Five legendary, Oscar-winning movie directors abandoned their lucrative Hollywood lifestyles to volunteer for often-grueling military service during World War II as part of a corps of hundreds of filmmakers who recorded the Allied advance across occupied Europe and in the Pacific.
“Five Came Back,’’ a new book out Monday by film historian Mark Harris, recounts their adventures — sometimes under enemy fire — and details how they sometimes secretly faked combat footage that has been passed off as the real thing for decades in documentaries.
“They all could have gotten out of service because they were too old and/or their work as civilians was so important to American morale,’’ says Harris. “But they all wanted to be in the thick of it and served for at least three years.’’
John Ford, who had already won three of his unmatched-to-date four Oscars and received a Purple Heart for wounds received while shooting the Academy Award-winning feature documentary “The Battle of Midway,’’ also co-directed “December 7,’’ which won the 1944 Oscar for Best Short Documentary.
Less than four minutes of film records the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, so Ford and co-director Gregg Toland (who photographed “Citizen Kane’’) staged footage using miniature battleships and airplanes on the Fox lot in Hollywood.
This was embellished with entirely staged shots taken in Hawaii of sailors manning surface-to-air guns “in time to perfectly frame our response to a surprise attack,’’ Harris says. “Even 70 years after Pearl Harbor, we still so want that to be true.’’
Once America entered the war, logistical problems and bureaucratic snafus sometimes made it difficult to get film crews to the front lines in time. This was especially true in Africa, where British army crews recorded lots of impressive footage, but most of the few combat scenes photographed by Americans during the invasion of Casablanca went down with a sunken ship.
So Frank Capra (whose three Oscars included “It Happened One Night’’ and who oversaw an ambitious series of army training films) assigned George Stevens (whose two Oscars after the war included “Giant’’) to spend two weeks in Algiers staging re-creations (that Harris says were obviously faked) using tanks and soldiers assigned to him.
Besides capturing “already blown-up cities being blown up some more,’’ as Stevens described it, “We took tanks and ran them through the water like they did when the British Seventh Army cut off the Germans by taking their tanks out into the water.’’
Personally supervised by Capra, director John Huston staged additional “African’’ footage in California’s Mojave Desert with dummy tanks being bombed from the air, as well as additional recreations of dogfights between Allied and (fake) German fighters that were shot in Orlando, Fla.
Decades later, Huston labeled the faked footage, which turned up in an Anglo-American documentary called “Tunisian Victory,’’ as “disgraceful.’’
But Harris says Huston — Oscar winner for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’’ and father of actors Anjelica and Danny Huston — was less frank about the authenticity of “The Battle of San Pietro,’’ his critically acclaimed documentary about an Italian battle that was selected in 1991 for the Library of Congress’ prestigious National Film Registry.
Harris’ research reveals that Huston arrived at the very end of the battle, which took the lives of more than 1,000 Allied soliders. But with encouragement of his superiors, who provided equipment and hundreds of GI extras, he shot what Harris regards as the most convincingly faked footage of a World War II battle — shot on the actual locations with real participants.
“When you take away the whole question of fakery,’’ Harris says, “it makes the combat look rough and frightening and punishing, and makes the advance of a line of soldiers look slow and hesitant in ways that set it apart from Hollywood war movies and even from a lot of other documentaries. This was a new look at what the war felt like.’’
There was plenty of genuine combat footage recorded by Americans — especially on D-Day, when months of advance planning got dozens of cameramen onto the beaches at Normandy — recording some footage that was too graphic to be shown.
The fifth director in Harris’ book — William Wyler, whose three postwar Oscars include “The Best Years of Our Lives’’ — risked his life to shoot missions from inside an American bomber (at the cost of severe hearing loss) for his documentary “Memphis Belle,’’ taking pains to get the actual crew to rerecord their dialogue afterwards in the United States.
Stevens photographed the first and most powerful footage of the liberation of concentration camps, as well as of the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation.
“After the ‘Tunisian Victory’ experience, he wrote an instruction to himself: ‘Show the war,’ ’’ Harris says.
“But he did famously restage one thing: the surrender of the occupying general when Paris was liberated. There wasn’t enough light when the papers were signed indoors, so he made them go outside and do it again’’ — for the sake of posterity.
December 7
Tunisian Victory
The Battle of San Pietro
Memphis Belle