeal to moviegoers who were now desperate to put it behind them. Hollywood, which had saturated the public with war-themed movies in its first two years, had also gotten the message; from 1943 to 1945, production of war pictures by the studios dropped by more than 60 percent. Nonetheless, Capra was accorded a hero’s welcome upon his heavily publicized return to Hollywood. The industry viewed Why We Fight, which had been seen by more than four million people, both in and out of uniform, as the signal filmmaking accomplishment of the war. William Wyler spoke for many at the time when he predicted that “Frank’s series . . . will live longer than Gone With The Wind and will have a greater effect on the development of the medium.” With such praise came widespread recognition of Capra as an industry leader whose status had only grown in his absence, and intense curiosity about what he would do next. He and Briskin had recently announced the formation of Liberty, but they still couldn’t finance it without partners, and Capra hadn’t yet picked a script for what would be his first movie in five years. (In the spring, he had gone to see the hit comedy Harvey on Broadway; he thought it had possibilities, but he couldn’t secure the rights.) Now he would have plenty of time to plan his next move. On June 25, after a three-day cross-country train ride, Capra got back to Los Angeles and ended his war years with a two-word diary entry: “Arrived home!”
In July, John Huston’s San Pietro was shown in theaters for the first time. Army publicity materials explained that the thirty-two-minute film had been shot “over a period of five months,” but otherwise did not disclose to a credulous press corps that it was composed almost entirely of reenactments. In fact, the Public Relations Bureau of the War Department went out of its way to tout San Pietro’s authenticity. Journalists and reviewers were sent a press release that read, “This was the first time a complete photographic crew stayed with any one outfit in the line. Major Huston was given complete freedom of action, and was able to [place] his cameramen advantageously throughout the filming of the picture. . . . As the battle progressed, Major Huston was able to start work on his script for the narration.” A separate press release, titled “Facts and Fiction” but trafficking almost entirely in the latter, stated that “Huston’s first task was to decide how to make his rather small unit spread out during the battle, so that he could have complete coverage from many sides, and at the same time be able to give directions to his men. . . . He knew beforehand what the tactics were to be. . . . Many times during the filming, he would lead several of his men ahead to the infantry, preceding an attack by several hours into no-man’s-land, and wait for the attack to start, and then start the cameras grinding.”
These were all outright lies about a battle at which Huston had not even been present, but the waves of celebration and memorialization that followed the end of the war in Europe seemed to dull critical acuity. A title card within the film contended that “all scenes in this picture were photographed within range of enemy small arms or artillery fire” but added that “for purposes of continuity a few of these scenes were shot before and after the actual battle.” That qualifier, which was placed not at the beginning of San Pietro but in its last ten seconds, was ignored by most who wrote about the movie. Had it been released six months earlier, San Pietro might have been more closely scrutinized as news from the front. But in peacetime, it was treated with reverence, as an invaluable record of recent American history. James Agee, who had previously demonstrated an unerring eye for any war film that smacked of falsity, filled his review for Time with a rephrasing of much of the army’s press release; he went on to call Huston’s movie a work of “pure tragic grandeur” and “as good a war film as any that has been made . . . in some respects it is the best”; he predicted that “history is likely to recognize it as . . . great.” He never questioned its authenticity, nor did the New York
Times, which praised Huston’s “daring” in shooting during combat.
Critics may have been taken in by the reenactments that filled San Pietro, but their praise was not limited to its purported realism; they also recognized that Huston had done something genuinely new, creating a fresh visual and emotional vocabulary for war films. The narration was delivered in a flat, almost bitter tone that could not have differed more from the sincere emotional throb of many earlier army-film voice-overs. And, largely because he had had the leisure and safety to stage battle sequences exactly as he wanted to, Huston had been able to refine an onscreen version of “realism” in which the shakiness of the camera, the fitfulness of the advance of troops, and the stoic inexpressiveness of the men all announced that while this was not a Hollywood version of war, it was perhaps a version of war that Hollywood could hope to emulate. The somberness of San Pietro also marked a departure from Signal Corps standards. Huston had deliberately lingered on images of death, loss, and destruction, redeemed only by the last scenes, in which, after a (staged) return to their village, peasant mothers are seen breastfeeding their babies. (The final minutes of San Pietro seem to anticipate the dawn of the Italian neorealist movement that would enthrall discerning moviegoers over the next few years.)
For critics, San Pietro was the perfect film for a moment in which, for the first time since before Pearl Harbor, it was no longer necessary for every war movie to make the case for war. None of them echoed the army’s initial fear that Huston had subversively crafted an “antiwar” statement; they felt that San Pietro’s cold-eyed depiction of life on a battlefield was long overdue, and the movie confirmed their belief that Huston, who still had only three feature films to his credit, was Hollywood’s most important new director. Writing in the New Republic, Manny Farber was stunned by how “absolutely unromantic” and “depressing” the film was; for the first time, he wrote, an American director was willing to show that battles were “confused, terrifying, surprising and tragic.” And the New Yorker praised Huston’s depiction of war as “a dirty, deadly business” that was free of “romantic gestures.”
Huston did not do many interviews to promote the release of San Pietro. At the time, his own feelings about the movie were ambivalent; shortly before its release, he wrote to Zanuck after a screening and called it “a dolorous goddamn picture full of hacked up towns and tanks and bodies. . . . I succeeded in making [the audience] miserable which is the purpose of the picture.”* The dark and angry mood that had plagued him since his return from Italy had only worsened. His wife, Lesley, had finally gone to Reno to fulfill the six-week residency requirement she needed in order to obtain a divorce (she spent most of her time there with Humphrey Bogart’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, who was in Reno for the same reason). In Los Angeles, Huston was drinking heavily; he didn’t have anything close to the number of points that would have entitled him to apply for a return to civilian life, and the army was in no hurry to get rid of him. At times, his uncontrolled belligerence became public and embarrassing; just before V-E Day, at a party at David O. Selznick’s house, he and Errol Flynn got in a fistfight, apparently over Olivia de Havilland, that landed both of them in the hospital—Flynn with broken ribs and Huston with a broken nose—and in the headlines. “I remember that the language on both our parts . . . was about as vile as it could get,” Huston wrote later. “Errol started it, but I went right along with it.”
That summer, the army gave Huston orders to make a new documentary, and he was genuinely excited by the subject—the plight of returning veterans who were suffering from war-related psychological trauma. Huston had not been able to put a name to the depression and anger that he had felt since returning home, but his interest in the treatment of mentally ill soldiers was personal. Rey Scott, his cameraman in the Aleutians, had declined rapidly since he had been hospitalized after firing his gun one night at the army’s film studio in Astoria; early in 1945, Scott’s wife had told Huston that the care he was receiving in the psychiatric ward of an army hospital was “callous and inhumane.” Huston decided he would try to intervene; he wrote a letter expressing his concern about the hospital’s plan to use shock treatment on Scott and pleaded for his colleague to be discharged. “Scott has made as many and as great personal sacrifices as anyone I know who is alive and in possession of all of his arms and legs,” Huston wrote to the hospital’s administrator. “He should he out of the army. . . . He is a peculiar cuss, but certainly not crazy. Unless it is craziness that leads a man to volunteer to fly time after time on bombing missions of an exceedingly fatal nature or to sweat it out in foxholes in advance positions for weeks on end. That is hardly the kind of craziness that requires electrical shock therapy. It is rather the kind that has given [the Army Pictorial Service] its present splendid reputation in the field.”
Two army psychiatrists wrote Huston patient and thorough replies, explaining that Scott had been diagnosed not as insane but as depressed and suicidal, that he had exaggerated the conditions of his confinement to his wife, and that his doctors were working hard not only to treat him but to keep what one of them called “a lot of rather unpleasant incidents which I would rather not write about” out of his army files so that he could continue to receive medical care. Huston came away from the exchange moved by the knowledge, compassion, and persistence of the doctors, and he welcomed the chance to explore their work in a documentary.
The army had a different purpose in mind. Huston was told that the prospective film was intended not to explore the workings of psychiatry or the struggles of patients, but to convince business owners around the country that they had nothing to fear in hiring war veterans. Taking no chances, Huston’s superiors gave him an itemized list of what the movie it was planning to call The Returning Psychoneurotic should do: “(1) Point out what a small proportion fall into this category; (2) Eliminate the stigma now attached to the psychoneurotic through a thorough explanation of what it really is—thus to offset the exaggerated picture that has already been given to the public through the press, magazine, and radio stories; and (3) Explain that in many cases the reason that makes a psychoneurotic unsatisfactory for the Army is the very reason for which this same person could be a real success in civilian life. (It has been stated by [veterans who have undergone treatment] that those qualities which made them a success as a civilian were the very things that made them crack up as a soldier.)”
Huston ignored the army’s specifications, but he took to the assignment with enthusiasm. He had no intention of making a film about civilian employment; his documentary would be an intimate examination of psychiatric process—a chronological narrative of the six to eight weeks of treatment that a hospitalized GI typically received. By the end of the summer, he had settled on Mason General, the army hospital near Astoria where Scott had been treated, and he made plans to spend the rest of the year filming its doctors and patients.
Huston welcomed the chance to start something new—even if it was for the army—since the last piece of propaganda on which he had worked had come to nothing. In August, Know Your Enemy—Japan, which was largely based on his script, was finished after three years. Capra had taken Huston’s rewrite and added a few flourishes of his own, disparaging Japanese soldiers as interchangeable “photographic prints off the same negative” and emphasizing his often-repeated belief that the citizenry of Japan was culpable for accepting “their fate in dumb, regimented silence” as “willing prisoners of a vicious, ironclad social structure.” (“The one thing that Americans are against in principle is regimentation,” he told the Los Angeles Times.) The hour-long documentary Capra submitted to the army was a patchy assemblage of racist rhetoric, faulty history, and indictment of the Japanese military, Shintoism, and the national character. With little actual film from wartime Japan available to him, Capra had relied so heavily on a hodgepodge of stock footage that he even included a shot from George Stevens’s melodrama Penny Serenade that was meant to pass as the record of a 1923 earthquake in Tokyo.
Huston and Capra were hardly the only filmmakers whose late-arriving movies were suddenly rendered irrelevant; after V-J Day, Wyler found himself up against an army that was completely indifferent to his documentary Thunderbolt. Through the summer, Wyler had struggled to regain his footing and adjust to life both as a civilian and as a disabled veteran; he had been fitted with a hearing aid that maximized the little hearing he had in one ear, and he had tried to shake off his misery by returning to work. In July, he wrote to the War Department’s Bureau of Public Relations that Thunderbolt was “nearly finished and I think it will be pretty good. It has a definite story to tell.” Wyler then made a pitch that had been a constant refrain of filmmakers throughout the war: Twenty minutes wasn’t enough time to tell the story well. Unless he received permission to make the movie longer, the result would be “nothing more than a glorified newsreel.”