Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
Mark Harris
Language: English
Pages: 528
ISBN: 0143126830
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The extraordinary wartime experience of five of Hollywood's most important directors, all of whom put their stamp on World War II and were changed by it forever
Here is the remarkable, untold story of how five major Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—changed World War II, and how, in turn, the war changed them. In a move unheard of at the time, the U.S. government farmed out its war propaganda effort to Hollywood, allowing these directors the freedom to film in combat zones as never before. They were on the scene at almost every major moment of America’s war, shaping the public’s collective consciousness of what we’ve now come to call the good fight. The product of five years of scrupulous archival research, Five Came Back provides a revelatory new understanding of Hollywood’s role in the war through the life and work of these five men who chose to go, and who came back.
Pearl Harbor 1941: The Day of Infamy - Revised Edition (Campaign, Volume 62)
Tiger I and Tiger II: Rare photographs from Wartime Archives
The Luftwaffe in Camera: 1939-1945
The Centurion Tank: Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives
A Good Place to Hide: How One French Community Saved Thousands of Lives in World War II
Pilot and Dive Bomber, had taken a crack at adapting it; when Wead temporarily set aside the script to move on to other work, the studio turned to Budd Schulberg, asking him to flesh out Bulkeley’s personal life by adding a wife and child so that the story would appeal to women. Throughout 1943, Ford had kept the project at arm’s length, never quite giving MGM a definitive no, but always finding new reasons that it probably wouldn’t work. “Every congressman in America would be after my ass” if he
both sides, and serve as an affirmation of the intentions of the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union to win the war and forge the peace jointly. For a few days, Stevens could try to forget the nightmarish tunnels and vaults of Nordhausen. The first Russian soldier they saw at the Elbe was “a bald-headed private,” Moffat recalled. “They had some quite old privates in the Russian army. . . . He had a big spool of wire on his back and he came up to me . . . and grinned. ‘Capitaliste!’
lobster-nosed”: Ibid., 125. Wyler and Huston cemented their comradeship: Lawrence Grobel, The Hustons: The Life and Times of a Hollywood Dynasty, updated ed. (New York: Cooper Square, 2000), 147. The film Wyler and Huston were researching, Wild Boys of the Road, was made by William Wellman for Warner Bros. in 1933. he was branded a spoiled, irresponsible wreck: Ibid., 155–61. “The experience seemed to bring my whole miserable existence”: John Huston, An Open Book (New York: Alfred A.
Front. That was a film which set out to show the First World War in all its horror, all the better to shock the viewer so that he won’t repeat it.” In fact, Huston understood precisely the ideological force of what he was being asked to do, and proved himself a willing instrument in the creation of the boldest piece of pro-intervention propaganda that had yet emerged from a Hollywood studio. In Sergeant York, he and Hawks consciously tried to replace All Quiet on the Western Front’s version of
a newspaperman all my life,” Flynn said, “and I have been looking at propaganda in eruption and I have read books on propaganda. Senator, you better look out, if you don’t think you should protect yourself against it. Look out. Somebody is going to sell you something some day.” McFarland didn’t miss a beat. “I have been listening to you here for several hours trying to sell me something,” he said. The room exploded in laughter. The next morning, many papers reprinted that exchange,
