by Mark Harris
* Huston never publicly acknowledged that the film was a reenactment, including in his autobiography thirty-five years later.
* Elliott Roosevelt, the president’s second son, had been the subject of several days of critical newspaper stories in 1945 when he had displaced three servicemen from an army plane so that he could ship a pair of dogs from London to his wife in California.
* The others were Huston, Wyler, Billy Wilder, and Roberto Rossellini.
* Paths of Glory was eventually made in 1957, by Stanley Kubrick.
* Although MGM had softened The Mortal Storm considerably, insisting that the screenplay not even identify Germany as the country in which it took place, the German government was nonetheless livid that it was being made at all and, according to Scott Eyman’s Lion of Hollywood, dispatched an emissary from the Swiss consulate to the Los Angeles set to warn Borzage and his cast that their treachery would not be forgotten after the war. By mid-1940, Germany would ban the exhibition of all Hollywood movies within its borders.
* The line was closely echoed—“It feels as if the lights were all out everywhere”—in Wanger’s production of Foreign Correspondent, which was shooting at the same time.