Five Came Back by Mark Harris

Author:Mark Harris
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

“If You Believe This, We Thank You”

HOLLYWOOD AND ENGLAND, MARCH–MAY 1944

In early 1944, after two years of war, the studios, which had become ever more deeply entangled with Washington, began, first gently and then forcefully, to reclaim their autonomy and to reassert themselves as servants of popular taste rather than of the national interest. In the months after Pearl Harbor, they had been quick to meet the government’s request for pictures about battlefield bravery and home-front sacrifice. But more and more, American moviegoers were turning away from war pictures and toward other genres for entertainment—musicals, comedies, religious epics like The Song of Bernadette, historical biographies like Madame Curie—or to pictures that exploited the war not as their primary subject but as a backdrop, at once topical and exotic, for foreign adventure or intrigue. In March 1944, the Best Picture Oscar went to Casablanca, in which the war was used to provide atmosphere and raise the stakes for romance. Some in the industry expressed surprise that a mere piece of genre entertainment could sweep past films that were thought to be either more hard-hitting or more high-minded, but the win for Casablanca reflected changing tastes both within the movie business and outside it; films that dealt directly with the realities of combat or global politics went home empty-handed, and were increasingly being ignored by audiences as well.

Some critics decried what they saw as Hollywood’s expedient abandonment of responsibility in favor of escapism, and bemoaned the eagerness with which studios were now acceding to the general public’s seeming lack of curiosity about what was happening in the rest of the world. “We suffer . . . a unique and constantly intensifying schizophrenia which threatens no other nation involved in this war,” James Agee wrote in an essay bitterly titled “So Proudly We Fail” about Hollywood’s abrogation of its duty to educate moviegoers and soldiers alike. “Those Americans who are doing the fighting are doing it in parts of the world which seem irrelevant to them; those who are not remain untouched, virginal, prenatal, while every other considerable population on earth comes of age. In every bit of information you can gather about breakdowns of American troops in combat . . . a sense of unutterable dislocation, dereliction, absence of contact, trust, wholeness, and reference . . . clearly works at the root of the disaster.”

But moviegoers felt, if anything, overexposed to the war and its ramifications. Aside from the barrage of newsreels and morale-building shorts that preceded practically every main attraction, there were the pictures themselves; at the end of 1943, an Office of War Information report noted that out of 545 feature films currently in production or development, 264 had content that was related, either directly or tangentially, to the war or to the OWI’s propaganda objectives. But as the pictures started to falter financially, the studios put the brakes on dozens of war-themed scripts. “Hollywood has finally thrown up its hands in despair at attempting to keep pace with headlines,”

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