{"id":1836,"date":"2014-04-11T07:40:23","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T11:40:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1836"},"modified":"2014-04-26T07:43:22","modified_gmt":"2014-04-26T11:43:22","slug":"hollywood-directors-wwii-mission","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=1836","title":{"rendered":"Hollywood Directors’ WWII Mission"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Leni<\/a>

1934 Nazi Party Congress, Nuremberg (photo: wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

The wartime experiences of five major film directors are recounted in the Mark Harris book, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War<\/i><\/a>, which has garnered impressive reviews<\/a>. The book describes the military contributions of five directors near the top of their careers: Frank Capra, John Ford, William Wyler, George Stevens, and John Huston. David Denby gives a nice summary of Harris\u2019s book in the March 17 New Yorker<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

(The pre-war activities of Tinseltown\u2019s studios were pretty bad, according to two widely discussed books last year. The studios held back on films attacking fascism or condemning persecution of the Jews, in order to continue doing business in Germany, according to Ben Urwand in The Collaboration<\/i><\/a>. As a result, \u201cNazis were all but invisible in American movies at the time when depicting their savagery might have done the most good,\u201d said Dave Kehr in a NYT review<\/a> of\u00a0 Thomas Doherty\u2019s Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939<\/i><\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Capra was put in charge of Why We Fight<\/i><\/a>, a series of training films for U.S. recruits, at the request of Gen. George C. Marshall. Capra saw this assignment as a democratic response to Leni Riefenstahl\u2019s inspiring propaganda film, Triumph of the Will<\/i><\/a>, depicting the 1934 Nazi party congress and the aims and ideals of the Third Reich.<\/p>\n

The five directors approached their assignments differently, but in every case with impressive results. George Stevens\u2019s documentary approach to recording the post-war liberation of Dachau became two films used at the first Nuremberg Trial.<\/p>\n

What the directors produced upon their return home was irrevocably colored and deepened by these experiences, including Ford\u2019s They Were Expendable<\/i>, as Denby says, \u201ca film suffused with an elegiac melancholy that is unique in American movies\u201d; William Wyler\u2019s The Best Years of our Lives<\/i>; and Frank Capra\u2019s It\u2019s a Wonderful Life<\/i>, in its way, the answer to Marshall\u2019s challenge: a vision of a way of life \u201cfor which Americans would have gone to war,\u201d says Denby.<\/p>\n

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