Right around the time that America finally entered World War II, five of the leading directors in Hollywood – studio filmmakers – individually chose to join the military and lend their talents to fighting the war. They didn’t carry rifles or fly planes, but their contributions told by first the book and now the filmed documentary Five Came Back is fascinating and important.
The five filmmakers who went to war were John Ford, still perhaps America’s finest director; the young John Huston, just off his first great film, The Maltese Falcon; Frank Capra, at the time the most popular director in the country – he’d made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (among many others) and later It’s a Wonderful Life; George Stevens, who began with Laurel and Hardy and before the war made The More the Merrier, the most delirious screwball comedy, and William Wyler whose prewar films include a bunch of Bette Davis movies as well as Wuthering Heights. And after the war Wyler made The Best Years of Our Lives, Roman Holiday and Ben-Hur.
And in the three-part Netflix documentary, five exceptional contemporary filmmakers help tell the story – Lawrence Kasdan, Steven Spielberg, Paul Greengrass, Francis Coppola and Guillermo del Toro.
Just as the story took writer Mark Harris 500 pages in his book in 2014, it packs the three-hour plus film. The material is shaped with contemporary commentary, archival images and the voices from the five who came back, footage from the work they did during the war along with clips from postwar work. Yet when it ended I wanted more.
These five filmmakers left their comfortable Hollywood careers and went into something completely unfamiliar. While they all knew Hollywood politics, now they had to figure out military politics, and military politics invoked national politics. The five had no idea what was expected of them, beyond early generalizations, and neither did the generals or the colonels the five encountered. The military at times seemed to want simply footage of things connected to the war, which was not what these Hollywood dramatists had in mind at all. Yet, they’d never before gathered documentary footage, and or knew about shaping it afterward. They made missteps; they annoyed the brass; they wondered why they were sent to where they were sent.
But each of them in his own way figured out what to do – and how they learned new craft is part of the story of Five Came Back. John Ford wound up on Midway Island in the Pacific when the Japanese attacked, and the Battle of Midway was a critical event in the eventual allied triumph. Paul Greengrass says Ford’s film about the battle is one of the great modernist works. Under the stress and chaos of the fighting, the film shows the struggle of the camera operators to keep images in frame, and the film stock often jumped off the sprocket wheels.
Huston struggled to find material. He arrived after a battle in the Italian town of San Pietro had ended, but he’d learned enough about filming actual combat that he restaged scenes and made a deeply affecting short, The Battle of San Pietro. At the end of the war his stunning documentary Let There Be Light showed the treatment of wounds not visible – wounds to the minds and psyches of soldiers, a picture Coppola says is filmed with a depth of love for the men that Huston himself may not have understood.
George Stevens filmed both the D-Day invasion of France and the liberation of Dachau. Much of his footage was too horrible to show publically for many years, and Stevens never made a lighthearted movie again in his long postwar career. And Wyler made The Best Years of Our Lives, about returning servicemen who struggle to adjust to life at home. It gets ever better with time.
And now, when many of us seem to have lost our understanding of the horror of that war, Five Came Back is a brilliant reminder.
