Five Came Back
A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
One of The Hollywood Reporter’s 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time
“One of the great works of film history of the decade.” —Slate
Now a Netflix original documentary series, also written by Mark Harris: the extraordinary wartime experience of five of Hollywood's most important directors, all of whom put their stamp on World War II and were changed by it forever
Here is the remarkable, untold story of how five major Hollywood directors—John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra—changed World War II, and how, in turn, the war changed them. In a move unheard of at the time, the U.S. government farmed out its war propaganda effort to Hollywood, allowing these directors the freedom to film in combat zones as never before. They were on the scene at almost every major moment of America’s war, shaping the public’s collective consciousness of what we’ve now come to call the good fight. The product of five years of scrupulous archival research, Five Came Back provides a revelatory new understanding of Hollywood’s role in the war through the life and work of these five men who chose to go, and who came back.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
American filmmakers undergo their baptism of fire in this insightful if sometimes chaotic war saga. Journalist Harris (Pictures at a Revolution) profiles five leading directors John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens who ditched stellar careers to join the military and craft propaganda, battle documentaries and training films. (Ford's first Navy assignment was an explicit primer on venereal disease.) Harris's story is often simply Hollywood on steroids: generals and political strictures replace studio moguls and the Hays code; location hardships include getting shot at; the blurring together of authenticity and fakery deepens (some of the most acclaimed and innovative combat "documentaries" were staged reenactments). The fog of war sometimes obscures the big picture here; even more than civilian making-of epics, the author's narrative of military movie production is a welter of confusion and misfires, turf struggles, budget constraints, and grand artistic impulses thwarted by philistine bureaucracies and petty happenstance. Still, Harris pens superb exegeses of the ideological currents coursing through this most political of cinematic eras, and in the arcs of his vividly drawn protagonists especially Stevens, whose camera took in the liberation of Paris and the horror of Dachau we see Hollywood abandoning sentimental make-believe to confront the starkest realities.
