Five Came Back (2017) s01e02 Episode Script
Combat Zones
1 [Steven Spielberg.]
When the five filmmakers got to Washington D.
C.
, they were thought of as mythmakers.
They were making Hollywood movies.
They were making stuff up.
This was the real world, folks.
This was the real war.
And now we've got these Hollywood guys coming to tell us how to acquit the war, or suggesting how they can make a contribution to the war effort? Well, how dare they? [Paul Greengrass.]
The relationship between the US government and Hollywood was entirely unclear.
[Lawrence Kasdan.]
No one had done this before.
There had never been a situation where you could take Hollywood professionals and use them to help sell the war to the American people, and to help win the war by building morale.
And so, they were really trying to figure out: "What should those movies be?" [Guillermo del Toro.]
The idea of propaganda filmmaking is to propagate, to disseminate ideas.
Each of the five men that we're talking about goes at it differently.
You have John Ford, who approaches it on a mythical, epic scale.
You have John Huston going at it almost like an adventure.
Wyler and Stevens approach it from an incredibly human point of view.
And their experiences are different from Capra, who approaches it very much as a concept problem-solving point of view.
When the immensity of World War II comes in, he is given to a single sentiment: Why we fight.
[man.]
From millions of feet of film confiscated from the enemy or donated by American film companies, these men are preparing pictures to set the war record straight and to counteract enemy propaganda.
[second male voiceover.]
Scream you're abused, shout you're oppressed.
The world's wrong, you're right.
If you speak it loud enough and often enough, they believe you.
[del Toro.]
One of the most brilliant ideas is for him to use iconic, simple, super clear animation, created by Disney, for everyone to read and see and understand.
[narrator.]
In the summer of 1942, the British Army was fighting to maintain its position against the Nazis in North Africa.
[man.]
The British Army of the Nile digs in after its withdrawal from Libya.
[narrator.]
And the US launched its first military offensive against the Japanese with a surprise invasion of Guadalcanal.
[man.]
Off the hostile shore, American warships bombard the Japanese position.
The attack takes the Japs by surprise, and this wave of leathernecks encounters little resistance, swarming ashore.
[explosions.]
Official pictures made by the United States Marine Corps.
[narrator.]
In September, John Huston's last film before reporting for duty was released.
You probably don't share my enthusiasm for the Japanese.
I don't know.
I never thought much about them.
[Francis Ford Coppola.]
Across the Pacific is a kind of early propaganda Hollywood film against the new enemies we were going to be facing.
You guys have been looking for a war, haven't you? That's right, Rick.
That's why we're starting it.
You might start it, Joe, but we'll finish it.
[narrator.]
While shooting Across the Pacific, Huston lost track of his enlistment papers and suddenly realized he was due to report immediately to Washington.
He was forced to let another director finish the film.
[Coppola.]
He was married and having a bunch of affairs, and that whole mess in his mind is partly what made him escape to the Army and join the Army.
[narrator.]
The Army didn't trust Huston.
A report called him "Capable and intelligent, but also self-centered, with an odd personality.
" [John Huston.]
They put me behind a desk, and it was ghastly, it was terrible.
What I wanted, you know, I wanted to be out with a camera in the field.
[narrator.]
Finally, he received his first assignment, on a battlefront as out of the way as could be imagined.
[Coppola.]
Eventually, he was sent to this Aleutian outpost near the Bering Strait, which was the Japanese's closest point to us.
But it was a place where absolutely nothing was happening at all, and he was just there with these men, day after day after day, just living to get a letter from home or, you know, playing cards, and occasionally, some bombers would come over, and they would refuel them, and they would go off.
Well, I wasn't at all self-conscious about it.
It seemed to me that making a documentary was It wouldn't be any different than making any other film.
I suppose it was a somewhat different approach, in that in the documentary, I allowed material to reveal itself.
And slowly, the shape of the thing appeared.
[Coppola.]
He had that great asset as a filmmaker, as he could always write a fantastic narration, and he could record it, too.
[man.]
Bookkeepers, grocery clerks, college men and dirt farmers.
That is, of course, ex-dirt farmers, ex-bookkeepers, ex-college men.
Soldiers now, as though all their lives they'd been nothing but.
[narrator.]
Despite the monotony at the base, Huston came face to face with the terror of war.
On an aerial bombing run, he saw a gunner shot dead in front of him.
By the way, it was to be a propaganda film.
And I'm afraid there are elements of that that show in Report from the Aleutians.
[muffled voice on radio.]
[Huston.]
There was a little bit of the hurrah in it, where we were cheering our own boys on, as it were.
[man.]
Our bombs found the target.
[Huston.]
There were planes lost on that mission, but the War Department wanted it to be a completely successful mission.
[airplane hums.]
[man.]
Nine bombers came out, and nine are going home.
Audiences were very used to a sterilized Hollywood war.
Listen, Dale, this is your first time up.
Don't try to win this war all by yourself.
[Spielberg.]
You know, with John Wayne, and where the war is secondary to the heroes who were fighting it.
And so, we see bloodless combat, and it's exciting, but it is nothing like the real thing.
Look, Captain Jim! Lookie! Wham, wham! Termites.
[Spielberg.]
Hollywood made a lot of movies about the war.
Air Force, The Fighting Seabees.
They were basically made to get people to get out of their seats and write a check.
[uplifting music.]
[man.]
Calling all Americans.
Calling all Americans to buy war bonds and stamps.
The motion picture industry mobilizing America's 100 million moviegoers into a regular bond- and stamp-buying army.
The esprit de corps, after Pearl Harbor, of wanting to be part of this and wanting to be an American, not a movie star [man.]
James Stewart, winner of top film honors for 1940, volunteers for his greatest role: buck private in Uncle Sam's Army.
[Spielberg.]
is something that we forget.
We forget the fact that Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart and many actors, they flew missions.
[narrator.]
In the heart of Hollywood Bette Davis spearheaded the opening of a popular nightclub for enlisted men.
[women sing.]
Manhattanites can brag of lights And Boston has its bean But on the coast we proudly boast About the Hollywood Canteen GI Joe [narrator.]
John Ford's wife, Mary, often helped out at the Canteen while her husband was away.
[women.]
From every camp For miles they tramp To the Hollywood Canteen [narrator.]
Although the Armed Forces were still segregated, the Hollywood Canteen welcomed servicemen of all races, a rarity at the time.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a poll revealed that half the residents of Harlem believed they would be no worse off if Japan won the war.
Their morale became a subject of great concern for the War Department.
[del Toro.]
Capra wanted to prove that this was not just a white man's war, that all Americans needed to be involved.
[narrator.]
Capra proposed what he called a "Negro War Effort" film.
William Wyler, eager for his first assignment, signed on enthusiastically.
And they knew very early on that, used in the right way, a film could influence just scores of Americans.
Wyler recruited an African-American playwright named Carlton Moss to write the film, and the two men embarked on a research tour of Southern military bases.
[narrator.]
Wyler was appalled, both by the way Moss was treated and by the racism that the black servicemen he met routinely faced.
In Georgia, a group of black soldiers told him of living in fear of attacks from nearby townspeople and the Ku Klux Klan.
Wyler received guidelines, not from Capra, but from the War Department directly, about how to depict African-American soldiers, including: "Play down officers most Negroid in appearance.
Omit all references to Lincoln, race leaders or friends of the Negro.
" [Spielberg.]
Wyler wanted no part in making a film that would perpetuate this kind of racism.
When he got to Washington, he told Capra he was out.
[narrator.]
At a party in the capital Wyler met the Commander of the Army Air Forces and asked for a filmmaking assignment.
He was made a major the next day and sent to England.
In London, tensions between the two Allies were running high.
The British were frustrated that the American effort had been focused on the Pacific front, and not on helping them in Europe and Africa.
When Wyler arrived in London he ended up in the same hotel as John Ford.
Wyler was struggling to navigate Army bureaucracy to get equipment and crew, and was being ignored.
He saw the ease with which Ford was able to get what he wanted and approached him for help.
[Greengrass.]
Ford didn't help Wyler in London when they were in London during the war.
Really, he should have done.
That was the petty side of Ford.
For a great man, he did have his petty side.
[narrator.]
Ford had been sent to England on his first assignment after Midway to prepare to film the Allied invasion of North Africa.
It would be the first cross-Atlantic military operation of American troops in the war.
[Greengrass.]
Bear in mind, that was very important for Britain.
Here we were, you know, a small island, we'd been pinned back.
We'd fought on our own for a long time.
[narrator.]
The Americans and the British each had filmmaking units working independently.
Ford arrived in Algiers with a crew of Navy filmmakers.
But once on the ground, he learned he was no longer in charge.
Darryl Zanuck, his old boss at Fox, was now Colonel Darryl Zanuck, his commanding officer, and was overseeing the entire American filmmaking effort in Africa.
Ford's relationship with Zanuck was love-hate, hate-hate [chuckles.]
love-love.
[narrator.]
When Ford was among fighting men, he just tried to blend in.
In the field, he wanted no special treatment.
But Zanuck had his own car, his own entourage, his own rules.
His short stature and autocratic manner had soldiers derisively referring to him as "the littlest colonel.
" Ford couldn't wait to get away from Zanuck's control.
[narrator.]
Ford and his men moved as quickly as they could toward the front lines and away from Zanuck.
In Tunisia, they found themselves in the middle of a firefight taking cover from German tanks and dive bombers.
[explosions.]
When Zanuck finally caught up, he insisted on pulling Ford and his troops back, away from danger.
As the Allies dug in, meeting heavy resistance from Axis forces in Tunisia, Ford and his men had to turn over all their footage to Zanuck.
But Ford was skeptical about Zanuck's ability to make a compelling war documentary.
In Hollywood, Capra was securing more studio space for his expanding program of war films.
[Frank Capra.]
We had installed ourselves at Western Avenue.
But we couldn't get any furniture.
So we stole it.
I went to Columbia Studio to steal a table.
George Stevens was just coming out of the stage.
He comes by, and I'm in uniform, and he sees me, and he comes over and says, "How about me coming in with you?" And I said, "You just come right over to Western Avenue, and you'll be in the Army.
" The last film that I did, in 1942, before I went into the Army, was a comedy called The More, the Merrier.
[Kasdan.]
Stevens, who was very good at a lot of light entertainment [silence.]
felt that the war was something substantial that he could get involved in.
[narrator.]
Stevens told his boss at Columbia, Harry Cohn, that as soon as he finished editing The More The Merrier, he was joining up.
Cohn warned him not to go, telling him he risked losing his place among Hollywood's top directors.
- Here are the keys.
- Where are you going? Back to California? No.
Africa.
You know, I'd gone so far with this business of films, and so I just retired.
I had a deal with the Army to go right to Africa, where the war was.
I had no certainty that I was gonna pick up again.
Everybody said, "If you do, you'll be out of it for three years or longer.
But that might be it, as far as filmmaking is concerned, if you're lucky enough not to get hurt badly.
" [narrator.]
Leaving his wife and ten-year-old son was the hardest thing for him.
He shipped out with only his camera, a small crew and vague orders.
From Washington, Stevens, now a major, flew to Miami, then to British Guyana, then to Brazil, then to Nigeria.
He ended up on an Army puddle-jumper bound for Cairo.
[Kasdan.]
I believe that, of these five directors, Stevens' experience in the war was the most intense, the most life-changing and, in some ways, the most impactful for history.
His route to get there was incredibly circuitous, difficult.
And Stevens suffered from asthma.
He was sometimes laid up.
He couldn't even move.
So, he had struggled to get over here.
Physically, he's suffering.
[narrator.]
In Egypt, Stevens sat with hundreds of GI's as they watched a two-year-old Betty Grable movie.
He saw the power of film, even a lowbrow genre picture, to bring people home and stir emotions as he never had before.
He kept moving, through Tripoli and Benghazi, getting closer to the front.
Finally, he reached Algiers, ready to become a war filmmaker at last.
When he stepped off the plane, he learned that there was no war to film.
Hitler's army had been badly beaten and was one day from surrendering.
The campaign was over.
He was too late.
That day, his diary entry was just three words: "This damn war.
" [uplifting music.]
[newscaster.]
Tunis: Capital of Tunisia.
Last great milestone in the Allied liberation of North Africa.
Thousands upon thousands of Italian and German troops lay down their arms and surrender.
The battle of North Africa, which has cost the Axis some 400,000 men in dead, wounded and prisoners, is over.
The victory is won, and now the victorious Allied leaders look eagerly across the Mediterranean to the shores of Hitler's fortress Europe.
[narrator.]
As Frank Capra continued to work on the Why We Fight films, his ambitions were growing.
Capra's first installment had been an instant hit with the new Army recruits it was made for.
The success of Prelude to War internally is so great that Capra wants the film to be shown, to reach the masses.
[narrator.]
Capra needed approval from Lowell Mellett, who was appointed by Roosevelt to oversee the Hollywood war filmmaking effort.
But Mellett strongly opposed showing Prelude to War to the general public.
[Capra.]
Yes, that was Mr.
Mellett.
He thought, "It's too gruesome.
The American people should not see this picture.
They'll hate the Germans from there on.
Then we never can be friends again.
" [interviewer.]
Did you want people to hate? [Capra.]
No [laughs.]
I did not want people to hate, I wanted to knock off people that hated.
I wanted to stop that hatred.
And you couldn't stop that hatred unless you stopped it.
And you weren't gonna stop it with candy bars.
[narrator.]
That year, the Motion Picture Academy announced the debut of a new category: Best Documentary Feature.
Capra went around Mellett and secretly screened Prelude to War for Academy members, qualifying it for the Oscars.
Look, if you can survive the politics of Hollywood, you can basically survive any political arena.
[narrator.]
Spurred on by the enormous success of The Battle of Midway in theaters, Ford screened his own film for the Academy's president and suggested that he expand the new category.
Ford wanted the Oscars and personally lobbied to get it.
[del Toro.]
Capra has this competition with Ford, in a way, and I think the competition was seen by Capra with Ford being a quintessential American filmmaker, and him being the little guy that needs to prove his worth with less resources, less time.
[Greengrass.]
Ford was very interested in glory, very competitive with his peers, you know, Capra, Wyler, and all the other guys.
Well, I mean, he was a glory hound, was Ford.
I mean, he used to make a tremendous song and dance about not going to the Oscars and, you know, "Oh, directing is just a job of work, and I have no interest in it.
" I never cared that much.
It's just a job of work.
Like the man digging the ditch.
Well, that's all, you know, to use his phrase, a crock of shit.
[uplifting music.]
[man.]
Once a year, Hollywood honors its brightest stars.
Tonight, they also salute the 27,000 men of the cinema industry now serving in the Armed Forces.
I'm very happy to be here, ladies and gentlemen, once again on the stand.
[laughter.]
So close, and yet so far.
[laughter.]
[narrator.]
Twenty-five documentaries were nominated, and four took home Oscars.
Both Battle of Midway and Prelude to War were winners.
At the ceremony, Mellett gave a speech to reassure the studios that the government would not try to insert propaganda into their movies.
This government is engaged in a war to save and perpetuate democracy, not in a war to destroy it.
So, the government is not going into the motion picture business.
[applause.]
[narrator.]
After Prelude to War won, Mellett gave in to pressure to release Capra's film publicly.
It was a box office flop.
Audiences were now hungry for the latest images from the front, not a film detailing the history leading up to the war.
[dramatic music.]
[Henry Gladstone.]
US forces make a smashing surprise attack on Jap-held Attu Island.
[narrator.]
In May, 1943, Allied forces recaptured the last of the Japanese bases in the Aleutians.
[Gladstone.]
Except for occasional snipers, the Japs offer no formal resistance to the establishing of beachheads.
Bombing raids almost daily from nearby US bases have done their job.
[narrator.]
The victory brought renewed focus from the Army on Huston's just-completed Report from the Aleutians.
Huston's cut of the film was over 40 minutes, more than twice the length Lowell Mellett wanted.
[Coppola.]
These were filmmakers who wanted to do a piece of work, and the Army wanted a short, twenty-minute film that they could show before the cartoon and the coming attractions.
There was always going to be a struggle between the administrators and directors of this level, pouring their hearts into the work.
[narrator.]
After being stymied by Mellett, Huston decided to go directly to the press in New York.
When newspapers began running stories about the government withholding Huston's film, the Army was left with no choice but to release it at full length.
They used the same tactics to get what they felt was best for the picture with the military and their representatives that they had been using with the studio bosses.
[narrator.]
But Mellett had been right.
The long running time meant Report from the Aleutians couldn't play before Hollywood features.
Released as a main attraction, it failed to interest audiences.
[newscaster.]
From North Africa, former Hollywood producer, Colonel Darryl Zanuck, has brought an official film record of frontline action.
[narrator.]
Zanuck's film about the North African campaign was finally released in theaters to withering reviews.
[man.]
Needlework.
[narrator.]
Zanuck had turned it into a blatant exercise in self-promotion, even releasing a book about his experience.
His behavior caused many in Congress to question the use of Hollywood talent in the war filmmaking effort.
The Americans out there were not prepared, and they didn't have the material.
[narrator.]
By contrast, when the British documentary about the North African Campaign, Desert Victory, opened in the US, audiences and critics were astonished.
The British were pretty sophisticated at understanding the role of cinema in building morale and propaganda.
[narrator.]
Desert Victory not only made the American filmmaking effort in the war seem amateurish by comparison, it also created the impression that the British were winning the war in Africa single-handedly.
[Kasdan.]
You have not only talented Hollywood movie directors who didn't really know what they were doing in this case, and you have military leaders who had never made films, and you have political people who are funding all this, and they're not sure what's the best way to help the war effort.
So, you have a lot of people who don't really know exactly what to do.
[narrator.]
The War Department felt that Desert Victory could not go unanswered.
So the Army turned to Capra to make another film about North Africa, to be called Tunisian Victory.
Faced with making a compelling film without any good footage to work with, Capra decided to simply restage it.
[Kasdan.]
There was a lot of manipulation of these films, because events didn't allow them to shoot what they wanted.
So, they would go back and dramatize it.
[narrator.]
Stevens was still in Algiers when he received orders to take a crew, drive tanks through villages that had already been liberated, and shell them again, this time for the cameras.
[Kasdan.]
When Stevens is asked to do what he thinks is inherently dishonest, he doesn't rebel.
He does the work that he's supposed to do.
But I think it impacted everything else that happened to him in the rest of the war.
[narrator.]
Capra then turned to Huston, sending him to shoot staged aerial combat in the Mojave Desert and Orlando, Florida.
Huston followed Capra's orders, but he knew the recreations were unconvincing.
Huston thought it was terrible.
He was beside himself.
[narrator.]
In England a sequel to Desert Victory was already underway.
So, the Army sent Capra and Huston to London with orders to convince the British to join them, combining all their footage into one joint production.
[Coppola.]
But then, when they saw some of the work of the British film units this was real filmmaking.
[narrator.]
Huston grew disheartened with what his war service was becoming.
He felt he'd been part of a plot to take a strong British film and destroy it.
This was Capra's first and only major wartime assignment outside of the United States.
One night, the air raid sirens sounded, and he and Huston had to evacuate their rooms.
That night, Capra wrote, "The war lost its glamour for me.
Old ladies and children cower in the hallways.
I was scared, but I was more sick at the thought of them being mangled.
How far has man gone mad?" After several months of tense negotiations and reediting, Capra convinced the British Army film unit to approve a joint film emphasizing Allied cooperation.
[man.]
On both sides of the Atlantic, the effort was tremendous.
Guns, trucks, aircraft, petrol, water, food, barbed wire, locomotives.
But ammunition alone was shipped 520 different times.
[narrator.]
By the time Tunisian Victory was released theatrically, the film had been condemned in a harsh internal Army report that accused it of attempting to reenact the war on a Hollywood scale.
It was another box office flop.
In England, Wyler felt hopelessly stalled.
Then Mrs.
Miniver opened in London.
It was a moment Wyler had been dreading since he got there.
[Spielberg.]
When he got to England, he saw really what was happening.
He thought he had been too soft in his own movie, Mrs.
Miniver.
It has just been announced over the air by the Prime Minister that our country is at war.
[narrator.]
But British audiences loved it.
Suddenly, Wyler was a celebrity in London, and within the Army.
He was finally able to get the assignment he'd been longing for.
He'd make a film about the crew of a bomber flying its 25th mission, a milestone after which they could go home.
[man.]
This is the crew of the Memphis Belle.
324th Squadron, 91st Heavy Bombardment Group.
[narrator.]
Wyler was urged by colleagues to fake it using miniatures, but he refused.
He took flight training courses to be able to film on the actual bombing missions over Germany.
[man.]
The Group Commander, Colonel Stanley Wray, steps up to the target map, and, for the first time, you learn where you're going.
Sometimes your face turns white when you find out.
Sometimes the feeling you won't come back tightens your insides.
The job is to bomb Wilhelmshaven, effectively and economically.
The enemy is strong, skillful, determined to stop us.
[narrator.]
One day, a reporter for the Army magazine Stars and Stripes arrived to photograph Wyler.
When he asked why, the reporter told him that he'd won an Academy Award.
"Well, I'll be damned," said Wyler.
[applause.]
[commentator.]
Irish-born Greer Garson wins the award for her unforgettable Mrs.
Miniver.
[narrator.]
Mrs.
Miniver won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Wyler's first award for Best Director.
Wyler's wife Talli accepted on his behalf from Frank Capra.
Thanks so much, everybody.
It makes me very happy to accept the award for Willy.
I wish he could be here.
He's wanted an Oscar for a long time, and I know it would thrill him an awful lot to be here, probably as much as that flight over Wilhelmshaven did.
[Spielberg.]
The fact that he wouldn't allow himself to be misled into stylizing the war, I think when Wyler got overseas, and he got up in a B-17, and he started doing sorties with that crew, I think he was dedicated to not sparing us anything.
[man.]
The wheels of the Memphis Belle leave the soil of England for the 25th time.
The friendly soil of England, with its ordered farms and rural hamlets, its country estates surrounded by formal gardens and well-kept parks, the England these Americans knew only from the classics they had to read in school.
Higher and higher, climbing to reach your best operational altitude: Twenty-five thousand feet, five miles straight up.
So high you can't be seen from the ground with the naked eye.
So high that after one minute without oxygen, you lose consciousness.
After 20 minutes, you're dead.
[Spielberg.]
He went on these missions to show what the air war was like and to show how young these kids were that went up in these tuna fish cans, where there was no air and it was freezing cold.
[man.]
You look out at the strange world beyond, reflections in Plexiglas, like nothing you ever saw before outside of a dream.
[Spielberg.]
And there was monotony and terror, and then terror and monotony, you know, so interchangeable, during any aspect of war.
[man.]
Morgan changes course every 15 seconds.
Evasive action to confuse the flak batteries.
Bomb sites set for correct altitude and speed, bomb bay doors open, crosshairs lined up on target, adjustments for wind drift made.
[gunfire.]
Two more fighters diving from nine o'clock.
They've hit this sport, but he keeps on his bombing run.
[explosion.]
Bombs away.
If the plane was knocked out and Willy parachuted to safety, why, he wouldn't be accorded the same treatment as other flyers.
[Spielberg.]
They were afraid of Wyler being shot down over Germany.
He would not be treated as a P.
O.
W.
As a Jew, his fate would be sealed.
[man.]
The first half of the mission is over.
The easy half.
Now to get home.
Fighters at six o'clock.
This is what a gunner sees: a speck in the sky.
That's a fighter.
And then a blink.
That means he's firing at you, 2,300 rounds a minute.
[pilot 1.]
Check that B-17, Chuck.
Three o'clock.
- [pilot 2.]
Motor's smoking.
- [pilot 1.]
Fire at 10-30.
[Spielberg.]
You know, what really strikes me in that film, in Memphis Belle, is showing other B-17s being shot down, and in particular, that one 17 that was making that slow spiral down from the sky [pilot 1.]
B-17 out of control at three o'clock.
[gunfire.]
[pilot 2.]
Come on, you guys, get out of that plane.
Bail out.
[pilot 3.]
There's one.
He come out of the bomb bay.
[pilot 1.]
I see him.
[pilot 2.]
There's the tail gunner coming out.
[Spielberg.]
where they were counting how many parachutes were opening, how many of the crew got out, how many of those ten survived.
That's one of the most stunning things I've ever seen.
[pilot 2.]
Eight men still in that B-17.
Come on, the rest of you guys.
Get out of there.
[narrator.]
During a mission, one of Wyler's cameramen, Harold Tannenbaum, was killed, when the B-17 he was filming in was shot down.
[uplifting music.]
[newscaster.]
Somewhere in England, the crew of a battle-scarred American flying fortress, the Memphis Belle, departs for home.
Flying with a new wing and a patched-up tail, the Memphis Belle arrives in Washington right on schedule.
[Spielberg.]
On the 25th mission, the Memphis Belle crew rotated out of combat, and they went back to America.
And then Wyler recorded all of their voices.
[crewmember 1.]
There's four of them.
One o'clock high.
[crewmember 2.]
They're coming around.
Watch it.
[crewmember 1.]
Two at six o'clock coming and diving at you.
[crewmember 3.]
Trouble at two o'clock.
Watch it.
[crewmember 4.]
It has an engine on fire.
[explosion.]
[narrator.]
The War Department worried that the movie was too realistic.
Some were offended by its rough language.
[crewmember 1.]
I'm on him.
Come on, you son of a bitch.
[narrator.]
Others complained that showing fighters taking evasive action made them look scared.
But Wyler fought them all the way up the chain of command, and won.
He just wanted everything to reflect his experience and the experience of those young men that he got to know and love so much.
And then, when the audiences saw Memphis Belle, it meant so much to America.
[narrator.]
Memphis Belle was a huge success with audiences and critics, becoming the first movie in history to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times.
[man.]
As General Eaker read the order for what he called their 26th and most important mission: return to America to train new crews and to tell the people what we're doing here, to thank them for their help and support and tell them to keep it up so we can keep it up.
[narrator.]
Wyler was an American filmmaking hero again.
But he almost missed the opening of his own movie.
In Washington, he was leaving a hotel when he heard a doorman call a taxi passenger a "goddamn Jew.
" Wyler punched him in the face.
The next day, he was arrested and charged with conduct unbecoming of an officer.
Wyler explained that the doorman's language was why he joined the war effort in the first place.
The Army told him he could take a reprimand or face a court-martial.
Reluctantly, he took the reprimand.
Despite the box office failures of Prelude to War and Tunisian Victory, Capra's reputation within the Army continued to grow.
He was now working closely with director Anatole Litvak on the fifth and greatest of the Why We Fight films: The Battle of Russia.
While Capra and Litvak worked on the film, the Red Army started pushing back the Nazis at Stalingrad, in one of the costliest battles of the war.
[man.]
For the first time since the mighty German Army started its career of blitz, smashing into submission one European country after the other, that same German Army came up against a country that did not submit.
[narrator.]
Though it had been made as a training film, The Battle of Russia was so well-regarded that Capra received permission to release it theatrically.
One reviewer called it "the best and most important war film ever assembled in this country.
" Capra was also turning out biweekly newsreels, shorts and training films for troops at the front.
[man.]
Screen magazines showing the soldier what's happening on the home front.
GI movies made strictly for his entertainment.
[del Toro.]
In the entire canon of the war films that are done under Capra, one of the most fascinating things that is created is Private Snafu.
I just learned a secret, it's a honey, it's a pip.
But the enemy is listening, so I'll never let it slip.
It was first and foremost an entertainment tool, but it also drove home, in a very underhanded way, with humor, the vital principles of soldiering and living through the war.
And Capra creates salacious, funny, raunchy, incredibly accessible cartoons that really connected and resonated with the average soldier.
[screams.]
[man.]
SNAFU: Situation Normal, All All Fouled Up.
[narrator.]
Because the cartoons were intended only for troops, Capra was able to include crude, racy material that would never have made it past Hollywood censors.
[man.]
It's so cold, it would freeze the nuts off a Jeep.
[narrator.]
Capra recruited an all-star team of writers, animators and voice actors.
To work on scripts for the shorts, he enlisted an editorial cartoonist named Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr.
Seuss.
[del Toro.]
For the final animation, the competition was between Disney and Warner Bros.
for the job.
Capra goes to the more populist, street-level humor of Warner Bros.
Eh, what's up, doc? [del Toro.]
And he gets Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, voiced by Mel Blanc.
Stick 'em up, or I'll blow your brains out! [German accent.]
Ah, what a rifle! Comrade! [narrator.]
There was a notable difference in the way Germans were depicted in Hollywood and in propaganda films, and in the way the Japanese were depicted.
Snafu, bingo-bango! [exaggerated Japanese accent.]
Calling Tokyo! Help! [del Toro.]
Even the German portrayal is somewhat human.
The enemy is Hitler, not the German race per se.
But Japan, as a whole, is viewed as a colony of ants, equally pernicious, one or the other.
The Japanese were often referred to as rats or monkeys and caricatured with buckteeth and bad vision.
In 1942, under the authorization of FDR, the US government ordered over 100,000 Japanese-Americans to report for relocation to internment camps.
[man.]
We knew that some among them were potentially dangerous.
Most were loyal.
But no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores.
Military authorities therefore determined that all of them, citizens and aliens alike, would have to move.
[narrator.]
The government was planning to eventually relocate these interned Japanese-Americans to small towns throughout the country.
But the War Department was concerned that if the Japanese were consistently depicted as inhuman monsters, no town would accept them.
[del Toro.]
And that prompted Mellett to very, very pointedly say, "I am not only concerned with these films helping us survive the war.
I'm really concerned with us being able to survive as a democracy because of how incredibly polarizing some of these notions are becoming.
" [narrator.]
John Ford found himself unexpectedly confronting this issue head-on.
[Greengrass.]
I think he then faced a real challenge, actually, which was a challenge I don't think he'd foreseen.
And the challenge was this: if you've organized the production, which is effectively what he'd done by setting up Field Photo, you've almost inevitably become a producer, not a director.
And this came home to him very, very clearly when he went off to see Toland's movie about Pearl Harbor.
[narrator.]
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Ford had been sent to Hawaii to supervise the production of a film about the rebuilding of the Pacific fleet.
Ford assigned the project to Gregg Toland, his cinematographer on The Grapes of Wrath.
Toland was one of the most sought-after cinematographers in Hollywood, a status he cemented with his work on Citizen Kane two years earlier.
[Greengrass.]
Ford knew that Toland wanted to direct, and I think he believed that he could, and he went out of his way to make it possible.
Well, of course, when Ford got out there some months later, what he found was that, far from Toland making, effectively, a small documentary film about what had happened and the aftermath and the destruction and the rebuilding and all the rest of it, what Toland was actually doing was making a full-on movie.
[narrator.]
Toland's feature-length film made extensive use of recreations and miniatures.
He had cast Walter Huston as Uncle Sam, and angrily indicted the United States as a sleeping giant that had failed to see Pearl Harbor coming.
The film also was full of the anti-Japanese racism that Lowell Mellett was working to avoid.
Toland exploited that, made that a big part of it, the sort of racial stereotyping.
Watch out, US.
Someday, one of these "incompetent, stupid little children of the Orient" will choose you, and when they get ready to square off, they won't worry about offending you.
They'll pick their time and their method, and they'll come over here and blow that bastion of military might behind which you sleep so easily into smithereens.
[narrator.]
The War Department was furious at Toland, and at Ford.
It had happened on his watch.
They told him to fix it.
[Greengrass.]
Ford realized that, in a time of war, what the American public wanted was to understand and have unmediated their sense of reality of this conflict.
And what that film had done was to try and create this kind of Hollywood semi-fictional mishmash, and it didn't play.
And what Ford did was what he did with his scripts.
Ford was famous for taking a script, you know, and just gutting it, filleting it, taking out the flam, the flim, and getting to the core of it, the essence of it.
And that's what he did: cut it in half and made it truthful.
[man.]
2,343 officers and enlisted men of our Army, Navy and Marine Corps gave their young lives in the service of our country.
[narrator.]
In a section Ford shaped to honor the fallen soldiers of the attack, he chose to spotlight a diverse selection of men.
[Tafoya.]
I am Antonio S.
Tafoya, United States Army.
My father and mother are Mr.
and Mrs.
Jesús A.
Tafoya.
[interviewer.]
How does it happen that all of you sound and talk alike? [serviceman.]
We are all alike.
We're all Americans.
[narrator.]
Ford salvaged the film, recutting as the half-hour documentary about the rebuilding of the fleet that was originally intended.
But Field Photo was placed under much heavier scrutiny, and Ford was unsure if he'd be sent on another assignment.
[del Toro.]
You know, Capra never gave up on projects, and one of the projects that he felt was urgent to not give up on was the film The Negro Soldier.
[narrator.]
After Wyler walked away from The Negro Soldier, Capra had reassigned the project to a different director, but kept its original writer, Carlton Moss.
[del Toro.]
As they go along, I think Moss becomes the backbone of the project.
He brings not only a perspective that is needed, but also a commitment to the subject, defending what he thinks is important for the film to embody.
[narrator.]
When The Negro Soldier was first shown, there was great concern in the black community that it would be nothing more than a reinforcement of the stereotypes and clichés that were pervasive in Hollywood films of the time.
Moss addressed the audience directly, casting himself as the preacher who serves as the film's primary narrator.
The gospel according to Hitler.
I'm not going to read all of this, but there are one or two things in this book that will interest you.
I quote: "From time to time, the illustrated papers show how a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, perhaps even a minister.
It never dawns on the degenerate, middle-class America that this is truly a sin against all reason, that it is criminal madness to train a born half-ape until one believes one has made a lawyer of him.
" This book was written 20 years ago.
The plan which it foreshadowed has become a reality.
[narrator.]
Audiences saw a portrait of black America that no mainstream movie had ever attempted.
The film was given a wide theatrical release in both black and white markets.
The writer and poet Langston Hughes praised the film, calling it "distinctly and thrillingly worthwhile.
" Because of Moss' conviction and Capra's insistence, the film becomes one of the most successful American propaganda films, not only gaining good reviews, but being praised as a worthy and powerful film.
[narrator.]
In the Pacific, the Allies continued to push their offensive towards Japan.
[man.]
The most difficult, the most dangerous of all military operations achieved.
Victory at Tarawa stands as a dramatic symbol of the growing offensive power of the United nations in the Pacific.
[narrator.]
An official War Department short documentary about the taking of Tarawa marked a turning point for the American filmmaking effort.
[gunfire.]
Made with on-the-ground footage shot during the battle, it was also the first American war film to show the bodies of dead US soldiers.
[man.]
These are Marine dead.
This is the price we have to pay for a war we didn't want.
[mournful music.]
[narrator.]
Capra wanted to make a film that was as vivid and realistic about the war in Europe.
Something that would show home front audiences that the course of the war was changing.
In September, 1943, the Allies began an invasion of Europe, landing in southern Italy.
[man.]
Allied troops entering a town just taken from the Nazis are alert for lurking snipers.
[gunfire.]
[Coppola.]
Capra wanted to show an Italian town being liberated and the people coming out and welcoming the soldiers.
[narrator.]
Eager to move on from their work in London, Capra assigned the project to John Huston.
From England, I was sent to Italy.
We got to the threshold of Liri Valley, which was defended by a little town, San Pietro.
Rain had just fallen, and everything looking very bright, and the sun had come out after the rain.
[sighs.]
It was It was quite a day.
There were numbers of dead.
Men dead behind their machine guns.
[Coppola.]
The town they were going to do this, San Pietro, had been bombed to hell.
There was hardly anything left.
The people were hiding.
They were in caves and what have you.
[narrator.]
The battle had ended a few days before Huston's arrival.
[Coppola.]
So, Huston and his team decided to do this whole fake liberation of a town that was already a rubble.
[dramatic music.]
Fire.
[narrator.]
With the full resources of the US Army, including equipment and battle reports, at his disposal, Huston meticulously recreated the entire three-day siege.
[Coppola.]
Huston was extremely ingenious in the way he decided to simulate all of what it would be like if the footage was real.
Cameras getting knocked apart and going out of focus and using all that stuff.
The way he would shake the camera and the way he would have even instruct the soldiers, as they walk into the assembly, to kind of glance at the guy shooting, the camera.
In other words, in staged material, you might think a movie director would say, "Okay, just go in.
Don't look at the camera.
" But Huston was so smart, he knew that in a real combat situation, the young guys would look at the cameraman who was sitting there.
So, he had them do it.
[man.]
To break the deadlock, orders were given for a coordinated divisional attack.
[explosions.]
[gunfire.]
[Huston.]
It had largely to do with the 36th Texas Infantry Division.
They're a wonderful outfit.
We were attached to them.
It was the story of that regiment in the operation.
[man.]
Our initial assault on San Pietro had been repulsed, with heavy casualties.
[narrator.]
Though the battle scenes had been staged, the footage of slain soldiers that Huston had captured was real.
[Huston.]
I remember when it was being first shown.
This was in the Pentagon.
We were in a projection room.
The big brass was assembled, and I realized that it wasn't like any picture about combat or any military film they'd ever seen.
But I wasn't prepared for the for the shock with which they received it.
There were several generals in the room, and the highest-ranking general presently, in the middle of the picture, stood up and walked out.
Well, then, the next the next-ranking general walked out.
And finally, we got down to colonels.
And so they went, one after the other, until I was alone.
I thought, "What assholes.
" The Army didn't like the picture at all.
The reason was they thought it would demoralize troops, demoralize men who had never been in combat.
[Coppola.]
The generals had felt he had made an antiwar film, and, of course, his response was, "Well, if I ever make a pro-war film, I ought to be shot.
" [Huston.]
A couple of weeks, I guess, went past.
And then, by one of those fortunate accidents, General George C.
Marshall saw the film.
I suppose he'd heard enough bad things about it to elicit his interest.
His reaction was exactly the opposite of everyone else.
Marshall said that they were the very men who should see such a film, to prepare them for the experience of combat.
Well, the atmosphere changed overnight.
I was decorated, and I was made a major.
[Coppola.]
So, the result was that, when the film was opened, it got great reviews, and they were saying how compelling the combat footage was.
[Spielberg.]
I didn't know until years after I saw The Battle of San Pietro that John Huston had actually staged some of it.
I didn't realize that until much later.
When I saw it, I really believed that it was actual footage, and that some of it, especially the man that is shot to the right, the camera pans just in time to get him hitting the ground, I didn't know that was staged.
[interviewer.]
Did you feel that you and your men were in real danger at San Pietro? Oh, of course.
Of course.
It was under fire a good part of the time.
[Spielberg.]
I was disappointed when I found out that that had been staged.
But I also was very respectful of the impact that film had on audiences and had on me when I first saw it.
[Coppola.]
I myself am less critical of the fact that they were saying this stuff was real combat footage, and in fact it was staged.
The filmmaker, and a writer-filmmaker such as Huston was, is inside the thing he's creating.
So, whether or not it really is the Battle of San Pietro or it's the fiction of the Battle of San Pietro, in his mind, there may be little difference.
If you get the essence of the thing, it doesn't matter whether it was There could be a real document happening during some incredible war that has less to it than one of these reenactments, because cinema is magical.
I'd like to think that all war movies are antiwar movies.
I made Apocalypse Now, and I certainly don't think that's a pro-war movie.
This is for television! Don't look at the camera! Don't look at the camera! Just go by like you're fighting! Like you're fighting! [Coppola.]
But, on the other hand, when a film has the excitement of combat and the adventure connected with combat, it can't help but get those juices flowing in the audience.
So that, even though you may consider that you're making an antiwar film, it's not, really, because it tends to, if not glorify, at least enhance the sensation that makes people be able to participate in this kind of thing.
[newscaster.]
Inside Nazi-occupied Europe, the enemy waits grimly for the day of invasion, as, across the English Channel, Allied forces plan the great offensive that is sure to come.
Prime Minister Churchill and General Eisenhower, Allied Commander, see thousands of American paratroopers drop from the skies in a spectacular rehearsal for the day of invasion.
[Kasdan.]
Eisenhower decided this grand invasion, which had been planned for years, and which was the most top-secret operation of the war, should be covered by film.
[Capra.]
I got an elite group of cameramen, and they weren't newsreel men, they were Army cameramen, headed by George Stevens.
I think at the time that Stevens runs into Capra and says to him, "What can I do," he was quoted as saying in his diaries, "I wanted to be in the war.
It's very hard to get a 50-yard line seat to something like that.
" And the fact is that he got exactly that.
You can't get any more central to the operation than to cover D-Day.
[narrator.]
Ford received orders to go to London.
While Stevens was setting up the Army filmmaking effort, Ford was asked to supervise preparations for the Navy.
When they realized the scale of the operations, Stevens and Ford agreed to coordinate efforts.
Together, the two men prepared Army and Navy filmmaking teams for D-Day.
[Greengrass.]
It was the largest combined operation in history at that point.
Who better than John Ford to film D-Day? Famously, I think he told his wife that he was going off for a little local skirmish.
[Kasdan.]
The fact that Stevens had that wish is an indication of his courage and his commitment to the cause, which he thought was worth risking family, friends, career, life.
When the five filmmakers got to Washington D.
C.
, they were thought of as mythmakers.
They were making Hollywood movies.
They were making stuff up.
This was the real world, folks.
This was the real war.
And now we've got these Hollywood guys coming to tell us how to acquit the war, or suggesting how they can make a contribution to the war effort? Well, how dare they? [Paul Greengrass.]
The relationship between the US government and Hollywood was entirely unclear.
[Lawrence Kasdan.]
No one had done this before.
There had never been a situation where you could take Hollywood professionals and use them to help sell the war to the American people, and to help win the war by building morale.
And so, they were really trying to figure out: "What should those movies be?" [Guillermo del Toro.]
The idea of propaganda filmmaking is to propagate, to disseminate ideas.
Each of the five men that we're talking about goes at it differently.
You have John Ford, who approaches it on a mythical, epic scale.
You have John Huston going at it almost like an adventure.
Wyler and Stevens approach it from an incredibly human point of view.
And their experiences are different from Capra, who approaches it very much as a concept problem-solving point of view.
When the immensity of World War II comes in, he is given to a single sentiment: Why we fight.
[man.]
From millions of feet of film confiscated from the enemy or donated by American film companies, these men are preparing pictures to set the war record straight and to counteract enemy propaganda.
[second male voiceover.]
Scream you're abused, shout you're oppressed.
The world's wrong, you're right.
If you speak it loud enough and often enough, they believe you.
[del Toro.]
One of the most brilliant ideas is for him to use iconic, simple, super clear animation, created by Disney, for everyone to read and see and understand.
[narrator.]
In the summer of 1942, the British Army was fighting to maintain its position against the Nazis in North Africa.
[man.]
The British Army of the Nile digs in after its withdrawal from Libya.
[narrator.]
And the US launched its first military offensive against the Japanese with a surprise invasion of Guadalcanal.
[man.]
Off the hostile shore, American warships bombard the Japanese position.
The attack takes the Japs by surprise, and this wave of leathernecks encounters little resistance, swarming ashore.
[explosions.]
Official pictures made by the United States Marine Corps.
[narrator.]
In September, John Huston's last film before reporting for duty was released.
You probably don't share my enthusiasm for the Japanese.
I don't know.
I never thought much about them.
[Francis Ford Coppola.]
Across the Pacific is a kind of early propaganda Hollywood film against the new enemies we were going to be facing.
You guys have been looking for a war, haven't you? That's right, Rick.
That's why we're starting it.
You might start it, Joe, but we'll finish it.
[narrator.]
While shooting Across the Pacific, Huston lost track of his enlistment papers and suddenly realized he was due to report immediately to Washington.
He was forced to let another director finish the film.
[Coppola.]
He was married and having a bunch of affairs, and that whole mess in his mind is partly what made him escape to the Army and join the Army.
[narrator.]
The Army didn't trust Huston.
A report called him "Capable and intelligent, but also self-centered, with an odd personality.
" [John Huston.]
They put me behind a desk, and it was ghastly, it was terrible.
What I wanted, you know, I wanted to be out with a camera in the field.
[narrator.]
Finally, he received his first assignment, on a battlefront as out of the way as could be imagined.
[Coppola.]
Eventually, he was sent to this Aleutian outpost near the Bering Strait, which was the Japanese's closest point to us.
But it was a place where absolutely nothing was happening at all, and he was just there with these men, day after day after day, just living to get a letter from home or, you know, playing cards, and occasionally, some bombers would come over, and they would refuel them, and they would go off.
Well, I wasn't at all self-conscious about it.
It seemed to me that making a documentary was It wouldn't be any different than making any other film.
I suppose it was a somewhat different approach, in that in the documentary, I allowed material to reveal itself.
And slowly, the shape of the thing appeared.
[Coppola.]
He had that great asset as a filmmaker, as he could always write a fantastic narration, and he could record it, too.
[man.]
Bookkeepers, grocery clerks, college men and dirt farmers.
That is, of course, ex-dirt farmers, ex-bookkeepers, ex-college men.
Soldiers now, as though all their lives they'd been nothing but.
[narrator.]
Despite the monotony at the base, Huston came face to face with the terror of war.
On an aerial bombing run, he saw a gunner shot dead in front of him.
By the way, it was to be a propaganda film.
And I'm afraid there are elements of that that show in Report from the Aleutians.
[muffled voice on radio.]
[Huston.]
There was a little bit of the hurrah in it, where we were cheering our own boys on, as it were.
[man.]
Our bombs found the target.
[Huston.]
There were planes lost on that mission, but the War Department wanted it to be a completely successful mission.
[airplane hums.]
[man.]
Nine bombers came out, and nine are going home.
Audiences were very used to a sterilized Hollywood war.
Listen, Dale, this is your first time up.
Don't try to win this war all by yourself.
[Spielberg.]
You know, with John Wayne, and where the war is secondary to the heroes who were fighting it.
And so, we see bloodless combat, and it's exciting, but it is nothing like the real thing.
Look, Captain Jim! Lookie! Wham, wham! Termites.
[Spielberg.]
Hollywood made a lot of movies about the war.
Air Force, The Fighting Seabees.
They were basically made to get people to get out of their seats and write a check.
[uplifting music.]
[man.]
Calling all Americans.
Calling all Americans to buy war bonds and stamps.
The motion picture industry mobilizing America's 100 million moviegoers into a regular bond- and stamp-buying army.
The esprit de corps, after Pearl Harbor, of wanting to be part of this and wanting to be an American, not a movie star [man.]
James Stewart, winner of top film honors for 1940, volunteers for his greatest role: buck private in Uncle Sam's Army.
[Spielberg.]
is something that we forget.
We forget the fact that Clark Gable and Jimmy Stewart and many actors, they flew missions.
[narrator.]
In the heart of Hollywood Bette Davis spearheaded the opening of a popular nightclub for enlisted men.
[women sing.]
Manhattanites can brag of lights And Boston has its bean But on the coast we proudly boast About the Hollywood Canteen GI Joe [narrator.]
John Ford's wife, Mary, often helped out at the Canteen while her husband was away.
[women.]
From every camp For miles they tramp To the Hollywood Canteen [narrator.]
Although the Armed Forces were still segregated, the Hollywood Canteen welcomed servicemen of all races, a rarity at the time.
Shortly after Pearl Harbor, a poll revealed that half the residents of Harlem believed they would be no worse off if Japan won the war.
Their morale became a subject of great concern for the War Department.
[del Toro.]
Capra wanted to prove that this was not just a white man's war, that all Americans needed to be involved.
[narrator.]
Capra proposed what he called a "Negro War Effort" film.
William Wyler, eager for his first assignment, signed on enthusiastically.
And they knew very early on that, used in the right way, a film could influence just scores of Americans.
Wyler recruited an African-American playwright named Carlton Moss to write the film, and the two men embarked on a research tour of Southern military bases.
[narrator.]
Wyler was appalled, both by the way Moss was treated and by the racism that the black servicemen he met routinely faced.
In Georgia, a group of black soldiers told him of living in fear of attacks from nearby townspeople and the Ku Klux Klan.
Wyler received guidelines, not from Capra, but from the War Department directly, about how to depict African-American soldiers, including: "Play down officers most Negroid in appearance.
Omit all references to Lincoln, race leaders or friends of the Negro.
" [Spielberg.]
Wyler wanted no part in making a film that would perpetuate this kind of racism.
When he got to Washington, he told Capra he was out.
[narrator.]
At a party in the capital Wyler met the Commander of the Army Air Forces and asked for a filmmaking assignment.
He was made a major the next day and sent to England.
In London, tensions between the two Allies were running high.
The British were frustrated that the American effort had been focused on the Pacific front, and not on helping them in Europe and Africa.
When Wyler arrived in London he ended up in the same hotel as John Ford.
Wyler was struggling to navigate Army bureaucracy to get equipment and crew, and was being ignored.
He saw the ease with which Ford was able to get what he wanted and approached him for help.
[Greengrass.]
Ford didn't help Wyler in London when they were in London during the war.
Really, he should have done.
That was the petty side of Ford.
For a great man, he did have his petty side.
[narrator.]
Ford had been sent to England on his first assignment after Midway to prepare to film the Allied invasion of North Africa.
It would be the first cross-Atlantic military operation of American troops in the war.
[Greengrass.]
Bear in mind, that was very important for Britain.
Here we were, you know, a small island, we'd been pinned back.
We'd fought on our own for a long time.
[narrator.]
The Americans and the British each had filmmaking units working independently.
Ford arrived in Algiers with a crew of Navy filmmakers.
But once on the ground, he learned he was no longer in charge.
Darryl Zanuck, his old boss at Fox, was now Colonel Darryl Zanuck, his commanding officer, and was overseeing the entire American filmmaking effort in Africa.
Ford's relationship with Zanuck was love-hate, hate-hate [chuckles.]
love-love.
[narrator.]
When Ford was among fighting men, he just tried to blend in.
In the field, he wanted no special treatment.
But Zanuck had his own car, his own entourage, his own rules.
His short stature and autocratic manner had soldiers derisively referring to him as "the littlest colonel.
" Ford couldn't wait to get away from Zanuck's control.
[narrator.]
Ford and his men moved as quickly as they could toward the front lines and away from Zanuck.
In Tunisia, they found themselves in the middle of a firefight taking cover from German tanks and dive bombers.
[explosions.]
When Zanuck finally caught up, he insisted on pulling Ford and his troops back, away from danger.
As the Allies dug in, meeting heavy resistance from Axis forces in Tunisia, Ford and his men had to turn over all their footage to Zanuck.
But Ford was skeptical about Zanuck's ability to make a compelling war documentary.
In Hollywood, Capra was securing more studio space for his expanding program of war films.
[Frank Capra.]
We had installed ourselves at Western Avenue.
But we couldn't get any furniture.
So we stole it.
I went to Columbia Studio to steal a table.
George Stevens was just coming out of the stage.
He comes by, and I'm in uniform, and he sees me, and he comes over and says, "How about me coming in with you?" And I said, "You just come right over to Western Avenue, and you'll be in the Army.
" The last film that I did, in 1942, before I went into the Army, was a comedy called The More, the Merrier.
[Kasdan.]
Stevens, who was very good at a lot of light entertainment [silence.]
felt that the war was something substantial that he could get involved in.
[narrator.]
Stevens told his boss at Columbia, Harry Cohn, that as soon as he finished editing The More The Merrier, he was joining up.
Cohn warned him not to go, telling him he risked losing his place among Hollywood's top directors.
- Here are the keys.
- Where are you going? Back to California? No.
Africa.
You know, I'd gone so far with this business of films, and so I just retired.
I had a deal with the Army to go right to Africa, where the war was.
I had no certainty that I was gonna pick up again.
Everybody said, "If you do, you'll be out of it for three years or longer.
But that might be it, as far as filmmaking is concerned, if you're lucky enough not to get hurt badly.
" [narrator.]
Leaving his wife and ten-year-old son was the hardest thing for him.
He shipped out with only his camera, a small crew and vague orders.
From Washington, Stevens, now a major, flew to Miami, then to British Guyana, then to Brazil, then to Nigeria.
He ended up on an Army puddle-jumper bound for Cairo.
[Kasdan.]
I believe that, of these five directors, Stevens' experience in the war was the most intense, the most life-changing and, in some ways, the most impactful for history.
His route to get there was incredibly circuitous, difficult.
And Stevens suffered from asthma.
He was sometimes laid up.
He couldn't even move.
So, he had struggled to get over here.
Physically, he's suffering.
[narrator.]
In Egypt, Stevens sat with hundreds of GI's as they watched a two-year-old Betty Grable movie.
He saw the power of film, even a lowbrow genre picture, to bring people home and stir emotions as he never had before.
He kept moving, through Tripoli and Benghazi, getting closer to the front.
Finally, he reached Algiers, ready to become a war filmmaker at last.
When he stepped off the plane, he learned that there was no war to film.
Hitler's army had been badly beaten and was one day from surrendering.
The campaign was over.
He was too late.
That day, his diary entry was just three words: "This damn war.
" [uplifting music.]
[newscaster.]
Tunis: Capital of Tunisia.
Last great milestone in the Allied liberation of North Africa.
Thousands upon thousands of Italian and German troops lay down their arms and surrender.
The battle of North Africa, which has cost the Axis some 400,000 men in dead, wounded and prisoners, is over.
The victory is won, and now the victorious Allied leaders look eagerly across the Mediterranean to the shores of Hitler's fortress Europe.
[narrator.]
As Frank Capra continued to work on the Why We Fight films, his ambitions were growing.
Capra's first installment had been an instant hit with the new Army recruits it was made for.
The success of Prelude to War internally is so great that Capra wants the film to be shown, to reach the masses.
[narrator.]
Capra needed approval from Lowell Mellett, who was appointed by Roosevelt to oversee the Hollywood war filmmaking effort.
But Mellett strongly opposed showing Prelude to War to the general public.
[Capra.]
Yes, that was Mr.
Mellett.
He thought, "It's too gruesome.
The American people should not see this picture.
They'll hate the Germans from there on.
Then we never can be friends again.
" [interviewer.]
Did you want people to hate? [Capra.]
No [laughs.]
I did not want people to hate, I wanted to knock off people that hated.
I wanted to stop that hatred.
And you couldn't stop that hatred unless you stopped it.
And you weren't gonna stop it with candy bars.
[narrator.]
That year, the Motion Picture Academy announced the debut of a new category: Best Documentary Feature.
Capra went around Mellett and secretly screened Prelude to War for Academy members, qualifying it for the Oscars.
Look, if you can survive the politics of Hollywood, you can basically survive any political arena.
[narrator.]
Spurred on by the enormous success of The Battle of Midway in theaters, Ford screened his own film for the Academy's president and suggested that he expand the new category.
Ford wanted the Oscars and personally lobbied to get it.
[del Toro.]
Capra has this competition with Ford, in a way, and I think the competition was seen by Capra with Ford being a quintessential American filmmaker, and him being the little guy that needs to prove his worth with less resources, less time.
[Greengrass.]
Ford was very interested in glory, very competitive with his peers, you know, Capra, Wyler, and all the other guys.
Well, I mean, he was a glory hound, was Ford.
I mean, he used to make a tremendous song and dance about not going to the Oscars and, you know, "Oh, directing is just a job of work, and I have no interest in it.
" I never cared that much.
It's just a job of work.
Like the man digging the ditch.
Well, that's all, you know, to use his phrase, a crock of shit.
[uplifting music.]
[man.]
Once a year, Hollywood honors its brightest stars.
Tonight, they also salute the 27,000 men of the cinema industry now serving in the Armed Forces.
I'm very happy to be here, ladies and gentlemen, once again on the stand.
[laughter.]
So close, and yet so far.
[laughter.]
[narrator.]
Twenty-five documentaries were nominated, and four took home Oscars.
Both Battle of Midway and Prelude to War were winners.
At the ceremony, Mellett gave a speech to reassure the studios that the government would not try to insert propaganda into their movies.
This government is engaged in a war to save and perpetuate democracy, not in a war to destroy it.
So, the government is not going into the motion picture business.
[applause.]
[narrator.]
After Prelude to War won, Mellett gave in to pressure to release Capra's film publicly.
It was a box office flop.
Audiences were now hungry for the latest images from the front, not a film detailing the history leading up to the war.
[dramatic music.]
[Henry Gladstone.]
US forces make a smashing surprise attack on Jap-held Attu Island.
[narrator.]
In May, 1943, Allied forces recaptured the last of the Japanese bases in the Aleutians.
[Gladstone.]
Except for occasional snipers, the Japs offer no formal resistance to the establishing of beachheads.
Bombing raids almost daily from nearby US bases have done their job.
[narrator.]
The victory brought renewed focus from the Army on Huston's just-completed Report from the Aleutians.
Huston's cut of the film was over 40 minutes, more than twice the length Lowell Mellett wanted.
[Coppola.]
These were filmmakers who wanted to do a piece of work, and the Army wanted a short, twenty-minute film that they could show before the cartoon and the coming attractions.
There was always going to be a struggle between the administrators and directors of this level, pouring their hearts into the work.
[narrator.]
After being stymied by Mellett, Huston decided to go directly to the press in New York.
When newspapers began running stories about the government withholding Huston's film, the Army was left with no choice but to release it at full length.
They used the same tactics to get what they felt was best for the picture with the military and their representatives that they had been using with the studio bosses.
[narrator.]
But Mellett had been right.
The long running time meant Report from the Aleutians couldn't play before Hollywood features.
Released as a main attraction, it failed to interest audiences.
[newscaster.]
From North Africa, former Hollywood producer, Colonel Darryl Zanuck, has brought an official film record of frontline action.
[narrator.]
Zanuck's film about the North African campaign was finally released in theaters to withering reviews.
[man.]
Needlework.
[narrator.]
Zanuck had turned it into a blatant exercise in self-promotion, even releasing a book about his experience.
His behavior caused many in Congress to question the use of Hollywood talent in the war filmmaking effort.
The Americans out there were not prepared, and they didn't have the material.
[narrator.]
By contrast, when the British documentary about the North African Campaign, Desert Victory, opened in the US, audiences and critics were astonished.
The British were pretty sophisticated at understanding the role of cinema in building morale and propaganda.
[narrator.]
Desert Victory not only made the American filmmaking effort in the war seem amateurish by comparison, it also created the impression that the British were winning the war in Africa single-handedly.
[Kasdan.]
You have not only talented Hollywood movie directors who didn't really know what they were doing in this case, and you have military leaders who had never made films, and you have political people who are funding all this, and they're not sure what's the best way to help the war effort.
So, you have a lot of people who don't really know exactly what to do.
[narrator.]
The War Department felt that Desert Victory could not go unanswered.
So the Army turned to Capra to make another film about North Africa, to be called Tunisian Victory.
Faced with making a compelling film without any good footage to work with, Capra decided to simply restage it.
[Kasdan.]
There was a lot of manipulation of these films, because events didn't allow them to shoot what they wanted.
So, they would go back and dramatize it.
[narrator.]
Stevens was still in Algiers when he received orders to take a crew, drive tanks through villages that had already been liberated, and shell them again, this time for the cameras.
[Kasdan.]
When Stevens is asked to do what he thinks is inherently dishonest, he doesn't rebel.
He does the work that he's supposed to do.
But I think it impacted everything else that happened to him in the rest of the war.
[narrator.]
Capra then turned to Huston, sending him to shoot staged aerial combat in the Mojave Desert and Orlando, Florida.
Huston followed Capra's orders, but he knew the recreations were unconvincing.
Huston thought it was terrible.
He was beside himself.
[narrator.]
In England a sequel to Desert Victory was already underway.
So, the Army sent Capra and Huston to London with orders to convince the British to join them, combining all their footage into one joint production.
[Coppola.]
But then, when they saw some of the work of the British film units this was real filmmaking.
[narrator.]
Huston grew disheartened with what his war service was becoming.
He felt he'd been part of a plot to take a strong British film and destroy it.
This was Capra's first and only major wartime assignment outside of the United States.
One night, the air raid sirens sounded, and he and Huston had to evacuate their rooms.
That night, Capra wrote, "The war lost its glamour for me.
Old ladies and children cower in the hallways.
I was scared, but I was more sick at the thought of them being mangled.
How far has man gone mad?" After several months of tense negotiations and reediting, Capra convinced the British Army film unit to approve a joint film emphasizing Allied cooperation.
[man.]
On both sides of the Atlantic, the effort was tremendous.
Guns, trucks, aircraft, petrol, water, food, barbed wire, locomotives.
But ammunition alone was shipped 520 different times.
[narrator.]
By the time Tunisian Victory was released theatrically, the film had been condemned in a harsh internal Army report that accused it of attempting to reenact the war on a Hollywood scale.
It was another box office flop.
In England, Wyler felt hopelessly stalled.
Then Mrs.
Miniver opened in London.
It was a moment Wyler had been dreading since he got there.
[Spielberg.]
When he got to England, he saw really what was happening.
He thought he had been too soft in his own movie, Mrs.
Miniver.
It has just been announced over the air by the Prime Minister that our country is at war.
[narrator.]
But British audiences loved it.
Suddenly, Wyler was a celebrity in London, and within the Army.
He was finally able to get the assignment he'd been longing for.
He'd make a film about the crew of a bomber flying its 25th mission, a milestone after which they could go home.
[man.]
This is the crew of the Memphis Belle.
324th Squadron, 91st Heavy Bombardment Group.
[narrator.]
Wyler was urged by colleagues to fake it using miniatures, but he refused.
He took flight training courses to be able to film on the actual bombing missions over Germany.
[man.]
The Group Commander, Colonel Stanley Wray, steps up to the target map, and, for the first time, you learn where you're going.
Sometimes your face turns white when you find out.
Sometimes the feeling you won't come back tightens your insides.
The job is to bomb Wilhelmshaven, effectively and economically.
The enemy is strong, skillful, determined to stop us.
[narrator.]
One day, a reporter for the Army magazine Stars and Stripes arrived to photograph Wyler.
When he asked why, the reporter told him that he'd won an Academy Award.
"Well, I'll be damned," said Wyler.
[applause.]
[commentator.]
Irish-born Greer Garson wins the award for her unforgettable Mrs.
Miniver.
[narrator.]
Mrs.
Miniver won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Wyler's first award for Best Director.
Wyler's wife Talli accepted on his behalf from Frank Capra.
Thanks so much, everybody.
It makes me very happy to accept the award for Willy.
I wish he could be here.
He's wanted an Oscar for a long time, and I know it would thrill him an awful lot to be here, probably as much as that flight over Wilhelmshaven did.
[Spielberg.]
The fact that he wouldn't allow himself to be misled into stylizing the war, I think when Wyler got overseas, and he got up in a B-17, and he started doing sorties with that crew, I think he was dedicated to not sparing us anything.
[man.]
The wheels of the Memphis Belle leave the soil of England for the 25th time.
The friendly soil of England, with its ordered farms and rural hamlets, its country estates surrounded by formal gardens and well-kept parks, the England these Americans knew only from the classics they had to read in school.
Higher and higher, climbing to reach your best operational altitude: Twenty-five thousand feet, five miles straight up.
So high you can't be seen from the ground with the naked eye.
So high that after one minute without oxygen, you lose consciousness.
After 20 minutes, you're dead.
[Spielberg.]
He went on these missions to show what the air war was like and to show how young these kids were that went up in these tuna fish cans, where there was no air and it was freezing cold.
[man.]
You look out at the strange world beyond, reflections in Plexiglas, like nothing you ever saw before outside of a dream.
[Spielberg.]
And there was monotony and terror, and then terror and monotony, you know, so interchangeable, during any aspect of war.
[man.]
Morgan changes course every 15 seconds.
Evasive action to confuse the flak batteries.
Bomb sites set for correct altitude and speed, bomb bay doors open, crosshairs lined up on target, adjustments for wind drift made.
[gunfire.]
Two more fighters diving from nine o'clock.
They've hit this sport, but he keeps on his bombing run.
[explosion.]
Bombs away.
If the plane was knocked out and Willy parachuted to safety, why, he wouldn't be accorded the same treatment as other flyers.
[Spielberg.]
They were afraid of Wyler being shot down over Germany.
He would not be treated as a P.
O.
W.
As a Jew, his fate would be sealed.
[man.]
The first half of the mission is over.
The easy half.
Now to get home.
Fighters at six o'clock.
This is what a gunner sees: a speck in the sky.
That's a fighter.
And then a blink.
That means he's firing at you, 2,300 rounds a minute.
[pilot 1.]
Check that B-17, Chuck.
Three o'clock.
- [pilot 2.]
Motor's smoking.
- [pilot 1.]
Fire at 10-30.
[Spielberg.]
You know, what really strikes me in that film, in Memphis Belle, is showing other B-17s being shot down, and in particular, that one 17 that was making that slow spiral down from the sky [pilot 1.]
B-17 out of control at three o'clock.
[gunfire.]
[pilot 2.]
Come on, you guys, get out of that plane.
Bail out.
[pilot 3.]
There's one.
He come out of the bomb bay.
[pilot 1.]
I see him.
[pilot 2.]
There's the tail gunner coming out.
[Spielberg.]
where they were counting how many parachutes were opening, how many of the crew got out, how many of those ten survived.
That's one of the most stunning things I've ever seen.
[pilot 2.]
Eight men still in that B-17.
Come on, the rest of you guys.
Get out of there.
[narrator.]
During a mission, one of Wyler's cameramen, Harold Tannenbaum, was killed, when the B-17 he was filming in was shot down.
[uplifting music.]
[newscaster.]
Somewhere in England, the crew of a battle-scarred American flying fortress, the Memphis Belle, departs for home.
Flying with a new wing and a patched-up tail, the Memphis Belle arrives in Washington right on schedule.
[Spielberg.]
On the 25th mission, the Memphis Belle crew rotated out of combat, and they went back to America.
And then Wyler recorded all of their voices.
[crewmember 1.]
There's four of them.
One o'clock high.
[crewmember 2.]
They're coming around.
Watch it.
[crewmember 1.]
Two at six o'clock coming and diving at you.
[crewmember 3.]
Trouble at two o'clock.
Watch it.
[crewmember 4.]
It has an engine on fire.
[explosion.]
[narrator.]
The War Department worried that the movie was too realistic.
Some were offended by its rough language.
[crewmember 1.]
I'm on him.
Come on, you son of a bitch.
[narrator.]
Others complained that showing fighters taking evasive action made them look scared.
But Wyler fought them all the way up the chain of command, and won.
He just wanted everything to reflect his experience and the experience of those young men that he got to know and love so much.
And then, when the audiences saw Memphis Belle, it meant so much to America.
[narrator.]
Memphis Belle was a huge success with audiences and critics, becoming the first movie in history to be reviewed on the front page of The New York Times.
[man.]
As General Eaker read the order for what he called their 26th and most important mission: return to America to train new crews and to tell the people what we're doing here, to thank them for their help and support and tell them to keep it up so we can keep it up.
[narrator.]
Wyler was an American filmmaking hero again.
But he almost missed the opening of his own movie.
In Washington, he was leaving a hotel when he heard a doorman call a taxi passenger a "goddamn Jew.
" Wyler punched him in the face.
The next day, he was arrested and charged with conduct unbecoming of an officer.
Wyler explained that the doorman's language was why he joined the war effort in the first place.
The Army told him he could take a reprimand or face a court-martial.
Reluctantly, he took the reprimand.
Despite the box office failures of Prelude to War and Tunisian Victory, Capra's reputation within the Army continued to grow.
He was now working closely with director Anatole Litvak on the fifth and greatest of the Why We Fight films: The Battle of Russia.
While Capra and Litvak worked on the film, the Red Army started pushing back the Nazis at Stalingrad, in one of the costliest battles of the war.
[man.]
For the first time since the mighty German Army started its career of blitz, smashing into submission one European country after the other, that same German Army came up against a country that did not submit.
[narrator.]
Though it had been made as a training film, The Battle of Russia was so well-regarded that Capra received permission to release it theatrically.
One reviewer called it "the best and most important war film ever assembled in this country.
" Capra was also turning out biweekly newsreels, shorts and training films for troops at the front.
[man.]
Screen magazines showing the soldier what's happening on the home front.
GI movies made strictly for his entertainment.
[del Toro.]
In the entire canon of the war films that are done under Capra, one of the most fascinating things that is created is Private Snafu.
I just learned a secret, it's a honey, it's a pip.
But the enemy is listening, so I'll never let it slip.
It was first and foremost an entertainment tool, but it also drove home, in a very underhanded way, with humor, the vital principles of soldiering and living through the war.
And Capra creates salacious, funny, raunchy, incredibly accessible cartoons that really connected and resonated with the average soldier.
[screams.]
[man.]
SNAFU: Situation Normal, All All Fouled Up.
[narrator.]
Because the cartoons were intended only for troops, Capra was able to include crude, racy material that would never have made it past Hollywood censors.
[man.]
It's so cold, it would freeze the nuts off a Jeep.
[narrator.]
Capra recruited an all-star team of writers, animators and voice actors.
To work on scripts for the shorts, he enlisted an editorial cartoonist named Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr.
Seuss.
[del Toro.]
For the final animation, the competition was between Disney and Warner Bros.
for the job.
Capra goes to the more populist, street-level humor of Warner Bros.
Eh, what's up, doc? [del Toro.]
And he gets Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng, voiced by Mel Blanc.
Stick 'em up, or I'll blow your brains out! [German accent.]
Ah, what a rifle! Comrade! [narrator.]
There was a notable difference in the way Germans were depicted in Hollywood and in propaganda films, and in the way the Japanese were depicted.
Snafu, bingo-bango! [exaggerated Japanese accent.]
Calling Tokyo! Help! [del Toro.]
Even the German portrayal is somewhat human.
The enemy is Hitler, not the German race per se.
But Japan, as a whole, is viewed as a colony of ants, equally pernicious, one or the other.
The Japanese were often referred to as rats or monkeys and caricatured with buckteeth and bad vision.
In 1942, under the authorization of FDR, the US government ordered over 100,000 Japanese-Americans to report for relocation to internment camps.
[man.]
We knew that some among them were potentially dangerous.
Most were loyal.
But no one knew what would happen among this concentrated population if Japanese forces should try to invade our shores.
Military authorities therefore determined that all of them, citizens and aliens alike, would have to move.
[narrator.]
The government was planning to eventually relocate these interned Japanese-Americans to small towns throughout the country.
But the War Department was concerned that if the Japanese were consistently depicted as inhuman monsters, no town would accept them.
[del Toro.]
And that prompted Mellett to very, very pointedly say, "I am not only concerned with these films helping us survive the war.
I'm really concerned with us being able to survive as a democracy because of how incredibly polarizing some of these notions are becoming.
" [narrator.]
John Ford found himself unexpectedly confronting this issue head-on.
[Greengrass.]
I think he then faced a real challenge, actually, which was a challenge I don't think he'd foreseen.
And the challenge was this: if you've organized the production, which is effectively what he'd done by setting up Field Photo, you've almost inevitably become a producer, not a director.
And this came home to him very, very clearly when he went off to see Toland's movie about Pearl Harbor.
[narrator.]
Immediately after Pearl Harbor, Ford had been sent to Hawaii to supervise the production of a film about the rebuilding of the Pacific fleet.
Ford assigned the project to Gregg Toland, his cinematographer on The Grapes of Wrath.
Toland was one of the most sought-after cinematographers in Hollywood, a status he cemented with his work on Citizen Kane two years earlier.
[Greengrass.]
Ford knew that Toland wanted to direct, and I think he believed that he could, and he went out of his way to make it possible.
Well, of course, when Ford got out there some months later, what he found was that, far from Toland making, effectively, a small documentary film about what had happened and the aftermath and the destruction and the rebuilding and all the rest of it, what Toland was actually doing was making a full-on movie.
[narrator.]
Toland's feature-length film made extensive use of recreations and miniatures.
He had cast Walter Huston as Uncle Sam, and angrily indicted the United States as a sleeping giant that had failed to see Pearl Harbor coming.
The film also was full of the anti-Japanese racism that Lowell Mellett was working to avoid.
Toland exploited that, made that a big part of it, the sort of racial stereotyping.
Watch out, US.
Someday, one of these "incompetent, stupid little children of the Orient" will choose you, and when they get ready to square off, they won't worry about offending you.
They'll pick their time and their method, and they'll come over here and blow that bastion of military might behind which you sleep so easily into smithereens.
[narrator.]
The War Department was furious at Toland, and at Ford.
It had happened on his watch.
They told him to fix it.
[Greengrass.]
Ford realized that, in a time of war, what the American public wanted was to understand and have unmediated their sense of reality of this conflict.
And what that film had done was to try and create this kind of Hollywood semi-fictional mishmash, and it didn't play.
And what Ford did was what he did with his scripts.
Ford was famous for taking a script, you know, and just gutting it, filleting it, taking out the flam, the flim, and getting to the core of it, the essence of it.
And that's what he did: cut it in half and made it truthful.
[man.]
2,343 officers and enlisted men of our Army, Navy and Marine Corps gave their young lives in the service of our country.
[narrator.]
In a section Ford shaped to honor the fallen soldiers of the attack, he chose to spotlight a diverse selection of men.
[Tafoya.]
I am Antonio S.
Tafoya, United States Army.
My father and mother are Mr.
and Mrs.
Jesús A.
Tafoya.
[interviewer.]
How does it happen that all of you sound and talk alike? [serviceman.]
We are all alike.
We're all Americans.
[narrator.]
Ford salvaged the film, recutting as the half-hour documentary about the rebuilding of the fleet that was originally intended.
But Field Photo was placed under much heavier scrutiny, and Ford was unsure if he'd be sent on another assignment.
[del Toro.]
You know, Capra never gave up on projects, and one of the projects that he felt was urgent to not give up on was the film The Negro Soldier.
[narrator.]
After Wyler walked away from The Negro Soldier, Capra had reassigned the project to a different director, but kept its original writer, Carlton Moss.
[del Toro.]
As they go along, I think Moss becomes the backbone of the project.
He brings not only a perspective that is needed, but also a commitment to the subject, defending what he thinks is important for the film to embody.
[narrator.]
When The Negro Soldier was first shown, there was great concern in the black community that it would be nothing more than a reinforcement of the stereotypes and clichés that were pervasive in Hollywood films of the time.
Moss addressed the audience directly, casting himself as the preacher who serves as the film's primary narrator.
The gospel according to Hitler.
I'm not going to read all of this, but there are one or two things in this book that will interest you.
I quote: "From time to time, the illustrated papers show how a Negro has become a lawyer, a teacher, perhaps even a minister.
It never dawns on the degenerate, middle-class America that this is truly a sin against all reason, that it is criminal madness to train a born half-ape until one believes one has made a lawyer of him.
" This book was written 20 years ago.
The plan which it foreshadowed has become a reality.
[narrator.]
Audiences saw a portrait of black America that no mainstream movie had ever attempted.
The film was given a wide theatrical release in both black and white markets.
The writer and poet Langston Hughes praised the film, calling it "distinctly and thrillingly worthwhile.
" Because of Moss' conviction and Capra's insistence, the film becomes one of the most successful American propaganda films, not only gaining good reviews, but being praised as a worthy and powerful film.
[narrator.]
In the Pacific, the Allies continued to push their offensive towards Japan.
[man.]
The most difficult, the most dangerous of all military operations achieved.
Victory at Tarawa stands as a dramatic symbol of the growing offensive power of the United nations in the Pacific.
[narrator.]
An official War Department short documentary about the taking of Tarawa marked a turning point for the American filmmaking effort.
[gunfire.]
Made with on-the-ground footage shot during the battle, it was also the first American war film to show the bodies of dead US soldiers.
[man.]
These are Marine dead.
This is the price we have to pay for a war we didn't want.
[mournful music.]
[narrator.]
Capra wanted to make a film that was as vivid and realistic about the war in Europe.
Something that would show home front audiences that the course of the war was changing.
In September, 1943, the Allies began an invasion of Europe, landing in southern Italy.
[man.]
Allied troops entering a town just taken from the Nazis are alert for lurking snipers.
[gunfire.]
[Coppola.]
Capra wanted to show an Italian town being liberated and the people coming out and welcoming the soldiers.
[narrator.]
Eager to move on from their work in London, Capra assigned the project to John Huston.
From England, I was sent to Italy.
We got to the threshold of Liri Valley, which was defended by a little town, San Pietro.
Rain had just fallen, and everything looking very bright, and the sun had come out after the rain.
[sighs.]
It was It was quite a day.
There were numbers of dead.
Men dead behind their machine guns.
[Coppola.]
The town they were going to do this, San Pietro, had been bombed to hell.
There was hardly anything left.
The people were hiding.
They were in caves and what have you.
[narrator.]
The battle had ended a few days before Huston's arrival.
[Coppola.]
So, Huston and his team decided to do this whole fake liberation of a town that was already a rubble.
[dramatic music.]
Fire.
[narrator.]
With the full resources of the US Army, including equipment and battle reports, at his disposal, Huston meticulously recreated the entire three-day siege.
[Coppola.]
Huston was extremely ingenious in the way he decided to simulate all of what it would be like if the footage was real.
Cameras getting knocked apart and going out of focus and using all that stuff.
The way he would shake the camera and the way he would have even instruct the soldiers, as they walk into the assembly, to kind of glance at the guy shooting, the camera.
In other words, in staged material, you might think a movie director would say, "Okay, just go in.
Don't look at the camera.
" But Huston was so smart, he knew that in a real combat situation, the young guys would look at the cameraman who was sitting there.
So, he had them do it.
[man.]
To break the deadlock, orders were given for a coordinated divisional attack.
[explosions.]
[gunfire.]
[Huston.]
It had largely to do with the 36th Texas Infantry Division.
They're a wonderful outfit.
We were attached to them.
It was the story of that regiment in the operation.
[man.]
Our initial assault on San Pietro had been repulsed, with heavy casualties.
[narrator.]
Though the battle scenes had been staged, the footage of slain soldiers that Huston had captured was real.
[Huston.]
I remember when it was being first shown.
This was in the Pentagon.
We were in a projection room.
The big brass was assembled, and I realized that it wasn't like any picture about combat or any military film they'd ever seen.
But I wasn't prepared for the for the shock with which they received it.
There were several generals in the room, and the highest-ranking general presently, in the middle of the picture, stood up and walked out.
Well, then, the next the next-ranking general walked out.
And finally, we got down to colonels.
And so they went, one after the other, until I was alone.
I thought, "What assholes.
" The Army didn't like the picture at all.
The reason was they thought it would demoralize troops, demoralize men who had never been in combat.
[Coppola.]
The generals had felt he had made an antiwar film, and, of course, his response was, "Well, if I ever make a pro-war film, I ought to be shot.
" [Huston.]
A couple of weeks, I guess, went past.
And then, by one of those fortunate accidents, General George C.
Marshall saw the film.
I suppose he'd heard enough bad things about it to elicit his interest.
His reaction was exactly the opposite of everyone else.
Marshall said that they were the very men who should see such a film, to prepare them for the experience of combat.
Well, the atmosphere changed overnight.
I was decorated, and I was made a major.
[Coppola.]
So, the result was that, when the film was opened, it got great reviews, and they were saying how compelling the combat footage was.
[Spielberg.]
I didn't know until years after I saw The Battle of San Pietro that John Huston had actually staged some of it.
I didn't realize that until much later.
When I saw it, I really believed that it was actual footage, and that some of it, especially the man that is shot to the right, the camera pans just in time to get him hitting the ground, I didn't know that was staged.
[interviewer.]
Did you feel that you and your men were in real danger at San Pietro? Oh, of course.
Of course.
It was under fire a good part of the time.
[Spielberg.]
I was disappointed when I found out that that had been staged.
But I also was very respectful of the impact that film had on audiences and had on me when I first saw it.
[Coppola.]
I myself am less critical of the fact that they were saying this stuff was real combat footage, and in fact it was staged.
The filmmaker, and a writer-filmmaker such as Huston was, is inside the thing he's creating.
So, whether or not it really is the Battle of San Pietro or it's the fiction of the Battle of San Pietro, in his mind, there may be little difference.
If you get the essence of the thing, it doesn't matter whether it was There could be a real document happening during some incredible war that has less to it than one of these reenactments, because cinema is magical.
I'd like to think that all war movies are antiwar movies.
I made Apocalypse Now, and I certainly don't think that's a pro-war movie.
This is for television! Don't look at the camera! Don't look at the camera! Just go by like you're fighting! Like you're fighting! [Coppola.]
But, on the other hand, when a film has the excitement of combat and the adventure connected with combat, it can't help but get those juices flowing in the audience.
So that, even though you may consider that you're making an antiwar film, it's not, really, because it tends to, if not glorify, at least enhance the sensation that makes people be able to participate in this kind of thing.
[newscaster.]
Inside Nazi-occupied Europe, the enemy waits grimly for the day of invasion, as, across the English Channel, Allied forces plan the great offensive that is sure to come.
Prime Minister Churchill and General Eisenhower, Allied Commander, see thousands of American paratroopers drop from the skies in a spectacular rehearsal for the day of invasion.
[Kasdan.]
Eisenhower decided this grand invasion, which had been planned for years, and which was the most top-secret operation of the war, should be covered by film.
[Capra.]
I got an elite group of cameramen, and they weren't newsreel men, they were Army cameramen, headed by George Stevens.
I think at the time that Stevens runs into Capra and says to him, "What can I do," he was quoted as saying in his diaries, "I wanted to be in the war.
It's very hard to get a 50-yard line seat to something like that.
" And the fact is that he got exactly that.
You can't get any more central to the operation than to cover D-Day.
[narrator.]
Ford received orders to go to London.
While Stevens was setting up the Army filmmaking effort, Ford was asked to supervise preparations for the Navy.
When they realized the scale of the operations, Stevens and Ford agreed to coordinate efforts.
Together, the two men prepared Army and Navy filmmaking teams for D-Day.
[Greengrass.]
It was the largest combined operation in history at that point.
Who better than John Ford to film D-Day? Famously, I think he told his wife that he was going off for a little local skirmish.
[Kasdan.]
The fact that Stevens had that wish is an indication of his courage and his commitment to the cause, which he thought was worth risking family, friends, career, life.