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

by Mark Harris

  His first instinct had been to retreat into the past. To inaugurate Liberty, he wanted to remake a horse-racing comedy he had shot for Columbia in 1934 called Broadway Bill. It was only when the studio wouldn’t sell him the rights that he settled on It’s a Wonderful Life. He defined the choice as a “compromise,” one that came to him at a moment when his anger and fear were at their peak. He would make a movie “about a small town guy who thinks he is a failure and wishes he had never been born.” When he pitched It’s a Wonderful Life to Jimmy Stewart, he told the story so poorly that the actor’s agent, Lew Wasserman, sat in the office “dying” until Capra finally spluttered, “This story doesn’t tell very well, does it?” “Frank,” Stewart replied, “if you want to do a movie about me committing suicide, with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I’m your boy.”

  He had found the bare bones of It’s a Wonderful Life in a short story reminiscent of A Christmas Carol called “The Greatest Gift,” which was written in 1939, sold to the movies in 1944 after its author, Philip Van Doren Stern, had had it printed as a gift booklet, and finally published by Good Housekeeping in early 1945 under the title “The Man Who Was Never Born.” Capra saw the brief parable as a means to explore the idea that faith in a benevolent guiding hand could encourage someone to look at his life from a different perspective, and thus help to combat a kind of plunging depression that he called “discouragement” about one’s value in the world. But in developing the script, he chewed through one writer after another trying to achieve the alternately light and melodramatic tone he had always found most appealing. Clifford Odets came and went; so did Dalton Trumbo (who turned the film’s main character, George Bailey, into a failed politician in an adaptation that felt too close to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Meet John Doe), Jo Swerling, and Green Pastures author Marc Connelly. Finally, Capra brought in Frances Goodrich and her husband, Albert Hackett, and told them to discard all previous drafts and start from scratch. The Hacketts, both veteran screenwriters, had willingly worked on propaganda films for Capra during the war, but they counted their time on It’s a Wonderful Life as the unhappiest of their long careers. After a while, the director, whom they called a “horrid man” and “an arrogant son of a bitch,” dropped them and decided to rewrite the picture himself.

  It’s a Wonderful Life was the only major film on which Capra ever received a screenplay credit (alongside Goodrich and Hackett), and the final version of the movie is a remarkably naked rendering of its director’s state of mind at the time. His conviction that after the war moviegoers were yearning to retreat into nostalgia and fantasy is evident in the Currier-and-Ives-style sketches that begin the movie. His still fresh experience as a propagandist echoes faintly in his unusually heavy use of narration and, despite his demurrals, in the explicit, repeated articulation of a message. And his reliance on the work of the men who had written his most successful movies in the 1930s is evident in what he cribs from his earlier hits—the pious veneration of small-town life, the distrust of a set of friends and neighbors who can easily turn into a hateful mob, and the depiction of the nervous hysteria to which hopelessness can drive a man. Capra stayed true to his desire to make a movie about “the individual’s belief in himself,” but he connected it to the issue that was then troubling him the most—his intense need to be appreciated by others. In an earlier draft by Connolly, the “alternate” life that George and the angel Clarence visit is one that includes a second George who is alive and well but lacks the real George’s good character. In the version that Capra chose to pursue, George instead watches what would happen in his world if he had never existed at all, and sees it quickly fall to ruin. For Capra, who was returning to an industry that he felt had recently erased him from its history, a what-if story about a man’s feelings of inconsequentiality and his dark fears of nonexistence felt autobiographical. It’s a Wonderful Life was a project driven by fears, desires, and wounds that he could no longer keep private.

  It was also a considerably larger gamble than he had ever meant it to be. The ever-changing roster of writers, the three cinematographers Capra went through, and the long shooting schedule drove the picture’s costs skyward. By June 30, 1946, Liberty had already spent almost $2 million on It’s a Wonderful Life—including a hefty $163,000 salary for its director—and it was still weeks away from the end of production. The expenditure put considerable pressure on the new company, and on Capra’s partners. In late 1945, Capra and Sam Briskin had completed a deal with RKO in which the studio agreed to distribute Liberty’s first nine pictures—three apiece from Capra, Wyler, and Stevens—over the next six years. The company had been structured so that, as Wyler explained it, “majority rules for story ideas and budgets. After that each of us is autonomous. We’ll each have the advantage of the other’s advice all through the making and assembling of the pictures. But the man in charge won’t have to take that advice. It will be his picture.” Neither Wyler nor Stevens felt any particular kinship with the material Capra had chosen, but they were supportive, even when they had to swallow hard. “Jesus Christ, I never signed so many goddamn checks in my life!” Stevens complained as Capra’s production became more and more elaborate. “I was getting to realize, you know, why Harry Cohn is Harry Cohn, because I hate to see all this money . . . he’s putting snow scenes in! Why the hell couldn’t it be springtime?”

  • • •

  Wyler kept more of a distance from It’s a Wonderful Life. By the beginning of 1946, he was fully immersed in what would become the most personal film he ever made. As the screenplay of The Best Years of Our Lives continued to take shape, he and Sherwood reached an important decision: The character of Homer would no longer suffer from spasticity. Goldwyn had earmarked the role for the promising young actor Farley Granger, but Wyler believed that the facial contortions, impaired speech, and uncontrolled movements the part would require were unplayable and perhaps undirectable. Instead, he had Sherwood rewrite the character as a young man who had lost his arms during the war—and he decided that they would find an actual amputee to play him. Their wary producer was sure that casting the role wouldn’t be possible; Goldwyn had once famously told Wyler, “You can’t have a Jew playing a Jew, it wouldn’t work on screen,” and he urged them to abandon their search and simply drop the idea of depicting a disabled character or using a disabled actor. And when Wyler began visiting veterans’ hospitals, the patients he met were just as skeptical. “So you’re gonna make a movie about fellows like us,” one GI sneered. “You’re gonna make a lot of money.”

  Wyler finally found his Homer not in a hospital but at the movies. One of the last films the Army Pictorial Service had produced during the war was a twenty-two-minute short called Diary of a Sergeant, a documentary about a thirty-year-old soldier from Cambridge, Massachusetts, named Harold Russell whose hands had been blown off in a training accident on June 6, 1944. “I got [my injury] on D-Day, all right, but it was in North Carolina when a half a pound of TNT exploded ahead of schedule,” he said. “I didn’t have a German scalp hanging from my belt, I didn’t have a Purple Heart. I didn’t even have an overseas ribbon. All I had was no hands.” Diary of a Sergeant begins with a reenactment of Russell being wheeled into surgery, then recreates the two months of rehabilitation that followed, during which he was trained in the use of the prosthetic hooks that replaced his lower arms, and was eventually discharged. The film had been intended to spotlight the quality of care received by injured veterans and the pension and educational allowance they were given upon their release. Russell was never even identified by name, and, probably because he had a distinctive, high-pitched New England accent that didn’t sound quite all-American enough for army propagandists, he was never heard in the movie either; his first-person narration was spoken by the deep-voiced actor Alfred Drake. But his sweet demeanor, and his understated recreation of his own nervousness for a scene in which he prepares to go out on a date, convinced Wyler to fly the young man from Cambridge, where he was studyin
g at Boston University and working in a YMCA, to Los Angeles. Over lunch at the Brown Derby, Wyler told Russell the part was his.

  It would not be easy. Russell had no acting experience at all, and Wyler, who had long preferred to cast smart, flinty stars like Bette Davis with whom he could speak in a kind of abrupt, impatient shorthand, said candidly that it was “difficult” and “painful” to extract a performance from him. “I didn’t try to teach him to act,” he said. “I concentrated on guiding his thinking more than his actions, because I reasoned that if he was thinking along the right lines, he just couldn’t do anything wrong. . . .” “It was more work. . . . I had to treat him a little better than I do professional actors . . . but this boy had this one thing: He understood the character because he’d gone through it himself. I didn’t have to explain to him how it felt to lose your hands.”

  For the first time in his career, Wyler became obsessed with realism, considering every creative decision he made on The Best Years of Our Lives not simply in terms of its narrative effect but also its accuracy and truthfulness. He was still embarrassed by his own, belated realization that he had gotten some of the details wrong in Mrs. Miniver, and as he prepared to shoot his new movie, he imagined an audience of millions of returning veterans and tried to see any potential Hollywood-style evasion or falseness through their eyes. Two years earlier, Selznick’s popular Since You Went Away had attempted to dramatize the long separation of husbands and wives and the uneasy prospect of a return to civilian life for what one character cynically called “all these irresponsible forty-year-old fathers dashing off into uniform.” But back then the war was still on, and Selznick had avoided any unhappy realities, turning the picture into a tribute to what he called “that unconquerable fortress, the American home.” His film was full of exactly the kind of bromides and easy answers that Wyler was determined to avoid. “We had to be honest in . . . the three stories,” he said. “We could not indicate any solution to a problem which would work only for a character in a movie.” He and Sherwood had cleverly positioned their three protagonists to appeal to the widest possible range of servicemen. Al was a regular army sergeant, Fred was an officer in the Air Corps, and Homer was a sailor; Al was well-to-do, Homer was middle-class, and Fred was from the wrong side of the tracks. But across that range, Wyler felt that everything had to be true to his own experience or to the lives of the men he had known in the service.

  Wyler had not made a movie about contemporary American life since Dead End a decade earlier, and his desire for verisimilitude extended even to the look of the sets—he told his production designer he didn’t want his characters to live in the high-ceilinged, gorgeously appointed homes that were often a default choice in studio movies. He also broke with studio tradition when it came to costumes: Before he began production, he gave Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright, who were playing Al’s wife and daughter, modest stipends and told them to go to a local department store and buy their characters’ wardrobes off the rack, an unusual decision in an era in which leading ladies almost always had a series of gowns designed for them. Loy and Wright didn’t hesitate, nor did they flinch when Wyler told them that because he wanted them to look ordinary, they would be wearing far less makeup and powder than they had in other movies.

  Unlike Ford, Wyler didn’t attempt to stock the cast and crew of his first postwar picture with actual veterans. But he did tell Dana Andrews, who was cast as Fred, and Fredric March, who was to play Al, that they needed to look the parts. In particular, March, who was nearing fifty and had acquired the bloat of a prosperous and well-fed middle age, got a gentle talking-to before filming began. “It’s very important that your figure suggest a K-ration diet rather than the ‘21’ Club,” Wyler warned him. “You should make every effort to be as trim and wiry as possible. . . . I know it’s not easy for fellows our age. I’ve gained twenty pounds since coming back. . . . But the entire approach to this picture will be along realistic lines. . . . I would hate to have something like the proverbial little ‘pouch’ spoil the illusion.”

  Wyler was just as tough on himself. “I have always tried to direct my pictures out of my own feelings,” he wrote in an essay about the making of Best Years. “I have tried to make them ‘by hand,’ and it has been hard work.” As production neared, he struggled to be faithful both to his own instincts about psychological and pictorial accuracy and to a statement made by the American Veterans Committee that “the veteran could not be isolated from the main body of the nation, for his problems were also national problems.” Wyler intended Best Years to be both a personal drama and exactly the kind of “message film” that Capra found so distasteful; even the most casual scene between husband and wife would need to reach for a kind of recognizability that he felt other movies had too long avoided. So he was not surprised when, as soon as Joseph Breen saw the script, the Production Code office announced its trepidation. In March, Wyler received a list of requests for changes that ran to eight single-spaced pages. Among them, Breen insisted that Al and his wife would have to sleep in twin beds, that moments depicting “the sacred intimacies of married life” would need to be toned down, and that a comic scene in which a puppy urinates on the floor from excitement was an unacceptable gateway to further vulgarity. (“You pass stuff like that,” said Breen, “and the next thing you know, you have a scene of a dapper young fellow in Paris standing at a pissoir, leaking away with a smile on his face.”)

  Most significantly, Breen took issue with the scene that had grown out of Wyler’s own intemperate encounter with an anti-Semitic doorman, in which Fred throws a punch after he hears a man at a drugstore lunch counter complain that the Roosevelt administration had duped Americans into supporting the war. As written by Sherwood, the scene was a pungent condemnation of the last vestiges of American isolationism. “The Japs and the Germans had nothing against us,” the man at the counter insisted. “They just wanted to fight the limeys and the Reds—and they’d have whipped them too, if we hadn’t got deceived into it by a bunch of radicals and Jew-lovers in Washington.” Breen, whose own anti-Semitism was hardly a secret within the industry, insisted that the words “Jew-lover” be taken out. Wyler knew he had to comply, but before the movie opened he became the most prominent director in Hollywood to attack Breen publicly, telling the New York Times that his experience dealing with Code restrictions on Best Years “convince[d] me that those people have no real judgment.”

  Days before the start of shooting in April, Wyler had received a lovely and unexpected note of reconciliation from Bette Davis, with whom he had not spoken since their falling-out after The Little Foxes five years earlier. “The war should be over between us,” Davis wrote to him. “It is so long ago, and so much has happened in the meantime. It seems sort of unimportant, the only important thing being, we should be friends. We should work together again. . . . It will always be for me the only right direction—yours.” The vote of confidence arrived at the right moment. He and Capra started shooting their movies at almost the same time, and Wyler was tightly wound; there was a genuine sense of competition beneath the surface of the jesting telegrams they exchanged, with Wyler cabling Capra, “Last one in is a rotten egg,” and Capra writing back, “My first day was easy but do you know they’re using sound today?”

  Wyler still wasn’t sure he could direct at all; he remained almost completely deaf, and didn’t know if he would be able to hear the actors or pick up on the subtleties that differentiated each take from the last. In a rare show of anger, he lost his temper with Russell when the anxious novice confessed that in preparation for his role he had secretly been taking acting lessons. “I didn’t hire an actor!” Wyler told him. “I hired a guy to play a role.” He also had to contend with Dana Andrews’s alcoholism—one morning, realizing that the actor was hungover, he exacted his punishment by making him do twenty-five takes of a scene in which he banged his head on the frame of a taxicab door. And early on it was clear that Fredric March’s insecurity and vanity would cause its sh
are of problems as well: “When I say my lines, keep those goddamn hooks down!” the older actor snapped at Russell during the filming of a comradely scene set in a local bar. “Don’t lift that bottle. I want people listening to what I’m saying, not watching you drink beer.”

  To make matters more difficult, Sherwood, who had struggled with his self-doubt at every stage of the writing process, had fled to New York before the cameras rolled. On April 9, just six days before the scheduled first day of filming, he told Wyler that the final 220-page script he had submitted was nowhere near ready and that the project would have to be postponed. The exhausted director, whose third child, a boy named William Jr., had been born just a week earlier, did not at that moment have the time or the patience to calm his collaborator, and so Sherwood hunkered down on the East Coast, unwilling to come to California and watch the production of a movie he had suddenly decided he didn’t want made.

  Goldwyn responded to the writer’s absence by showing up on the set in a meddlesome mood and insisting that Wyler treat the script as finished and inviolable. “When I come to a set, I’ve studied the scene and I have a vague idea of how I want to play it,” Wyler said. “But I haven’t mapped it out exactly. . . . Before I can make up my mind definitely, I’ve got to see the actors doing it.” Goldwyn would have none of it. “I am writing you in order that there will be no mistake or misunderstanding,” he scolded his director on what would be their final collaboration. “Before you started shooting . . . I told you that there were to be no changes made in the script without discussing them in advance . . . even dialogue which may have been in one of the earlier versions. . . . I do not want something that Bob Sherwood had once discarded to be revived and used in this picture without our first carefully considering and discussing it.”