“Don’t put yourself in unnecessary danger, focus on what you see, and take pictures of everything.”
They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but moving pictures are often more effective even than that, if only because more people watch movies than read books. During World War II, five of Hollywood’s most prominent film directors—John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens—enlisted in the military and were sent to the frontlines. Not to fight but to document the war via film.
The most remarkable aspect of Laurent Bouzereau’s comprehensive documentary series Five Came Back is not the astounding archival footage captured by these talented, iron-willed, rough-edged, vainglorious directors (which is substantial and further represented by an accompanying slate of “reference films”), but the way in which the filmmakers’ aims evolved as the war went on. Early on they were cranking out short propaganda films to play before features in an effort to sell war bonds. Later though, as the dynamics of the war developed and various startling realities came to light, the film projects grew increasingly ambitious and personal and less concerned with the government’s agenda. And of course they returned from the war with vastly altered perspectives that informed their subsequent commercial efforts. Consider that Stevens, known primarily for his light comedies, was part of the crew that discovered the atrocities at the Dachau death camp. Or that Wyler found himself documenting the ruins of his hometown.
Cannily, rather than frame the narrative with commentary from historians of WWII or cinema, Bouzereau utilizes modern filmmakers as his insightful talking heads, namely Paul Greengrass, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, and Lawrence Kasdan, each of whom serves as an advocate and critic of one of the five subjects. Three hours isn’t really adequate to thoroughly cover the multitude of storylines and subjects assembled here, and the source book by Mark Harris is now high on my to-be-read list (which probably means I’ll get to it sometime within the next decade).