In Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris turned the story of the
five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967 into a landmark work of
cultural history, a book about the transformation of an art form and the
larger social shift it signified. In Five Came Back, he achieves
something larger and even more remarkable, giving us the untold story
of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II changed
Hollywood, through the prism of five film directors caught up in the
war: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George
Stevens.
It was the best of times and the worst of times
for Hollywood before the war. The box office was booming, and the
studios’ control of talent and distribution was as airtight as could be
hoped. But the industry’s relationship with Washington was decidedly
uneasy—hearings and investigations into allegations of corruption and
racketeering were multiplying, and hanging in the air was the
insinuation that the business was too foreign, too Jewish, too
“un-American” in its values and causes. Could an industry this powerful
in shaping America’s mind-set really be left in the hands of this crew?
Following Pearl Harbor, Hollywood had the chance to prove its critics
wrong and did so with vigor, turning its talents and its business over
to the war effort to an unprecedented extent.
No industry
professionals played a bigger role in the war than America’s most
legendary directors: Ford, Wyler, Huston, Capra, and Stevens. Between
them they were on the scene of almost every major moment of America’s
war, and in every branch of service—army, navy, and air force; Atlantic
and Pacific; from Midway to North Africa; from Normandy to the fall of
Paris; and from the liberation of the Nazi death camps to the shaping of the
message out of Washington, DC.
As it did for so many others,
World War II divided the lives of these men into before and after—to
an extent that has not been adequately understood. In a larger
sense and even less well understood, the war divided the history of Hollywood
into before and after as well. Harris reckons with that transformation
on a human level through five unforgettable lives and on the level of
the industry and the country as a whole. Like these five men, Hollywood
too, and indeed all of America, came back from the war having grown up
more than a little.
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