Fulfilling Netflix series on eminent directors, their WWII films
Propaganda’s a dirty word, casting a shadow of fake news and wily psychological manipulation onto shape-shifting political events. America is hardly immune to the word, or its practice. In the World War II years several of Hollywood’s most revered directors engaged in the gathering, staging (in some cases) and dissemination of wartime propaganda, some of it thrilling and good for war bond sales, some of it stark and painful, some of it grimly racist.
Author, film historian and critic Mark Harris explored this propaganda and the men who made it in his excellent 2014 nonfiction account “Five Came Back.” Now that account has become a three-hour, three-part Netflix documentary series, available for streaming Friday.
The “five” of the title represent a who’s who of patriarchal Hollywood authority figures and iconoclasts, each marked by the war in different ways. At 46, John Ford (haunted by his feelings of inadequacy after not serving in WWI) was the oldest of the group. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he entered the war fresh off the success of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “How Green Was My Valley.”
John Huston had just made a smashing directorial debut with “The Maltese Falcon.” Frank Capra had just finished with “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Meet John Doe.” George Stevens, a master of buoyant light comedy, had tried to adapt “Paths of Glory” in the late ‘30s but was overruled his RKO bosses, who pushed him instead to do the rousing rah-rah war adventure “Gunga Din.”
The fifth man, William Wyler, was a German Jew who’d gotten out of Europe thanks to Universal head Carl Laemmle. Coming off the prestigious “Wuthering Heights” and “The Little Foxes,” Wyler was ready to do his part for the Allied effort when the U.S. War Department came calling.
The director of the Netflix series, Laurent Bouzereau, and Harris adapted his book for the script. The first of the three segments hustles around to establish who’s where, chasing which conflict. The second and third parts breathe more easily.
Narrated by Meryl Streep, “Five Came Back” tracks Ford as he makes “The Battle of Midway” (1942) and John Huston on the road to Italy. “San Pietro,” Huston’s 1945 dramatization, used staged combat footage, which Huston lied about for decades. Capra’s ambitious “Why We Fight” series included “Know Your Enemy — Japan” (1945), rife with dehumanizing slander, completed just before Hiroshima and Nagasaki were leveled.
Inevitably, the most haunting story in “Five Came Back” is that of George Stevens, whose camera units captured footage of D-Day, the Battle of the Bulge — and finally, the release of the prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp. The unblinking Dachau images were used as evidence in the Nuremberg trials. Stevens never quite shook the experience, and he never made another comedy.