Five Came Back
A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
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- $36.99
Publisher Description
NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES, featuring interviews with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Guillermo del Toro
Before the Second World War the Hollywood box office was booming, but the business was accused of being too foreign, too Jewish, too 'un-American'. Then the war changed everything. With Pearl Harbor came the opportunity for Hollywood to prove its critics wrong.
America's most legendary directors played a huge role in the war effort: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Between them they shaped the public perception of almost every major moment of the war. With characteristic insight and expert knowledge Harris tells the untold story of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II changed Hollywood.
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.
