Five Came Back Hollywood Filmmakers and World War II_3of3_ The Price of Victory
Transcript
00:00:00Nothing like World War II has ever happened to give us any idea of why there was such
00:00:15solidarity.
00:00:18I think everybody could see that Western civilization was at stake and they needed
00:00:24to fight or die.
00:00:30When you strip away all the glitz and the glamour of Hollywood, what you're left with
00:00:37is what is the witness that you're giving to the world that you see out there?
00:02:07John Ford and George Stevens were chosen by Eisenhower to land in the invasion on D-Day.
00:02:34And they gathered around them a large group of cameramen and soundmen to make the landing.
00:02:44That means you know you're going to sacrifice some of those men.
00:02:48There was no protected place from which to film the invasion of Normandy.
00:02:57You are about to embark upon the great crusade toward which we have striven these many months.
00:03:04In company with our brave allies and brothers-in-arms on other fronts, you will bring about the
00:03:10destruction of the German war machine.
00:03:14I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle.
00:03:18We will accept nothing less than full victory.
00:03:24To capture the largest military operation of the war, John Ford and George Stevens used
00:03:29hundreds of cameras and dozens of men.
00:03:33The orders they gave were simple.
00:03:36Don't put yourself in unnecessary danger.
00:03:39Focus on what you see.
00:03:41And take pictures of everything.
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00:05:13Nothing, I think, could prepare anyone for the sheer intensity of the conflict and the
00:05:25violence on the beach.
00:05:29Ford talked about, in one interview, about seeing a man drown and the bodies littering
00:05:37the beaches.
00:05:39I mean, it's beyond imagination.
00:05:47A lot of the footage that the Allied cameramen got on D-Day, that is, the people under Ford
00:05:55and Stevens, could not be shown in newsreels, could not be shown as propaganda.
00:06:02It was just too brutal.
00:06:03It was just too much carnage.
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00:06:23Capra was in Washington, anxiously awaiting delivery of the footage.
00:06:29His team packaged it into a newsreel that was distributed to theaters around the country.
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00:06:40Today, just as in these scenes, the armies of the United Nations have made their first
00:06:45landings on the soil of Western Europe.
00:06:48Another of the great decisive battles of world history has been joined.
00:06:53This is the day for which free people long have waited.
00:06:57This is D-Day.
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00:07:02The sheer human cost of that operation, the numbers of people that died, was too pitiless.
00:07:11By the end of the first day, over 4,000 Allied soldiers had been killed.
00:07:20After it was all over, Ford went on a tremendous drinking bender.
00:07:27Alone and without telling any of his men,
00:07:30Ford made his way up the French coast to a house where officers were staying
00:07:35and drank himself into a three-day stupor.
00:07:39He was belligerent and incoherent.
00:07:42Finally, the officers had had enough.
00:07:45They summoned the men of Ford's unit to come and take him away.
00:07:51That journey that began in the studios of Hollywood in the late 30s,
00:07:56recruiting a ragbag army for what became Field Photo,
00:08:02it ended in the carnage of D-Day.
00:08:09Ford would never supervise Navy men again.
00:08:12His war service was over.
00:08:15He was sent back to Washington.
00:08:19That was the end of Ford's involvement in the war.
00:08:23But Stevens was really the start of his life-changing experience in Europe.
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00:08:36Stevens did not predetermine what he wanted to see.
00:08:42Just as he does in his movies,
00:08:45he wanted to observe what was going on.
00:08:51Stevens and his men traveled with the army
00:08:54as they liberated small French towns on the drive to Paris.
00:09:00He didn't shy away from showing all aspects of war,
00:09:06from the mundane
00:09:10to the terrible.
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00:09:19He had his unit shoot everything that he thought was important,
00:09:23and that included very cinematic details.
00:09:26It could be a little boy running after the troops.
00:09:29It could be a church steeple that is half destroyed.
00:09:37They are the texture of war.
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00:09:44As they approached Paris,
00:09:46Stevens got permission to go ahead of the American troops
00:09:49and enter the city with the free French army to film the liberation.
00:09:57The footage he got there is some of the most ecstatic
00:10:01and thrilling and unique footage ever shot.
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00:10:13Stevens wanted to shoot the surrender of Paris,
00:10:17and that surrender happened in the Montparnasse train station,
00:10:22and Stevens went in there with his crew and shot that surrender,
00:10:26but he became panicked that it was too dark in there
00:10:30and he would not get the images of this pivotal moment in history.
00:10:35And he told them, De Gaulle and the German commander,
00:10:40that they had to restage it outside the station in the sunlight
00:10:45so that he would be sure to get it.
00:10:48Now, that is a Hollywood filmmaker.
00:10:51We all believe getting the shot is more important than anything.
00:10:56It was the last time Stevens staged any footage during the war.
00:11:01Paris is free!
00:11:04While all the world catches its breath at the news,
00:11:07joyful Allied armies speed in through welcoming crowds.
00:11:12In this hour, Paris, crowned with honor and glory, does not forget.
00:11:18The war is still going on and will continue for everyone, everywhere,
00:11:24until the final day of total victory.
00:11:31In Italy, Weiler was struggling to complete a new assignment
00:11:36as a follow-up to Memphis Belle.
00:11:39The army wanted him to showcase a new plane,
00:11:44the P-47 Thunderbolt fighter-bomber.
00:11:49Weiler with Memphis Belle, he had so many places to put cameras.
00:11:53Suddenly, he sees a single pilot, P-47 Thunderbolt.
00:11:58And how can he get creative with that? Where can he put his cameras?
00:12:02He had to figure out places to put the cameras on the plane
00:12:06and not mess up its aerodynamics.
00:12:09Behind the pilot, shooting forward and back.
00:12:12Under the wing.
00:12:14In the wing.
00:12:16Timed with a gun.
00:12:23And in the wing.
00:12:44Weiler felt the mounted cameras on the planes
00:12:47didn't provide enough footage to tell a complete story.
00:12:50He also filmed extensive devastation on the ground.
00:13:01While Weiler was figuring out the story he wanted to tell with Thunderbolt,
00:13:06the army sent him on various assignments across Italy and France.
00:13:12On June 5th, 1944, he filmed the liberation of Rome.
00:13:18Citizens of Rome organized welcoming ceremonies.
00:13:21After more than 20 years of fascism, they are free again.
00:13:27In Paris, Weiler met with Stevens and asked him for help.
00:13:32Weiler's hometown of Mulhouse had just been liberated by the Allies
00:13:36and he was looking for a way to get there.
00:13:39After the liberation of Mulhouse,
00:13:41patriotic Frenchmen were able to bring their flags out into the open.
00:13:45Stevens recommended a trusted colleague,
00:13:48Ernest Hemingway's younger brother, Lester,
00:13:51who was a driver in the army.
00:13:53Weiler wanted to go home and this was his opportunity.
00:13:58Weiler and Hemingway left without telling anybody,
00:14:01but Weiler, of course, brought along a film camera.
00:14:14THE LIBERATION OF ROME
00:14:30Like George Stevens,
00:14:32William Weiler was a documentarian in the most literal sense.
00:14:36He wanted to record what he saw
00:14:39and he wanted to give not just a sense of what was happening,
00:14:42but how it looked and how it felt.
00:15:13THE LIBERATION OF ROME
00:15:23After days of travel, they finally arrived in Mulhouse.
00:15:30Weiler was heartened to see his father's old shop still standing.
00:15:36When he got back to Mulhouse, there was no one there.
00:15:40The Holocaust had claimed all of them.
00:15:45Hitler's Shoah, Hitler's genocide,
00:15:48had been so successful there that there was no one left.
00:16:04Weiler returned to Air Force headquarters
00:16:06to find he'd been reported missing in action.
00:16:09He was ordered to go back to Italy
00:16:11and complete the long-delayed Thunderbolt.
00:16:15Weiler felt he needed more images
00:16:17of the devastated Italian coastline,
00:16:19so he went up in a B-25 bomber to shoot the footage himself.
00:16:24My father flew in B-25s in World War II.
00:16:27He said they were really noisy,
00:16:29but of course he was only comparing it to nothing
00:16:31because he had not been on anything but a B-25
00:16:33when he was fighting in Burma.
00:16:35My dad told me that you had to wear ear protection
00:16:37because you couldn't hear yourself think
00:16:39if you didn't have your ear guards on.
00:16:43With all the time that William Weiler spent in the B-17,
00:16:46making Memphis Belle,
00:16:49he got on the B-25,
00:16:53and after one mission, after one flight,
00:16:56he couldn't hear anything when he got down.
00:16:59At first he thought it was temporary
00:17:02and his hearing would come back.
00:17:04The next day, Weiler was examined by an Army doctor in Naples.
00:17:08The doctor handed him the diagnosis on a piece of paper.
00:17:12The damage was permanent.
00:17:14Weiler was deaf.
00:17:17His time in the Army was over.
00:17:21A day earlier, he had been one of the foremost documentarians
00:17:25in the armed forces.
00:17:27Now he was a disabled veteran going home.
00:17:31So much of his cinema
00:17:33was as much about the ear as it was about the eye.
00:17:36The performances and just the beautiful words
00:17:39that were written for Weiler to direct actors to speak.
00:17:44Weiler returned to Hollywood,
00:17:46but he believed that his directing career was over.
00:17:52After the liberation of Paris,
00:17:55Stevens and others thought the war was near ending.
00:18:00But in truth, it wasn't nearly done.
00:18:05And what Stevens found himself on
00:18:08was a long, cold, hard, brutal, violent slog to Germany.
00:18:22Winter warfare on the Western Front.
00:18:24The Allies grinding relentlessly ahead through heavy bogs
00:18:28that slow down both machines and men.
00:18:31One night they woke up and the earth was shaking
00:18:34and the Germans had counterattacked.
00:18:38In December 1944,
00:18:40the Germans launched a fierce counteroffensive.
00:18:45Over the next six weeks,
00:18:47tens of thousands of Allied troops were killed or injured
00:18:50in the Battle of the Bulge.
00:18:54The Germans were forced to retreat.
00:19:04Stevens and his men pressed on,
00:19:06filming the devastation and the aftermath.
00:19:10He had been traveling with the Allies non-stop
00:19:13for seven months now,
00:19:15sick and sleeping outdoors most of the time.
00:19:18As winter set in and conditions worsened,
00:19:21he sent back movies.
00:19:30After a punishing month of being pushed back,
00:19:33the Allies regained the offensive
00:19:35and began the final advance into Germany.
00:19:44As the American troops approached Cologne,
00:19:46they freed countless numbers of Russian and Polish prisoners
00:19:49who were forced laborers under the German heel.
00:19:52Imagine your son, your daughter, your husband or your wife here.
00:19:56Victory is in our grasp.
00:19:58We have the opportunity to stamp out evil like this.
00:20:02That movement started again after the Battle of the Bulge
00:20:05and the end of the war did seem possible.
00:20:10But they were not prepared for what they were going to find.
00:20:15And the Allied forces start coming upon these concentration camps,
00:20:20and Stevens was at Dachau.
00:20:25He and everyone with him was changed forever by what they saw.
00:20:45It's very hard for us to imagine now
00:20:48the shock of what they discovered.
00:20:56They had heard rumblings
00:20:58and a lot of people had tried to keep those rumblings quiet.
00:21:02They had heard that the Jews had been taken to camps,
00:21:07but they did not know.
00:21:09No one had seen the result of that.
00:21:14And what they thought might be prison camps
00:21:17turned out to be extermination camps.
00:21:19They were death factories.
00:21:25I think the strongest feeling I ever had in my life
00:21:28was the horror and the revulsion
00:21:31and the exposure to things that I couldn't believe
00:21:35was part of human existence.
00:21:40The violence and wickedness that took place in those concentration camps.
00:21:55When Stevens entered Dachau, he realized his job had changed.
00:22:01His task was no longer to make propaganda or even a documentary.
00:22:07He would now use the camera to gather evidence.
00:22:14And he was very rigorous about being right at the front himself.
00:22:19He did not want to send his men
00:22:21to see things that he was not willing to see.
00:22:28And you think, what kind of a world is this?
00:22:30What kind of creatures are we?
00:22:32And how much management do we need to keep us from being ourselves?
00:22:38Some of the men in his crew, overwhelmed by what they saw,
00:22:42abandoned their cameras to become nurses or ministers.
00:22:47One cameraman spent the next few days writing letters
00:22:50to the families of dying prisoners that they dictated from their beds.
00:22:56Stevens wrestled with his own repulsion towards the prisoners,
00:23:00many of whom treated him as just a new captor.
00:23:04When a poor man, hungered and unseen because his eyesight is failing,
00:23:09grabs me and starts begging,
00:23:12I feel the Nazi in any human being.
00:23:15I don't care whether I'm a Jew or a Gentile.
00:23:17I feel a Nazi.
00:23:19And that's a fierce thing,
00:23:22to discover within yourself that which you despise the most.
00:23:31Two nights later, Stevens and his men heard the news on the radio.
00:23:36The war in Europe was over.
00:23:39I wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to see this day.
00:23:44The forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.
00:23:52Stevens' instinct to document the atrocities at Dachau proved to be correct.
00:23:58The surviving Nazi leadership was charged with war crimes,
00:24:02and he was asked to create two films to be used as evidence against them.
00:24:08Stevens stayed in Germany for quite a while,
00:24:11shooting Dachau and composing these two films,
00:24:15one about the concentration camp,
00:24:18one about the overreaching Nazi plan that allowed this to happen.
00:24:23These are the locations of the largest concentration and prison camps
00:24:27maintained throughout Germany and occupied Europe under the Nazi regime.
00:24:37Dachau, factory of horror.
00:24:41Dachau near München, one of the oldest of the Nazi prison camps.
00:24:47Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners
00:24:50who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber.
00:24:53They had been persuaded to remove their clothing
00:24:56under the pretext of taking a shower for which towels and soap were provided.
00:25:05The films Stevens made were shown at Nuremberg.
00:25:09He had omitted nothing.
00:25:11Journalists from around the world reported
00:25:14those images were the turning point in the trials.
00:25:17The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish
00:25:22have been so calculated,
00:25:25so malignant and so devastating,
00:25:29that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored
00:25:35because it cannot survive their being repeated.
00:25:40Not until we showed them some of the stuff that we got at Dachau,
00:25:43that George Stevens' photograph is true,
00:25:47did it actually impinge itself on the minds of horror,
00:25:53the horror of this whole thing.
00:25:57As in the case of other camps,
00:25:59local townspeople were brought in to view the dead at Dachau.
00:26:03As in the case of other camps,
00:26:05local townspeople were brought in to view the dead at Dachau.
00:26:11Men, the highest of all the animals,
00:26:15man, the man who created God,
00:26:21dwindled up here in a pile of bones, burned.
00:26:27It left me just speechless,
00:26:31colorless, bloodless.
00:26:36I couldn't possibly believe
00:26:39that there was that kind of a savagery in the world.
00:26:46If the propaganda gave you the reason to go into war,
00:26:52the footage of the liberation of the camps,
00:26:55what these men saw,
00:26:57it proved that the enormity of the task was worth it.
00:27:02Well, it was the first Holocaust footage the world had seen.
00:27:06And it was only after the war that this footage began to come out,
00:27:09and that's when people really began to see the true and terrible impact
00:27:12of what Hitler had designed to accomplish
00:27:15and had, in most part, been successful at in Eastern Europe.
00:27:19The Demagogue on his way to power
00:27:22and to world infamy as history's arch-war criminal.
00:27:26In the Nazi downfall, Mussolini has been executed
00:27:29by patriots of his own country,
00:27:32and Hitler has come to an end appropriate to a war maker,
00:27:35the atrocities of whose Nazi regime have shocked the world.
00:27:50In Washington, Capra petitioned to be released from service.
00:27:54He had given up his career to volunteer.
00:27:57Now, he wrote, he would have to go back
00:28:00and compete with those who weren't so patriotic.
00:28:03But the army wouldn't let him go
00:28:06until he had completed the program of war films
00:28:09he had set out to make four years earlier.
00:28:12So he turned his attention back to the war against Japan.
00:28:15Supplies that were sent to Europe
00:28:18are now on their way to the Pacific.
00:28:21Foot by foot is the bitter and bloody story
00:28:24of the advance on Iwo Jima.
00:28:33The Japs make a bitter defense on Okinawa.
00:28:36American troops battling their way forward.
00:28:39A kamikaze dives into the Ticonderoga.
00:28:43We still have a dangerous war to fight.
00:28:51Know your enemy, Japan.
00:28:54Another project that Capra struggles with
00:28:57and struggles with and struggles with.
00:29:03Because there was a problem going all the way up to General Marshall
00:29:06is how do you deal with that?
00:29:09Because there was a problem going all the way up to General Marshall
00:29:12is how to treat who we were going to dislike.
00:29:15Know your enemy, Japan
00:29:18had been delayed for years over conflicts within the U.S. government
00:29:21about where the film should place the blame.
00:29:24Should it be on the emperor?
00:29:27On the ruling class?
00:29:30Or on the Japanese people as a whole?
00:29:33The script went through countless revisions.
00:29:36Houston and Capra wrote the final versions themselves.
00:29:40First, let's examine a typical Japanese soldier.
00:29:43And the project, when viewed today,
00:29:46is brutally jingoistic
00:29:49and horribly racist.
00:29:52He and his brother's soldiers are as much alike
00:29:55as photographic prints off the same negative.
00:29:58This merciless, dehumanizing
00:30:01cartoon view of the Japanese.
00:30:06Defeating this nation is as necessary as shooting down
00:30:09a mad dog in your neighborhood.
00:30:14It tragically coincides with the way
00:30:17Japan was dealt with
00:30:20with a brutal extermination tool.
00:30:30A short time ago, an American airplane
00:30:33dropped one bomb on Hiroshima
00:30:36and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.
00:30:56If they do not now accept our terms,
00:30:59they may expect a rain of ruin from the air,
00:31:02the like of which has never been seen on this earth.
00:31:08Already en route,
00:31:11prints of Know Your Enemy Japan arrived at the front
00:31:14three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
00:31:17General MacArthur informed Washington
00:31:20he would not allow soldiers to see it
00:31:23and recommended it not be shown to the public either.
00:31:27I think it was wise of MacArthur to say
00:31:30we don't need this anymore.
00:31:33Not only from a practical point of view,
00:31:36but from a human point of view.
00:31:39After three days with no sign of surrender from Japan,
00:31:42a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
00:31:47I now invite the representatives
00:31:50of the Emperor of Japan
00:31:53and the Japanese government
00:31:56and the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters
00:32:00to sign the Instrument of Surrender
00:32:03at the places indicated.
00:32:07Let us pray that peace
00:32:10be now restored to the world
00:32:13and that God will preserve it always.
00:32:25Nightmare of war and separation is over.
00:32:28Nightmare of war and separation is over.
00:32:46The guns are quiet now.
00:32:49The papers of peace have been signed
00:32:52and the oceans of the earth are filled with ships coming home.
00:32:55In faraway places men dreamed of this moment,
00:32:58but for some men the moment is very different from the dream.
00:33:03Houston was given the assignment
00:33:06to cover a military hospital
00:33:09and they had soldiers who had come back
00:33:12wounded in other than physical ways
00:33:15and they made a film called Let There Be Light.
00:33:19Others show no outward signs,
00:33:22yet they too are wounded.
00:33:26Well, I made that film for the army, for the American army.
00:33:29I was in the army, a soldier at the time,
00:33:32and it was the last work I did for the army
00:33:35before going out of uniform.
00:33:41Each of these directors,
00:33:44they all went through a lot and came back with scars.
00:33:47You can't work on these projects
00:33:50and be immersed in moments of horror and despair
00:33:53and not feel that.
00:33:57The idea of battle fatigue
00:34:00or neurosis related to battle
00:34:03was not considered at all valid.
00:34:06I followed one group through the hospital.
00:34:11I followed them from their induction
00:34:14from the first time they filed in and sat down in the receiving room
00:34:18and it was explained to them what the cameras were doing there
00:34:21and if the cameras would continue to follow them
00:34:24through their treatment.
00:34:27There's no need to be alarmed at the presence of these cameras
00:34:30as they're making a photographic record
00:34:33of your progress at this hospital
00:34:36from the date of admission to the date of discharge.
00:34:42They were so deep in their own despair
00:34:45and shock that the presence of the camera
00:34:48made absolutely no difference to them.
00:34:54Do you feel conscious about it?
00:34:57Are you aware of the fact that you're not the same boy
00:35:00that you were when you went over?
00:35:03Do you feel changed?
00:35:16I'm not doing this deliberately, so please believe me.
00:35:19I do believe you.
00:35:22A display of emotion is sometimes very helpful.
00:35:25I hope so, sir.
00:35:28Sure, it gets it off your chest.
00:35:32And it's in that film that I really get a sense
00:35:35of Houston's
00:35:38bigness of soul.
00:35:41Remember the exposure now.
00:35:45The way he treated these young boys coming back
00:35:48and the style he used
00:35:51and the respect for them
00:35:54that is evident in that film
00:35:57and the beauty of some of the sequences
00:36:00and how he really expressed that yes, there are wounds
00:36:03that are far deeper than flesh wounds
00:36:06and maybe more serious and more difficult
00:36:09to ever be able to cure.
00:36:13There was no pretension, by the way,
00:36:16that they were curing these patients.
00:36:19What they were doing was putting a fire out
00:36:22in an attempt to restore the men
00:36:25to more or less the condition they were in
00:36:28when they came into the army.
00:36:31In societies where manliness and bravery
00:36:34are so admired,
00:36:37it was knowledge that, you know, we're all different
00:36:40and something can happen that just cracks your spirit
00:36:43and it happened in every war there's ever been.
00:36:46But in the case of Let There Be Light,
00:36:49the army no doubt wanted to show
00:36:52that these young men could be helped by the army.
00:36:55Well, ultimately, economically,
00:36:57if they can rehabilitate those soldiers,
00:37:00then everyone wanted to get back on making automobiles
00:37:03and go back to work and buy houses
00:37:06and bring about the great American miracle,
00:37:09the baby boom.
00:37:12There's a lot of love in that film.
00:37:15There's more love in that film
00:37:18than maybe Houston realized he had in him.
00:37:23The hope was then
00:37:26to create a better understanding,
00:37:29not sugar-coated, but honest and straightforward.
00:37:33Just before it was to be screened
00:37:36in a documentary film festival
00:37:39at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,
00:37:42the film print was seized by military police.
00:37:45John Houston's film about PTSD
00:37:48before the term PTSD was ever invented
00:37:51is a film that had been suppressed
00:37:54by the War Department.
00:37:57It's no great advertisement for war,
00:38:00but it's no great advertisement for war
00:38:03to see what, um,
00:38:06what the experience of combat does
00:38:09to men's souls.
00:38:12So much of the horrible truth of the war
00:38:16was just removed from our culture,
00:38:19almost in order to give Americans
00:38:22a chance to take a big deep breath
00:38:25and look forward into the future.
00:38:27But I've always been a big believer
00:38:30that you really can't move into the future
00:38:33unless you have a complete, solid basis
00:38:36of understanding and empathy about the past.
00:38:39Many, many, many millions of men
00:38:42in the US and Europe returned from war
00:38:45trying to pick up the threads
00:38:48of a civilian life, of a peacetime life,
00:38:51forever marked by what they'd seen and been through.
00:38:57There was a change in Jack because, you know,
00:39:00he liked to play soldier before the war,
00:39:03but after he'd been out there, you know,
00:39:05then it was a different thing.
00:39:07Ford was still in uniform,
00:39:09but with the Navy's blessing,
00:39:11he was back in Hollywood working for MGM.
00:39:14They Were Expendable would be his first feature
00:39:17in five years.
00:39:19Since Midway, Ford had wanted to make a film
00:39:22about the sailors who manned PT boats
00:39:25after Pearl Harbor.
00:39:27It would be a story not of victory,
00:39:30but of sacrifice.
00:39:32We lost Mahan and Larson.
00:39:34A couple of the kids got hurt.
00:39:36How'd they get slugged?
00:39:38Machine gun from a plane.
00:39:43The idea of expendables,
00:39:46those that have to sacrifice themselves
00:39:49for the greater good.
00:39:51He'd seen it. He'd seen it with his own eyes.
00:39:54He documented it.
00:39:56And it became profoundly important to him.
00:40:04The trouble is, most of the actual things
00:40:06that happen to people,
00:40:08the factual things,
00:40:10puts them on the screen.
00:40:12People say, that's too sentimental.
00:40:14It never happened.
00:40:16Well, in They Were Expendable,
00:40:18all these things did happen.
00:40:21And he chose Robert Montgomery, of course,
00:40:24who was himself a veteran.
00:40:26He was a PT boat captain during the war.
00:40:32When Montgomery went down to Florida
00:40:34where they were gonna shoot,
00:40:36he found the entire experience
00:40:39intensely mentally distressing,
00:40:42so much so that Ford said to him,
00:40:44we won't shoot.
00:40:46You know, you just get set.
00:40:49I think he kept the whole unit waiting,
00:40:51you know, for some days.
00:40:53And Ford gave him the time.
00:40:55Ford gave him the time,
00:40:57and then they started shooting.
00:41:00That was the caring side of Ford.
00:41:03They were brothers in arms.
00:41:05They both served.
00:41:08But he also, of course, chose John Wayne,
00:41:11who had not served in the war.
00:41:16Jack wanted to get me in,
00:41:18and I wanted to get into the service,
00:41:20but, you know, I'm 40 years old.
00:41:22I've had four kids,
00:41:24and I didn't feel that I should go in as a private.
00:41:28I could do more good going around on tours and things.
00:41:32Ford berated him and belittled Wayne
00:41:34at every opportunity,
00:41:36in the scene where they salute.
00:41:40Ryan.
00:41:41Goodbye, sir.
00:41:44Ford made them do take after take
00:41:46until finally he shouted at Wayne on the set,
00:41:49you know, damn it, can't you salute like someone
00:41:51who's actually been in service?
00:41:55Which was tremendously difficult, I think,
00:41:57for Wayne to take.
00:42:00Ford, I think, somewhat tardily realised what he'd done
00:42:05and actually burst into tears.
00:42:09That film was as much therapy as filmmaking.
00:42:14It began the long process of trying to explore
00:42:19what this conflict had meant to America.
00:42:23How did you make sense of the sacrifices
00:42:26that men and some women had made
00:42:29to ensure that new world could be enjoyed?
00:42:38None of us were the same as after that experience with the war,
00:42:43Capra comes out in a way that is as fairytale as his fables,
00:42:48almost Pinocchio-like.
00:42:51He becomes a real boy, a real American.
00:42:58He embodied the principle of a land
00:43:00that was formed by immigrants,
00:43:04Capra viewing the Statue of Liberty as a kid
00:43:09and being moved by the possibilities,
00:43:11the infinite possibilities of that light.
00:43:15What it is to be American is to contemplate that light
00:43:19and feel in your heart that now
00:43:23the way you write your history is going to be in your hands.
00:43:28And I think that Capra rewrites his history
00:43:32and the history of the world with his labour in World War II.
00:43:42World War II
00:43:53And Capra successfully manages all the obstacles.
00:43:58He was an incredible leader and a politician,
00:44:01ultimately capable of gathering the best of everyone.
00:44:06Ironically, out of this fruitful period
00:44:09in which he produces seven Why We Fight films,
00:44:12dozens of instructional shorts,
00:44:14and commands hundreds of people,
00:44:20he realizes that for Hollywood
00:44:23he finds himself a forgotten man.
00:44:26We came back to Hollywood and we didn't know anybody.
00:44:30People introduced me to somebody and they'd say,
00:44:33Frank who?
00:44:37When Stevens got back,
00:44:39it was a difficult reintegration into his life.
00:44:46He was in no hurry to make movies.
00:44:50It was my feeling after World War II
00:44:52nobody made any films about the war, as it was.
00:44:56It was happy to be forgotten.
00:44:59These films that I was seeing then,
00:45:02after the war in Hollywood,
00:45:04were not made from life, they were made from other films.
00:45:09It took him quite a while.
00:45:11It took him quite a while to adjust.
00:45:14He became hard to talk with.
00:45:16I don't think he wanted to express his...
00:45:19or maybe he just couldn't express himself.
00:45:22I don't think he wanted to express his...
00:45:24or maybe he just couldn't express the horror that he'd been through.
00:45:29But he was a different person.
00:45:32He was not the same George Stevens that left.
00:45:38When you're making movies
00:45:40and you walk onto a soundstage
00:45:43and you walk past a lot of two-by-fours holding up facades,
00:45:48sawdust all over the floor,
00:45:50the smell of plaster and wood,
00:45:52and then you come around the unseemly backside
00:45:57into a grand palace,
00:45:59which is perfectly authentically decorated,
00:46:02and you suddenly see the artifice
00:46:05in which you are telling your stories.
00:46:08Everything seemed fake now.
00:46:10Nothing seemed real.
00:46:12And being told off by Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohen
00:46:16and Jack Warner and Daryl Zanuck,
00:46:18they weren't going to stand for that anymore.
00:46:21They wanted to bring back home with them
00:46:25the reality of what they had gone through.
00:46:29Capra takes this moment to restart himself
00:46:34as one of the first independents.
00:46:37Came up with an idea to make a director's company,
00:46:42just directors who made their own pictures.
00:46:45Willy Warner was in it, and when George Stevens got back,
00:46:49we offered him to come in with us, and he came in with us.
00:46:52So the three of us became Liberty Films.
00:46:55This idea, which has been repeated through history
00:46:58with United Artists and First Artists,
00:47:00there's always an urge for filmmakers
00:47:02to take control of their destiny.
00:47:04They don't want that force above them
00:47:06telling them what they can make and how it should be cut.
00:47:10And Capra is the first one out
00:47:13with what is going to become his most important film.
00:47:18It's a Wonderful Life is an incredibly genuine,
00:47:21incredibly brave film for Capra to undertake after World War II
00:47:26because he has gone through an incredible experience
00:47:30where he has given so much for others
00:47:34in the way he sees his own labor.
00:47:37And he comes out of it, and it's inconsequential.
00:47:42In the same quiet, terrible way
00:47:45that George Bailey postpones his trips, postpones his life...
00:47:50Uh-oh.
00:47:51Please, let's not stop, George.
00:47:53I'll be back in a minute.
00:47:55...in order to serve a community of people
00:47:58that render him, in his perception, invisible.
00:48:02The essence of Capra is always a question of worth,
00:48:07a question of self-worth.
00:48:10Dear Father in Heaven.
00:48:12I think it was probably the strongest picture I've made.
00:48:16I think it's my favorite film
00:48:18because what it does is it epitomizes
00:48:21everything I tried to say in all the other films in one package.
00:48:25I never have run across such a unique story
00:48:29as a man who thought he was a failure.
00:48:35Help!
00:48:36Being given the opportunity to come back
00:48:39to the world as it would have been had he not been born.
00:48:42A very unique fantasy.
00:48:44What'd you say?
00:48:45I said I wish I'd never been born.
00:48:48Oh, you mustn't say things like that.
00:48:51You...
00:48:52Wait a minute.
00:48:53Wait a minute.
00:48:54That's an idea.
00:48:56It's a true contemplation in which, you know,
00:49:00Capra asks himself what the world would be without me.
00:49:07You're driving me crazy, too.
00:49:08I'm seeing things here.
00:49:09I'm going home and see my wife and family.
00:49:11You understand that?
00:49:12And I'm going home alone.
00:49:16The abandonment of George Bailey is truly existential.
00:49:22That is as dark as he can get.
00:49:25I think he really faces
00:49:27the darkest part of the mirror in that film.
00:49:34Many filmmakers, even if they remain active,
00:49:37create their testament movie at an earlier point in their career.
00:49:42And then they go on working,
00:49:45but not necessarily renovating themselves.
00:49:48And I think It's a Wonderful Life rephrases Capra.
00:49:53He truly ventures something that intimate,
00:49:58truly himself, out there on a limb.
00:50:02I want to live again.
00:50:04Please, God, let me live again.
00:50:06Let me live again.
00:50:12At the same time Capra was shooting It's a Wonderful Life,
00:50:15Weiler was making his last film under contract for Sam Goldwyn.
00:50:20He had regained about 20% of his hearing in one year,
00:50:24and Greg Toland, his cinematographer,
00:50:26helped to rig an audio amplifier
00:50:29that would allow Weiler to hear his actors.
00:50:32I've made pictures for over 40 years.
00:50:35There was one that was particularly close to me
00:50:39because it was done right after the war.
00:50:42Most of the films are fictional, you know, are fictional stories,
00:50:47and didn't really involve me.
00:50:50But since I was in the service during the war,
00:50:54right after the war I made a film called Best Years of Our Lives.
00:50:58That film gave me a great deal of satisfaction
00:51:02because it contributed something to the social life of the time.
00:51:07It made people understand veterans better.
00:51:11William Weiler came back from the war
00:51:14and suddenly saw, based on his knowledge of what war does to people,
00:51:19he went back and he made a movie,
00:51:22the greatest movie, arguably, of his entire career.
00:51:26Probably have a long ride because she's making a lot of stops,
00:51:29but you get there tomorrow afternoon.
00:51:31Sure, that's swell. OK, sign here.
00:51:34Boy, it sure is great to be going home.
00:51:37Here you go, sailor.
00:51:39Sign in at that...
00:51:42I'll do it for you.
00:51:44What's the matter? Think I can't spell my own name?
00:51:47No, I...
00:51:49It was about three returning veterans
00:51:52and the difficulties they had with returning to civilian life,
00:51:56of whom one was hurt.
00:52:00And supposedly others were not.
00:52:05Fourth floor.
00:52:07Because they were physically not hurt, but they were emotionally hurt.
00:52:13You're not going to work right away.
00:52:16You ought to rest a while, take a vacation.
00:52:19I've got to make money.
00:52:21Last year it was kill Japs and this year it's make money.
00:52:25In effect, when they come home, they're still fighting the internal war.
00:52:30And that internal war is something that haunts them,
00:52:33it haunts their dreams, it haunts their waking hours,
00:52:36it haunts the choices they make,
00:52:38it haunts how they react to conflict
00:52:41in the real world of post-war America.
00:52:44Can't you get those things out of your system?
00:52:46Oh, sure.
00:52:48Maybe that's what's holding you back.
00:52:50The war's over, you won't get any place till you stop thinking about it.
00:52:53Okay, honey, I'll do that.
00:52:55Being a veteran, I knew the subject matter.
00:52:58I didn't have to do much research
00:53:00about these people returning from the war.
00:53:03I knew how they felt, I knew what they were thinking of.
00:53:07Because I was one of them.
00:53:10You know, he stripped that whole production down to just its bare essentials.
00:53:15He didn't want to have fancy dolly shots,
00:53:17he didn't want a camera to go from room to room.
00:53:20Weiler wanted the movie to be realistic in every detail.
00:53:25He didn't want the help of a costume designer
00:53:27for his two lead actresses, Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright.
00:53:32Instead, he gave them money to buy their wardrobes
00:53:34off the rack at a department store.
00:53:37You're all going to do this for yourselves.
00:53:39We're not going to be pampered,
00:53:41we're not going to be put on little pedestals.
00:53:44And they all went along with it, you know, willingly.
00:53:47I've given you every chance to make something yourself.
00:53:50I gave up my own job when you asked me.
00:53:52I gave up the best years of my life, and what have you done?
00:53:55You flopped. Couldn't even hold that job in the drugstore.
00:53:59He was saving his powder because he wanted to really pack a wallop.
00:54:05When Fred Derry climbs up into the B-17,
00:54:09he reveals to us all the pieces of the planes
00:54:13that were sitting there with their tails in the air.
00:54:16But Wyler moves the camera for the first time.
00:54:18He really moves the camera.
00:54:21And there's countless B-17s in this World War II graveyard.
00:54:27And then he gets into the plane, and the camera does this amazing shot
00:54:30where it just moves into Fred.
00:54:40Hey, bud, what are you doing up there?
00:54:43Hey, you!
00:54:46What are you doing in that airplane?
00:54:49I think he backed the whole movie into that moment.
00:54:53I used to work in one of those.
00:54:56Reviving old memories, huh?
00:54:59Yeah, or maybe getting some of them out of my system.
00:55:02And I watch the best years of our lives at least once a year.
00:55:05I don't think a year's gone by over the last 30 years
00:55:08that I haven't watched that film once a year
00:55:10and try to bring people to see it for the first time
00:55:13so I can relive it through their eyes.
00:55:16Wyler's movie was praised as a masterpiece of American social realism.
00:55:21It won rave reviews
00:55:23and became the second-highest-grossing film in history.
00:55:27I believe a film should have something to say.
00:55:31And that, I suppose, is a message.
00:55:36I think it should make people think and feel, if possible,
00:55:42long after they've left the theater.
00:55:45The best years of our lives swept the Oscars that year.
00:55:50Thank you very much, Shirley.
00:55:52This is a very proud and a very happy moment.
00:55:55Wyler won his second Academy Award for Best Director
00:55:59and spent the next 20 years
00:56:02as one of Hollywood's most successful filmmakers.
00:56:06When he came back from the war and he had lost his hearing,
00:56:09his post-World War II movies seemed to become more cinematic.
00:56:14With the added strength of his visual compositional acuity,
00:56:18his painterly art became more painterly.
00:56:22In 1960, he won his third Academy Award for Ben-Hur.
00:56:28He never lost contact with the crew of The Memphis Belle.
00:56:37It doesn't make any sense that It's a Wonderful Life
00:56:41wasn't as big a popular smash as The Best Years of Our Lives.
00:56:46Because it wasn't.
00:56:48It was a flop when it came out.
00:56:51But that, for me, is the best Frank Capra movie ever made.
00:56:57The tragedy of It's a Wonderful Life, to me,
00:57:00is that the film fails not only at the box office, but critically.
00:57:07The critics are notoriously unsentimental.
00:57:10Of course it affects you.
00:57:12You want people to...
00:57:16You must understand, we all have egos, and I have a very big one.
00:57:20And if somebody doesn't like something I do,
00:57:24I feel it. I feel it very badly.
00:57:27The failure of It's a Wonderful Life put Liberty Films out of business.
00:57:32The company never made another movie.
00:57:35We sold Liberty Films to Paramount.
00:57:38We also sold our contracts to Paramount.
00:57:41That kind of soured me on the whole thing.
00:57:44So I said, maybe I should just lay off for a while.
00:57:47So I went down to my ranch and said, I'm just gonna quit for a while.
00:57:51Capra directed just a few more pictures before retiring in 1961.
00:57:56Each of these five directors who went through the war,
00:58:00some were shot at, Ford was wounded,
00:58:03Wyler lost his hearing,
00:58:06and they saw terrible things and participated in terrible things,
00:58:10and yet, coming out of it,
00:58:12each one made possibly their greatest film.
00:58:15Houston came out, and the first film he made after his military service
00:58:19was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
00:58:22You're so dumb, there's nothing to compare you with.
00:58:25You're the dumbest jackass. Look at each other, will you?
00:58:28Do you ever see anything like yourself for being dumb specimens?
00:58:31And of course this wonderful performance by Walter Houston,
00:58:34who's the best character in the whole piece.
00:58:37John Houston's work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
00:58:40earned him an Academy Award for both writing and directing
00:58:44and won Walter Houston an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.
00:58:48Many, many years ago, I raised a son,
00:58:51and I said, if you ever become a director or a writer,
00:58:55please find a good part for your old man. He did all right.
00:59:00Houston went on to have a long and prolific career
00:59:03as a celebrated director and actor.
00:59:06In 1981, after 35 years of appeals to the government,
00:59:10he was finally allowed to show Let There Be Light publicly.
00:59:15Today, the film is recognized as a milestone
00:59:18and is part of the Library of Congress National Film Registry.
00:59:23Houston and Wyler remained close friends for the rest of their lives.
00:59:30I'd had three years in the war in Europe,
00:59:34and that changed my life and my thinking.
00:59:38Professionally, I knew I wanted to do very different things
00:59:41than I'd done before.
00:59:44I was a maker of comedies.
00:59:48I came back, and I tried to make a comedy, and I couldn't do it.
00:59:53I started to work on one of those things,
00:59:56to do the fine star Ingrid Bergman,
01:00:00who was the number one star in America at that time,
01:00:03and I started on a comedy, and she was waiting for it,
01:00:05and she says, where is our comedy?
01:00:07And finally I said, it just isn't going to be funny,
01:00:10so we better forget it.
01:00:12What he had seen during the war in Etihad
01:00:15was so impactful for him
01:00:17that he thought he could never make something frivolous again.
01:00:23True to his word, Stevens never made another comedy.
01:00:28Instead, in the 1950s, he reemerged
01:00:31as one of Hollywood's most thoughtful and respected directors of drama.
01:00:36I hated to see him leave comedy for the other stuff
01:00:39that came out later on, for the more serious stuff,
01:00:43because nobody could do comedy quite like he was doing it.
01:00:50Stevens had taken all of the footage he had shot
01:00:53throughout the war and at Dachau,
01:00:55and locked it up in a warehouse.
01:00:57He retrieved the reels only once, in 1959,
01:01:01when he was preparing to direct The Diary of Anne Frank.
01:01:06He went alone to the screening room to watch the footage,
01:01:10put on the first reel of film,
01:01:12and after about one minute, turned it off.
01:01:17He drove it back to the warehouse,
01:01:19locked it up, and never looked at it again.
01:01:25To think that this is a man that had landed at D-Day
01:01:28and walked through the entire European theater,
01:01:31for this to be his war film
01:01:33is kind of extraordinary.
01:01:35And I think it is a reflection of his difficulty,
01:01:39feeling that any film could capture
01:01:43the feelings that he had had,
01:01:45his despair about humankind.
01:01:49And The Diary of Anne Frank tries to find a glimmer of hope.
01:01:54I think the world may be going through a phase,
01:01:58the way I was with Mother.
01:02:02It'll pass.
01:02:05Maybe not for hundreds of years, but someday.
01:02:11We will always go back and back and back to their films, all of them,
01:02:17because whether pre- or post-war,
01:02:20they speak to the lives that all of our parents and grandparents lived.
01:02:25They told the stories.
01:02:28Ford is the filmmaker with tremendously long vision,
01:02:33tremendous sense of perspective.
01:02:37There was an optimism in Ford's films of the 20s and 30s
01:02:44that's never quite there after that.
01:02:47You get much more the cinema of myth,
01:02:51the cinema of loss, I think.
01:02:55It took me many years and fitful maturity
01:03:00to understand that the questions that Ford was asking
01:03:05about what is owed to the past were still important
01:03:09and ever more important as the 50s became the 60s and the 70s,
01:03:14and my generation, who grew up in a consumer society
01:03:18and post-war affluence,
01:03:20did we stop to think about the sacrifices that people made for us?
01:03:28Ford never forgot the men of his unit.
01:03:31Soon after the war, he opened the Field Photo Home,
01:03:35known by the veterans who used it as the farm.
01:03:38It served as a social club and rehabilitation centre for his men.
01:03:44When Ford died, a tattered flag from the Battle of Midway
01:03:48was draped over his coffin.
01:03:55Mr. Frank Capra.
01:03:59Believe in yourself,
01:04:02because only the valiant can create.
01:04:06Only the daring should make films,
01:04:09and only the morally courageous are worthy of speaking
01:04:13to their fellow man for two hours, end of the dark.
01:04:19It's a Wonderful Life was only appreciated on television decades later,
01:04:24and then it became a perennial.
01:04:26Merry Christmas!
01:04:28I think with Capra, his redemption couldn't be more complete.
01:04:32Merry Christmas, you wonderful building alone!
01:04:36Kids, Jamie!
01:04:38It's not only a film that is remembered and loved,
01:04:42but it's part of a season, it's part of a yearly ritual.
01:04:46In every family, in every country in the world.
01:04:49George! Mary! Mary!
01:04:52George, darling! Mary!
01:04:56The greatest of all emotions
01:04:59that move us
01:05:02is love.
01:05:07The world is not all evil.
01:05:11Yes, we do have nightmares, but we also have dreams.
01:05:16We do have villainy,
01:05:19but we also have great compassion.
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