Five Came Back

Harris Mark

Description

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES, featuring interviews with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Guillermo del ToroBefore 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.

Sujets

• Histoire
• USA
• World War II
• États-Unis

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 20 février 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781782112884
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ALSO BY MARK HARRIS
Scenes From A Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood

Published in Great Britain in 2014 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.tv
First published in the United States in 2014 by The Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC.
Copyright Mark Harris, 2014
Photograph credits appear here .
The moral right of the author has been asserted
This digital edition first published by Canongate Books in 2014
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 9781847678553
eISBN 9781782112884
For my brother
CONTENTS
Also by Mark Harris
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue: Pearl Harbor
PART ONE


1. The Only Way I Could Survive
HOLLYWOOD, MARCH 1938-APRIL 1939
2. The Dictates of My Heart and Blood
HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, APRIL 1939-MAY 1940
3. You Must Not Realize that There Is a War Going On
HOLLYWOOD, JUNE-SEPTEMBER 1940
4. What s the Good of a Message?
HOLLYWOOD, EARLY 1941
5. The Most Dangerous Fifth Column in Our Country
HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, JULY-DECEMBER 1941
PART TWO


6. Do I Have to Wait for Orders?
HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND HAWAII, DECEMBER 1941-APRIL 1942
7. I ve Only Got One German
HOLLYWOOD, DECEMBER 1941-APRIL 1942
8. It s Going to Be a Problem and a Battle
WASHINGTON, MARCH-JUNE 1942
9. All I Know Is That I m Not Courageous
MIDWAY AND WASHINGTON, JUNE-AUGUST 1942
10. Can You Use Me?
WASHINGTON AND HOLLYWOOD, AUGUST-SEPTEMBER 1942
11. A Good Partner to Have in Times of Trouble
ENGLAND, NORTH AFRICA, AND HOLLYWOOD, September 1942-January 1943
12. You Might as Well Run into It as Away from It
THE ALEUTIAN ISLANDS, HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, and North Africa, September 1942-May 1943
13. Just Enough to Make It Seem Less Than Real
ENGLAND, HOLLYWOOD, AND WASHINGTON, JANUARY-MAY 1943
14. Coming Along with Us Just for Pictures?
WASHINGTON, ENGLAND, AND NEW YORK, MARCH-JULY 1943
PART THREE


15. How to Live in the Army
NORTH AFRICA, HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA, AND WASHINGTON, SUMMER 1943
16. I m the Wrong Man for That Stuff
WASHINGTON, HOLLYWOOD, AND ENGLAND, JUNE-DECEMBER 1943
17. I Have to Do a Good Job
ENGLAND AND ITALY, OCTOBER 1943-JANUARY 1944
18. We Really Don t Know What Goes On Beneath the Surface
WASHINGTON, THE CHINA-BURMA-INDIA THEATER, ITALY, and New York, September 1943-March 1944
19. If You Believe This, We Thank You
HOLLYWOOD AND ENGLAND, MARCH-MAY 1944
20. A Sporadic Raid of Sorts on the Continent
HOLLYWOOD, WASHINGTON, AND NEW YORK, MARCH-MAY 1944
21. If You See It, Shoot It
FRANCE, JUNE-JULY 1944
22. If Hitler Can Hold Out, So Can I
HOLLYWOOD AND WASHINGTON, JULY-DECEMBER 1944
23. Time and Us Marches On
FRANCE, BELGIUM, LUXEMBOURG, GERMANY, and England, July 1944-January 1945
24. Who You Working For-Yourself?
HOLLYWOOD, FLORIDA, ITALY, AND NEW YORK, FEBRUARY-MAY 1945
25. Where I Learned About Life
GERMANY, MARCH-AUGUST 1945
26. What s This Picture For?
WASHINGTON AND HOLLYWOOD, SUMMER 1945
27. An Angry Past Commingled with the Future in a Storm
HOLLYWOOD, NEW YORK, AND GERMANY, 1945
28. A Straight Face and a Painfully Maturing Mind
HOLLYWOOD, NEW YORK, AND WASHINGTON, DECEMBER 1945-MARCH 1946
29. Closer to What Is Going On in the World
HOLLYWOOD, MAY 1946-FEBRUARY 1947
Epilogue
Note on Sources and Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Credits
Index
Picture Section
Prologue: Pearl Harbor
J ohn Ford was the first of the five to go. By the time the Imperial Japanese Navy attacked the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, he was already three thousand miles from Hollywood and had been in uniform for three months. When news of the bombing came, Ford, now a lieutenant commander in the navy, and his wife, Mary, were guests at a Sunday luncheon at the home of Rear Admiral Andrew Pickens in Alexandria, Virginia. A maid nervously entered the room holding a telephone. It s the War Department, animal, she said, stumbling over her employer s rank. The visitors braced themselves as the admiral left his table to take the call. He returned to the party and announced, Gentlemen, Pearl Harbor has just been attacked by the Japanese. We are now at war. As the guests dispersed, the admiral s wife tried to save the afternoon. It s no use getting excited. This is the seventh war that s been announced in this dining room, she said. She showed the Fords a bullet hole in the wall left by a musket ball during the American Revolution. I never let them plaster over that, she told them.
Mary Ford later remembered that for everybody at that table, their lives changed that minute. But Ford had already changed his life, drastically and unexpectedly. By late 1941, most people in the movie industry, like most people in the country, believed that it was only a matter of time before the United States entered World War II. But what many of his colleagues viewed as a vague shadow spreading across the distant horizon, Ford accepted as a certainty that would require, and reward, advance preparation. For months before he left Hollywood for Washington, D.C., that September, he had been spending his nights and weekends overseeing the creation of a group he called the Naval Volunteer Photographic Unit, training camera operators, sound technicians, and editors to do their jobs under wartime conditions in close quarters; he even used gimbaled platforms in order to simulate attempts to develop film on ships while they pitched and listed. If war was inevitable, he believed the effort to record that war would be essential, and its planning could not be left to amateurs or to the bungling of War Department bureaucrats.
Still, Ford was an unlikely candidate to lead Hollywood s march toward battle. He was old enough to be the father of a typical draftee; at forty-six, he was just a couple of years from welcoming his first grandchild. And although he had done his part in Hollywood over the years on several of the industry s various committees-toiling among the interventionists, the fervent anti-Nazi campaigners, the leaders of ad hoc groups trying to provide aid in the Spanish Civil War-he hadn t been on the front lines of those battles recently. Since 1939, he had spent most of his time and energy directing a string of movies-among them Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and The Grapes of Wrath -that had turned him into Hollywood s most respected filmmaker.
What moved Ford, just three weeks after completing production on How Green Was My Valley, the picture that would win him his third Best Director Academy Award in seven years, to step away from his thriving career and request a transfer from the Naval Reserve to active duty? Was it lingering shame at having failed the entrance exam for the Naval Academy at Annapolis as a high school student a quarter of a century earlier? Was it embarrassment about having missed America s entry into the First World War in 1917, when he was busy trying to break into the movie business as a stuntman, actor, and fledgling director? Ford s motivation was an enigma even to those closest to him-his wife, the colleagues with whom he made movies, and the drinking buddies at his favorite haunt, the Hollywood Athletic Club. Is the ace director … tired of the tinsel of Hollywood? one news story queried. Ford seemed to delight in withholding any explanation at all, burnishing his public image as a taciturn and cryptic man by accepting an invitation to be interviewed about his decision and then declining to offer anything more expansive than, I think it s the thing to do at this time.
It may have been that simple-a sense of duty, combined with a fear of how he might feel if he shirked it. That September, he had boarded a train for Washington, D.C., predicting misery and remorse for the able-bodied men in Hollywood who were still waiting, wondering what the war would mean and hoping the draft might leave them untouched. They don t count, he wrote. The blow will hit them hard next year. He checked into the Carlton Hotel, hung his uniform in the closet, and installed himself in his modest room with its single window of old, runny glass, stacking a couple of books on the bureau along with his pipes and cigars and living out of an open wardrobe trunk. He had the air, wrote a reporter who visited him, of a man who might set out to sea with an hour s notice. In fact, that was just what he was thinking and even hoping; as Ford awaited orders from his mentor, intelligence chief Wild Bill Donovan, his mind was only on what was to come. Things are moving apace here, he wrote to Mary, admonishing her to avoid the needless expense of late-night long-distance calls to him whenever she felt lonely or sad or angry, and telling her of the hum of preparation and excitement that the city was experiencing. It would take volumes to say what I think of your unselfish courageous attitude in this present emergency, he added as he awaited her arrival in the capital. Words literally fail me. I am very proud of you.
When Mary finally joined her husband in Washington, Ford gave his wife of twenty-one years something she had always wanted, a proper Catholic wedding ceremony. It was a preparatory gesture, a gift before what they both knew might be a long separation. And when the moment finally came, Ford and the men he trained, who had been streaming into Washington in the last few weeks, could barely contain their enthusiasm. Just hours after the news of Pearl Harbor broke, his Photo Unit recruits began showing up at the Carlton, knocking on the Fords door, wanting to know what was going to happen next. The drinks started to flow, and as dusk fell on December 7, Ford and his men welcomed America into the war with cocktails.
T he sense of urgency that had led Ford to upend his life was not shared by most of his colleagues in Hollywood until that D