RECOMMENDED READING
Five Came Back by Mark Harris
The story of five Hollywood directors who went to war in the forties and made some unforgettable propaganda films is a story that needed telling, and in Mark Harris it has found a knowledgeable, thorough and research-oriented author. Yet his accounts of Wyler, Stevens, Capra, Huston and Ford in action — both military and dramatic — reads like a novel. We enter all the theaters of war, with Ford in the Pacific, Wyler in Africa and Italy and in the Memphis Belle, Huston in the Aleutians and at San Pietro, Stevens photographing the liberation of concentration camps (with film that would become evidence at Nuremberg), and Capra in Washington organizing and superintending it all.
William Wyler
Stevens in postwar work, on the set with his his stars
If Huston or Ford is a personal hero, however, and you are unfamiliar with previous books about them, you might wish to steer clear of this study — very unattractive portraits (anti-Semitic portraits) of two unattractive personalities. Storied filmmakers of staggering talent — but unattractive personalities.
And Harris’ treatment of the fabled Frank Capra is in a class by itself. I had believed that no writer could savage Capra to the extent that Capra savages himself in the final pages of his own book The Name Above the Title, but Harris manages to surpass him. It is clear early in the book that Harris likes neither Frank Capra nor his films. He is determined to see Capra as a crypto-Fascist; and any quality or craft in his work goes largely unmentioned.
He writes with barely disguised delight of the critical and box office failure of It’s a Wonderful Life, Capra’s first postwar film, at the time of its original release. His ends his account of Capra with that and not a word about the rediscovery of It’s a Wonderful Life on television, not a word about its present day popularity and longevity as one of America’s best loved films.
Frank Capra
But this is a superbly written book, filled with information. It includes extensive notes, background on sources, a full bibliography and some fine photographs.
I learned something new on every page. I didn’t know that Eric Knight participated in this American wartime effort. I didn’t know that Joris Ivens did. Or. Dr. Seuss.
Five Came Back by Mark Harris. Penguin, 2015.
NEXT Friday POST October 13
Until then,
See you at the movies,
Rick
