Five Came Back

January 13, 2014
American filmmakers undergo their baptism of fire in this insightful if sometimes chaotic war saga. Journalist Harris (Pictures at a Revolution) profiles five leading directors—John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens—who ditched stellar careers to join the military and craft propaganda, battle documentaries and training films. (Ford’s first Navy assignment was an explicit primer on venereal disease.) Harris’s story is often simply Hollywood on steroids: generals and political strictures replace studio moguls and the Hays code; location hardships include getting shot at; the blurring together of authenticity and fakery deepens (some of the most acclaimed and innovative combat “documentaries” were staged reenactments). The fog of war sometimes obscures the big picture here; even more than civilian making-of epics, the author’s narrative of military movie production is a welter of confusion and misfires, turf struggles, budget constraints, and grand artistic impulses thwarted by philistine bureaucracies and petty happenstance. Still, Harris pens superb exegeses of the ideological currents coursing through this most political of cinematic eras, and in the arcs of his vividly drawn protagonists—especially Stevens, whose camera took in the liberation of Paris and the horror of Dachau—we see Hollywood abandoning sentimental make-believe to confront the starkest realities.

January 1, 2014
Entertainment Weekly writer Harris (Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, 2008) returns with a comprehensive, cleareyed look at the careers of five legendary directors who put their Hollywood lives on freeze-frame while they went off to fight in the only ways they knew how. "As long as they lived," writes the author, "the war lived with them." Arranged chronologically (beginning in 1938), the text generally includes the doings of each of the five (John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler and Frank Capra) in each of the chapters, with Harris artfully intercutting events from his principals' private as well as professional lives. The author also keeps us up to date on Hollywood without his five, showing us the stars who were winning Oscars, how the five felt about the winners (sometimes themselves) and how Hollywood sought to profit from the war. Harris segues seamlessly to scenes all over the world--the Aleutians, England, France, Germany, Italy, the South Pacific and other venues important in the war and in his story. We learn along the way of the involvement in various cinema projects by other considerable talents--e.g., Lillian Hellman, cinematographer Gregg Toland, Theodor Geisl, Mel Blanc and animator Chuck Jones. Some of the five worked together (Capra and Stevens), but others worked separately on feature-length documentaries, short subjects and films for military use only. Among the more enduring productions were The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress (Wyler, 1944) and the powerful, wrenching footage shot in 1945 at the liberation of Dachau by George Stevens' crew. Stevens was devastated by what he saw and later shot The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). Harris also chronicles the politics, personality clashes (military vs. Hollywood), egos, drinking, carousing and sexual exploits. As riveting and revealing as a film by an Oscar winner.

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Starred review from February 15, 2014
It's hardly news that the movies affect and are affected by the broader canvas of popular culture and world history, but Harrisperhaps more successfully than any other writer, past or presentmanages to find in that symbiotic relationship the stuff of great stories. He turned that unlikely trick in Pictures at a Revolution (2008), about the five Best Picture nominees in 1967 and how they defined a sea change in Hollywood and in society at large, and he does it again here. The number is once more five, but this time it's five acclaimed directors who went to war in the 1940s to make propaganda films and came home changed by what they saw and what they did. The stories of what John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra did in the war are dramatic (Ford filming the opening salvo in the Battle of Midway from a rooftop; Wyler riding along on bombing missions over Germany; Stevens filming the horrific scenes at Dachau), but they are also stories of personal redemption, frustration, and even dishonesty (Huston receiving acclaim for the authenticity of his documentary San Pietro, which was made up almost entirely of reenactments). Every chapter contains small, priceless nuggets of movie history (Joseph Goebbels thought Wyler's Mrs. Miniver was an exemplary propaganda film and hoped the Germans could copy it), and nearly every page offers an example of Harris' ability to capture the essence of a person or an event in a few, perfectly chosen words (describing Huston as a last-call bon vivant ). Narrative nonfiction that is as gloriously readable as it is unfailingly informative.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

September 1, 2013

Plagued by accusations of un-American attitudes before World War II, movie folks rallied when the fighting broke out. Outstanding among them, says Harris (Pictures at a Revolution), were the directors John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens, who served worldwide in various branches of the military.

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Starred review from March 1, 2014

Harris (Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood) surpasses previous scholarship on the directors who are the focus here: Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, and William Wyler. These Academy Award-winning directors were at the top of their careers when they volunteered for military duty in World War II. Several joined the Signal Corps and the Field Photo Unit; Wyler documented flying missions of the Memphis Belle. This is also a well-documented analysis of how Hollywood moguls (the majority being Jewish) and film celebrities became divided on the issue of prewar U.S. isolationism vs. interventionism. Accusations were thrown at Hollywood for either being in collusion with the Roosevelt administration or being anti-American and communist sympathizers. These directors were responsible for creating effective propaganda and training films for new recruits, as well as documenting the realities of a devastating war. Their work took them everywhere from the Aleutian Islands to the South Pacific. After the war, they brought their experiences back home, each being affected both personally and professionally. While Wyler and Huston found new pride in Hollywood and the country they loved so much, Stevens became painfully withdrawn from the world after having filmed the horrors of Dachau in preparing evidence for the Nuremberg trials. VERDICT This well-researched book is essential for both film enthusiasts and World War II aficionados. [See Prepub Alert, 9/1/13.]

All five directors are featured in individual titles as part of the University of Mississippi's "Conversations with Filmmakers: Interviews" series. Other books to consider: Thomas Doherty's Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II ([Film & Culture] Columbia Univ. 1993); Clayton Koppes & Gregory D. Black's Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Free Pr. 1987); Frank Capra's The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography (Macmillan. 1971; Da Capo. 1997); Joseph McBride's Searching for John Ford (Univ. of Mississippi. 2011); John Huston's An Open Book (Da Capo, 1994); Marilyn Ann Moss's Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film (Univ. of Wisconsin. 2004); Gabriel Miller's William Wyler: The Life and Films of Hollywood's Most Celebrated Director ([Screen Classics] Univ. of Kentucky. 2013); Jan Herman's A Talent for Trouble: The Life of Hollywood's Most Acclaimed Director: William Wyler (Putnam. 1996).--Richard Dickey, Washington DC

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.