(By Mark Harris. Penguin, 498 pages, $29.95)
Reviewed by Jules L. Wagman
The five who came back were movie directors Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler. They volunteered for military service in World War II and only Capra, who was stationed in Washington, did not see combat.
Ford was wounded at Midway. Wyler lost his hearing while filming P-47 fighters over Italy in 1945. Stevens filmed the liberated concentration camps, including Dachau. Traumatized by what he found, he was unable to resume directing for several years. Huston was in the Aleutians before filming action in Italy.
Author Mark Harris covered movies, television and books for Entertainment Weekly for 15 years before turning to writing books full time. His knowledge of the industry and the five directors is evident from the first page.
Harris follows each of the directors within each chapter. He relates their pre-war work, both in movies and politics, then moves on to the war. In Part One, he dwells too long on industry issues and events that have no bearing on the war, but that aside, he tells a compelling story.
The five directors had skills the military needed to record the war and create training films and documentaries. Only Huston, at 35 years old, was of draft age. Stevens was 37, Wyler 39, Capra 43 and Ford 46. They all volunteered for service, walking away from high profile and lucrative Hollywood careers.
Ford was the first to go, entering the Navy and overseeing the creation of the Naval Volunteer Photographic Unit in September, 1941. One of his first efforts was a training film, “Sex Hygiene,” required viewing for every recruit.
In April 1942 he was ordered to the aircraft carrier USS Hornet to supervise filming of the start of Gen. Jimmy Doolittle’s raid on Tokyo. A month later, he led a team on a “dangerous” mission to Midway Island.
Ford suffered a shrapnel wound to his left arm while directing camera work on Midway. Before the attack, his crew shot movies of Torpedo Squadron 8, all of whose planes and 29 of the 30 men were lost in the Americans’ first attack on the Japanese carriers.
Wyler filmed B-17 raids over Germany. From that came the movie, “The Memphis Belle,” mostly from existing footage, including combat. It was the story of the 25th and final mission of a B-17 and the return home of its 10-man crew.
Ford’s Navy team and Stevens’s Army team covered Normandy. They had “dozens” of cameramen and mounted 500 automatic cameras on ships and tanks, 50 on the first wave of landing craft. Ford’s orders were: “[S]imple—just take movies of everything” and, “If you see it, shoot it.”
Of the invasion film, Harris writes, “Much of the footage was blurry, obscure, or jerky and frantic, and many of the clearest images were so explicit that they were immediately deemed inappropriate for any kind of general exhibition.”
But when Paris was freed, Harris writes: “When footage of the citizens of Paris pouring out of their homes and shops, filling the streets and weeping and shouting for joy, reached American movie screens, the shots served as a symbolic bookend to images of the broken and sobbing populace that Americans had seen when the city fell to Hitler in 1940.”
Five Came Back is a fitting tribute to those whose war put a movie camera in their hands.
Jules L. Wagman has been reviewing books since 1966.
© 2014 Jules L. Wagman
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