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

by Mark Harris

  His friends and colleagues were solicitous and patient. Capra was now ready to launch Liberty Films publicly; Huston had turned down his invitation to become a partner, but Stevens had said yes, and a press conference was scheduled for late February at which the two of them and Wyler would tout Liberty as a new business model, the dawn of a golden era of creative autonomy for movie directors. All Stevens needed to do, Capra told him, was to find a project that would rekindle his excitement about making movies. He just had to roll up his sleeves and concentrate on something. In those first weeks, Capra would invite him over to his house and try to tempt him, first with lists of novels and then with scripts. He told Stevens about the movie with which he was planning to inaugurate Liberty, a Christmas-themed comedy-drama called It’s a Wonderful Life, and showed him the screenplay, hoping to spark some enthusiasm. Stevens took the script home and a week later let Capra know apologetically that he just hadn’t gotten around to reading it. He hadn’t, in fact, gotten around to much of anything.

  Yvonne Stevens began to worry. To celebrate her husband’s return, they had just bought a Lincoln Continental, “the small one, with the tire in the back,” she recalled. “There were only three of them in town at the time.” One day, she watched him sit behind the wheel “and he just started shaking,” she said. “He couldn’t get a hold of himself. Well, it was a long time away.”

  Capra knew that his friend was, for the time being, unreachable, held hostage by memories he felt he might never be able to shake. “The whole [war] became, for him, a kind of nightmare,” he said, “a nightmare of the stupidity of man. He became hard to talk with because I don’t think he wanted to express his real—or maybe he just couldn’t—express the horror that he’d been through. It just grew on him. . . . He was not the same George Stevens.”

  Everyone seemed certain that he would eventually bounce back except for Stevens himself. They all imagined that work was the answer, that if he could just get back in the swing of things with the kind of charming adult comedy that had helped make his reputation, the images of Dachau and the boxcars that plagued him would recede and he could resume a career that had been on a steady upward trajectory until the war interrupted it. But Stevens felt hobbled, both literally—a taxicab had run over his foot in London and he was having some difficulty walking—and emotionally. He forced himself to get out of the house for social and professional engagements, but rather than draw him back into the industry, his encounters with colleagues only increased his sense of dislocation and alienation. Walter Wanger invited him out to his office at Universal, and David O. Selznick brought him and Capra to his lot in Culver City to show them scenes from the new picture he was producing, an epic Technicolor showcase for Jennifer Jones and Gregory Peck called Duel in the Sun. Stevens politely told Selznick how magnificent the picture looked, but he went home that night unsettled by the realization that three years away from the movie business had been an eternity. It had gone on without him. He had no idea who Gregory Peck and Jennifer Jones were; they certainly hadn’t been stars when he left. And the new Hollywood movies he was seeing all felt to him, he later said, “not made from life, but made from old films . . . guided by what [the director] had seen in films, rather than what was going on at that time.”

  On occasion, Stevens sought out his old army life, looking for comfort. He went to an Academy screening of Wyler’s air force short Thunderbolt; he arranged to have lunch with a couple of his old SPECOU buddies who were now out of the army and hoping that he could use his Hollywood clout to get them jobs; he went to a party for General Eaker that turned into an impromptu reunion of many of his former comrades in arms. When he dined at Romanoff’s in Beverly Hills with Ivan Moffat, he put on his army uniform for the occasion. Walking into the restaurant was tantamount to making a major public appearance, since what seemed like half of Hollywood showed up there routinely for lunch. Alfred Hitchcock was at the next table and, seeing Stevens, gave him what Moffat described as “a ceremonious but at the same time negligent little bow” that stopped just short of an ironic salute. Jean Arthur, who had starred in Stevens’s last two movies before the war, spotted him and embraced him with real warmth and affection. And an old colleague who had sat out the war strolled by their table and said, “Well, George, welcome home! When are you going to take that suit off?” Stevens glowered up at him and replied, “When are you going to put yours on?” He was “very bitter about the people who stayed home and made all the movies,” said Yvonne. But whereas in Capra that very resentment fueled an intense desire to get back in the director’s chair and prove his worth once again, Stevens withdrew further into himself with every prickly encounter. “He didn’t look for a job at all,” his wife said. “He just went out and played golf every day. I just couldn’t understand it.”

  He refused to talk about the war, except obliquely. “He [was] so quiet,” said Yvonne. “He couldn’t express himself, really. He just kept it in and thought about it.” On more than one occasion, he suggested that the only subject that could lure him back to a soundstage was World War II itself, claiming that “when I think I have the skill, I’m going to make a film about the war.” But even that idea would quickly give way to a sense of futility. He was surprised and hurt that no offers to make a war picture came his way; the studios didn’t see him as that sort of director, and they certainly weren’t interested in the kind of story he might want to tell. “They tell me you can’t make a film about the war. . . . Nobody wants to see it,” he said. “Nobody wants to be disillusioned about the fun and games.”

  Stevens knew that soon he would have to at least feign a public gesture of returning to work as part of the announcement of Liberty Films. He didn’t want to disappoint Capra or Wyler, who had invested their professional and financial futures in the fledgling company, and he also had a stake in its success, having paid a first installment of $100,000 to buy in as a partner who, like Wyler, would control 25 percent of the stock. (Capra, as the founder, controlled 32 percent; the remaining 18 percent belonged to Sam Briskin.) Capra was already hard at work on preproduction for It’s a Wonderful Life and Wyler was amassing a list of projects that might serve as his inaugural feature for Liberty after he finished The Best Years of Our Lives for Goldwyn. Stevens was nowhere near as far along. “I wasn’t ready,” he said, “but because it was Frank and Willy, I went into it. And when I did go into it, that meant I went to the studio, [even though] I hadn’t been home long enough to go to a studio.”

  Stevens leased office space for himself and moved tentatively toward making a movie with Ingrid Bergman, who, between Casablanca and Gaslight, had become the most important new Hollywood actress to emerge in the last few years. After the war ended, she told her friend Irene Selznick that she didn’t care about money anymore; all she wanted was to work with the best directors in the world. Stevens was one of the five names on her list.* The director started developing a comedy script called One Big Happy Family for her, and took a train to New York City, intending to watch her perform in Joan of Lorraine on Broadway and then take her out to dinner to talk about their collaboration. But by the time he got to New York, he had decided that the project was awful. He brought her to a late supper at “21,” told her that his work on the screenplay had been worthless, that the material was beneath an actress of her talent, and that he was dropping out. Bergman was crestfallen and confused; Stevens couldn’t find the words to explain his change of heart to her. “I didn’t quite know what had brought this reversal about,” he said. “I had done my pictures before on the basis that the principal thing needed was just film, unexposed film, and the rest would follow.” He wondered, not for the first time, if he would ever have the self-confidence to direct again. “There were many people who had come back from a long period away in the war and couldn’t get going,” he said. “Had circumstances changed and shut them out, or had they themselves become different? . . . Obviously something had changed.” Stevens went back to Los Angeles and told Wyler and Capra
that he had no idea when, or if, he would find a movie he wanted to make. “Being the men they were,” he said, “they understood.” And they still wanted him to be part of Liberty.

  Stevens hoped, more than anything, to find a project that reflected his changed understanding of the world. “Our films should tell the truth and not pat us on the back,” he said that year. Otherwise, he asked, “isn’t there the slight chance that we might be revealing America as it is not? Would that be encouraging us in our own delusions about ourselves?”

  Those who knew him begged him to forget the idea of making a statement and to simply try doing what he did best. Katharine Hepburn, a good friend and one of his greatest champions, told him he needed to return to comedy, a genre in which she believed his talents were unrivaled by any other director in Hollywood. But Stevens would never, for the rest of his career, direct anything but drama. “After the war,” he said, “I don’t think I was ever too hilarious again.”

  “I hated to see him leave comedy for the other stuff that came later on, the more serious stuff,” said Capra. “None of us were the same after the war, but for him . . . The films that he took of Dachau, the ovens, and the big, big piles of bones that nobody could believe existed . . . He had seen too much.”

  “You can never be right after you’ve seen things like that,” said Yvonne Stevens. “He was just shocked. He never got over it.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  “Closer to What Is Going On in the World”

  HOLLYWOOD, MAY 1946–FEBRUARY 1947

  A change is in the making in Hollywood,” Frank Capra announced in 1946, shortly after he started to shoot It’s a Wonderful Life. “It might be termed a revolution. . . . Perhaps you’ll leave your neighborhood theatre one evening and remark to your companion, ‘Haven’t we been seeing an unusual number of good pictures lately, different from the typical Hollywood product?’ The reason behind this is [that] experienced filmmakers with records of achievement [are] willing to gamble their hard-earned savings to gain independence.”

  When Capra wrote those words in a New York Times Magazine article called “Breaking Hollywood’s ‘Pattern of Sameness,’” Liberty Films was not yet three months old. But as he returned to the director’s chair after five years away, he wasted no time in appointing himself the spokesman for what he saw as an industry on the cusp of a historic metamorphosis. The war, he wrote, had caused American filmmakers to see the movies that studios had been turning out “through new eyes” and to recoil from the “machine-like treatment” that, he contended, made most pictures look and sound the same. “Many of the men who had been . . . producers, directors, scriptwriters returned from service with a firm resolve to remedy this,” he said; the production companies they were now forming would give each of them the “freedom and liberty” to pursue “his own individual ideas on subject matter and material.”

  Capra was evangelizing for Liberty with an impresario’s noisy flair; he even had the company issue a manifesto that included proclamations that “story value will have foremost precedence in production,” “quality of product both from an artistic and an entertainment standpoint is to come first,” and big budgets “will in no way be highlighted or exploited as an indication of . . . entertainment value.” But self-promotion notwithstanding, Capra genuinely believed that, as filmmakers like Preston Sturges, Leo McCarey, and Robert Riskin joined the ranks of established independent producers like Goldwyn, Selznick, and Wanger, the balance of power would soon shift permanently away from studios and toward producers and directors. His taste for bold pronouncements, already in evidence before the war, expanded into high-flying pontification with the launch of his new venture. But when he was asked what, specifically, more independence would mean for his own movies, Capra retreated into aesthetic timidity. At a time when many of his fellow filmmakers, including his two new partners, were becoming outspoken advocates for increased candor and frankness in Hollywood movies and a more adult approach to storytelling, he flinched at anything that smacked of controversy. Over the past several years he had become so enthralled by the use of film as propaganda that in peacetime he was finding it hard to think of movies any other way. “There are just two things that are important,” he told the Los Angeles Times in March. “One is to strengthen the individual’s belief in himself, and the other, even more important right now, is to combat a modern trend toward atheism.”

  As he tried to recapture his position as an industry leader, Capra was, in his way, as shaky and unsure of himself as Stevens. Wyler recalled a get-together at which he had chatted with Capra, Ford, and Huston about their decision to leave their careers behind and go off to war; they all predicted anxiously that “if the war lasted more than a couple of years we’d be the gone-and-forgotten boys when we came back.” But while Ford and Wyler seemed to be returning to their places in the movie business without worrying too much about where they stood, Capra had a difficult time ridding himself of his anxiety. He had been certain that his work during the war would only elevate his stature in Hollywood, and his reception when he returned had seemed to confirm that. He even planned to capitalize on the esteem in which his army work was held by using the image of the ringing Liberty Bell—with which he had ended all of his documentaries and Why We Fight episodes—as the logo for his new company.

  But Hollywood’s consciousness of what Capra had contributed to the war effort, and even its collective memory of who had served and who hadn’t, now seemed to be receding with a rapidity that alarmed him and inflamed his sense of injustice. There were no more grand welcome-home parties to honor his achievements; the only real nod his colleagues gave to the completion of Why We Fight came in a letter from Academy president Jean Hersholt, reminding Capra that the plaque and trophy he had been awarded for Prelude to War was actually, because of wartime shortages, made of plaster, and explaining that “the Academy will replace your ersatz plaque with a gold statuette if you will bring the plaque to the Academy office.” He felt underappreciated, and he began to bridle at every perceived slight. A handful of encounters with people in the industry whom he felt took a moment longer than they should have to recognize his face or register his name gnawed at him, and he couldn’t quite manage to separate injuries to his ego from doubts about his ability. “It’s frightening to go back to Hollywood after four years, wondering whether you’ve gone rusty or lost touch,” he said.

  His colleagues, including Wyler, had no hesitation about tackling social issues in their new movies. When Wyler talked about his reason for joining Capra and Stevens in Liberty, he said that he and his partners had all “participated in the major experience of our time, and . . . I believe it will have a healthy effect on our work. . . . I know George Stevens is not the same man for having seen the corpses of Dachau.” Wyler argued that Liberty could serve as the corrective to an industry whose movies were “divorced from the main currents of our time” and did “not reflect the world in which we live.” And he expressed his hope that he and other American directors would meet the challenge of the exciting new films that were now coming out of Britain and Europe, the work of David Lean, Vittorio De Sica, Roberto Rossellini, and other directors who had lived “through the war in a very real sense and . . . are closer to what is going on in the world than we are.”

  Capra took that creative boldness almost as an affront; he was dismissive of any emphasis on what he derided as “message films” or “think films.” Without a war to focus his always scattershot politics, his quasi-populist ideology had become as muddled as it had been in the 1930s. Having served in Washington for four years, he was no longer inclined to turn congressmen or government officials into bad guys, but he had difficulty conceiving new movie villains, and he struggled to grasp the national mood. “How could you make a message picture with universal appeal?” he asked. “People are disillusioned. Statesmen’s words are not worth much. Whom are the people going to believe?” In one breath, he would talk about the advent of a new freedom in Hollywood; in the next,
he would directly contradict Wyler by arguing that the average American was less inclined to go to the movies to think, to be challenged, or to engage with the world than ever before. “People are numb after the catastrophic events of the past ten to fifteen years,” he insisted. “I would not attempt to reach them mentally through a picture. . . . I would not know how to make a picture that would illuminate the bigger problems of today.” Besides, he said, “no independent producer is big enough to lick” the system, and “even if he had ideals and ideas, he has to compromise them if he wants to stay in business.”