Movies During the War

MOVIES DURING THE WAR

Government Work

Hollywood, ever fearful of any conflict that might upset their system of production and generally aligned politically with the president, had worked with the government prior to the war. In August 1940 President Roosevelt asked Nicholas Schenck, the president of M-G-M, to make a film on foreign policy and defense. Schenck produced Eyes of the Navy. In February 1941 a filmed message was shown of President Roosevelt thanking Hollywood for its efforts and cooperation with the "expansion of our defense force." By mid 1941 government propaganda offices such as the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) were being formed. Robert E. Sherwood, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and a screenwriter, joined COI, whose job was to counter anti-American propaganda in Europe. Sherwood set up the Foreign Information Service (that eventually would become Voice of America) and promptly recruited notable writers, including Thornton Wilder, Stephen Vincent Benét, and John Houseman, to help. The work was usually pro-American, not anti-Nazi, in tone. The single largest cooperation ever between the government and America's entertainment industry was under way.

Coordination

The government did not actively censor Hollywood during the war. Instead it worked with the studios to coordinate Hollywood and government efforts to the benefit of both. Ten days after Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt appointed Lowell Mellett as coordinator of government films. Mellett traveled to Hollywood and cut a deal. The government would not interfere with Hollywood's production and distribution in return for a guarantee to show all films released with a War Action Committee seal. Mellett knew Hollywood would cooperate if their box office remained unaffected. By June 1942 Roosevelt had created the Office of War Information (OWI), a government propaganda agency which promptly set up an office in Hollywood headed by Nelson Poynter, a newspaper editor. Sherwood's COI became OWI's foreign branch, and the Bureau of Motion Pictures, headed by Mellett, joined as well to oversee production of government newsreels or "Victory" shorts. Former radio newsman Elmer Davis became the head of all OWI offices.

Celluloid Battles

Encouraged by the government to produce movies with a war theme, Hollywood rushed in with abandon, if not with subtlety. The industry released some seventy war-related films within six months of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Most of the films were simply typical Hollywood themes grafted onto a war scenario. The gangster film, the comedy, and the musical were all given wartime twists. In The Daring Young Man (1942), racketeers become Nazi spies. An aging Johnny Weissmuller acted out Tarzan's battle against Nazis in Africa. Another theme was even easier—Japan-bashing. Anti-Japanese feeling raged in the United States. Japanese Americans had been interned by executive order in February 1942. The films and their advertisements revealed the mood of the country. Movies such as Menace of the Rising Sun and Remember Pearl Harbor had no purpose other than to portray the Japanese as cruel and bloodthirsty. Caricatures of the Japanese as fanged, bucktoothed monkeys were common and reflected in the language of the movies, where the Japanese were the target of American contempt and hatred. They were "brutes," or "animals," and needed "to be exterminated" in the most extreme cases. The OWI office of Poynter was troubled by the trend immediately upon his arrival in May 1942. He did not think the war was being treated seriously and visited studio heads to convince them to change their tactics.

The Manual

Officially OWI had no censorship power. Poynter emphasized this fact to the studios. The government was looking for cooperation. He wanted Hollywood to make positive films. While censors usually delete material, the OWI wanted to insert the government view of the country and the war into the films. To speed up the process and save the studios money, he asked that scripts be submitted to the OWI so that changes could be made before shooting. Some in Hollywood howled at the suggestion, but the studios ultimately complied. The industry had been censoring itself for years, so occasional complaints of OWI pressure were somewhat hypocritical. Poynter was not a movie man and often suggested ridiculous changes, but to some extent Hollywood listened and complied with OWI's manual. The emphasis in the manual was on the positive. The manual asked questions such as "Will this picture help win the war?" and "If it is an 'escape picture,' will it harm the war effort by creating a false picture of America, her allies, or the world we live in?" OWI's belief was that fascism was the enemy, not the German or the Japanese people. Poynter tried to restore some balance into films by suggesting "good" Germans be shown anguishing over Nazi tactics and that multi-ethnic unity be portrayed.

Mrs. Miniver

The film that Poynter cited as an example of what OWI wanted was William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver (1942). Set in Great Britain during the early stages of the war and portraying the "home front" during the Battle of Britain, Mrs. Miniver combined all of the elements that OWI viewed as necessary to a positive portrayal of the war effort. Greer Garson portrays a middle-class woman presiding over a country house near the English Channel. As war breaks out, she demonstrates the fortitude needed at home. Mr. Miniver (played by Walter Pidgeon) helps night patrols and assists in the evacuation of Dunkirk. The oldest son, Tony, becomes an RAF pilot fighting in the skies above Britain. Class distinctions drop away magically, and the village unites smoothly in the war effort while also trying to keep life as normal as possible. The film ends with the impassioned speech of a priest describing the war as "the people's war" for freedom. The movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1942. OWI praised Mrs. Miniver profusely and asked Hollywood to produce similar films set in the United States or in Allied countries such as China and the Soviet Union. Other movies honored a variety of contributions to the war. Tender Comrade (1943) portrayed women without men, working in a wartime factory and living together in a democratic, unified way while waiting for the men to come home. Action in the North Atlantic (1943) showed the contribution of the merchant marine. The Fighting Seabees (1944) portrayed the patriotism of construction workers helping the war effort. OWI's favorite word was unity.

HOLLYWOOD ENLISTS

On 12 August 1942 Clark Gable was sworn in as a forty-two-year-old private in the U.S. Army. Gable claimed that he had "no interest in acting as long as the war is going on," His wife, Carole Lombard, had been killed in a plane crash earlier in the year. She was flying back from a war-bond rally, Hollywood's first "casualty" of war.

Gable joined the ranks of many of Hollywood's elites who had enlisted voluntarily in the first months of the war. Hollywood stars were a kind of royalty providing the role-model behavior and the occasional scandal worthy of the princes and princesses of Europe. Gable withstood the rigors of Officers Candidate school and contributed to an army air force film, Wings Up (1943), about the training program.

Within weeks of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, stars such as James Stewart and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., had joined up. Director Frank Capra volunteered, as did Henry Fonda, Tyrone Power, and Darryl Zanuck, among the many. Hollywood prepared for other sacrifices: private planes were grounded, and the navy considered commandeering private yachts and pleasure boats. Executives prepared to lose 35 to 50 percent of their manpower to the armed forces. Those who did not or could not join tarnished their reputations. Actor Lew Ayres claimed conscientious-objector status, and within days theater owners in Chicago prohibited his films from being shown. Frank Sinatra, the popular singing star, was declared 4-F due to a punctured eardrum. By war's end his popularity had plummeted.

Sources:

Thomas Doherty, Projections of War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993);

Otto Friedrich, City of Nets (New York Harper & Row, 1986);

"Hollywood to the Colors: One of Biggest War Time Assets is Set for All-Out Effort," Newsweek, 18 (22 December 1941): 59-60.

OWI Exerts Pressure

Despite OWI pleas, not everyone in Hollywood portrayed the homefront as unified and democratic. Studios resented the intrusiveness of government officials who admittedly knew little about the film industry. During the summer of 1942, 20th Century—Fox embarassed the government by releasing Little Tokyo, U.S.A., an anti-Japanese B movie that portrayed the internment of Japanese Americans earlier in the year. OWI objected strenuously, but the studio rightly pointed out that it was only portraying government policy in action. OWI responded to the movie by pushing for more script supervision, which became a large part of its work. Their second response, however, was much more effective. Hollywood had been ignoring much of OWI's code of conduct, using military approval as a rubber stamp to get films through the government agencies. The military was happy to offer equipment and services to any film that portrayed them in a positive light. Democratic unity was not an issue for them. With army approval for a film, the studios felt no need to please OWI. So in the fall of 1942, OWI decided to get tough. Ulric Bell was appointed liaison between OWI and the film industry in November. Though the government again claimed no power of censorship, it did justifiably control information that would be leaving the United States. Since most Hollywood films made their profit margin on overseas distribution, Bell began exerting economic pressure to force studios to comply with OWI. Films deemed inappropriate by OWI simply would not be released overseas because of the potentially detrimental effect on the war effort. OWI was saying, "Comply by our rules or choose to lose money." Hollywood began to comply more readily. By early 1943 OWI was reviewing scripts more regularly and offering suggestions. By the end of the war OWI had read 1,652 Hollywood scripts and had effected changes in nearly 70 percent of them.

Capra

Not all of Hollywood was resisting the war effort or the government. Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Frank Capra, one of the film industry's star directors, enlisted in the army. He was made a colonel and immediately put to work making short training and educational films for troops. But Capra's greatest contribution to the war effort was in his Why We Fight series. Made for wider release, the series, consisting of seven separate films, attempted to portray the events leading up to the war and explain whom the United States was fighting and exactly why. Capra was a virtuoso director. After initially balking at the plan, he proceeded to pull out all the stops and produce a monumental documentary. He used maps, diagrams, optical printing, archival footage, double exposures, and, in select cases, reenactment of events. He had first come to realize the power of the documentary from Nazi Germany, the master of propaganda. Capra had first seen Leni Riefenstahl's homage to the Nazis, Triumph of the Will, in early 1942. The sheer power of the images from the German director's camera stunned and horrified Capra. He would eventually incorporate footage from the films into his own work, turning the tables on Riefenstahl. The first film in the series, Prelude to War, won an Oscar for best documentary of 1942. Other segments followed: The Battle of Britain, The Battle of Russia, The Nazi Strike, and Divide and Conquer in 1943 and War Comes to America in 1945. Not all of the films were released commercially. Prelude to War was delayed in release until 1943 and did not fare well at the box office. Dollars aside, however, Capra had triumphed over Riefenstahl as a filmmaker and counterpropagandist. Other directors followed Capra into war and contributed to recording what has been called the most documented event in human history. John Ford personally filmed The Battle of Midway Island (1943) while standing on a beach. The raw, disturbed footage, blurred and shaken because Ford had used a hand-held camera, became a technical innovation worth copying for effect in later films. John Huston made a documentary (Let There Be Light ) showing shell-shocked veterans. The army would not allow it to be released. Disney studios estimated that 94 percent of its wartime work was for the war effort. Its Victory Through Airpower was a documentary supporting the air war against the Axis. The film did well at the box office, due in large part to its stunning animated visuals.

STAYING POWER

Stars were often the main point of movies in the 1940s. Under the studio system films were often cobbled together as vehicles for presenting the personalities the public wanted. The annual poll of the Motion Picture Herald revealed the stars with the most staying power. Bing Crosby headed the list for five consecutive years in the 1940s. With films such as Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St Mary's (1945), Crosby, who was equally popular as a singer, scoring hit after hit, was one of the decade's stars among the stars.

1944	1945	1946	1947	1948
1. Bing Crosby	Bing Crosby	Bing Crosby	Bing Crosby	Bing Crosby
2. Gary Cooper	Van Johnson	Ingrid Bergman	Betty Grable	Betty Grable
3. Bob Hope	Greer Garson	Van Johnson	Ingrid Bergman	Abbott and Costello
4. Betty Grable	Betty Grable	Gary Cooper	Gary Cooper	Gary Cooper
5. Spencer Tracy	Spencer Tracy	Bob Hope	Humphrey Bogart	Bob Hope
6. Greer Garson	Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper (tie)	Humphrey Bogart	Bob Hope	Humphrey Bogart
7. Humphrey Bogart	Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper (tie)	Greer Garson	Clark Gable	Clark Gable
8. Abbott and Costello	Bob Hope	Margaret O'Brien	Gregory Peck	Cary Grant
9. Cary Grant	Judy Garland	Betty Grable	Claudette Colbert	Spencer Tracy
10. Bette Davis	Margaret O'Brien	Roy Rogers	Alan Ladd	Ingrid Bergman

Other War Films

For all of the poorly made films that the studios cranked out during the war years, a few films met OWI standards and became timeless movies of the war years. David O. Selznick's Since You Went Away (1944) became the ultimate home-front statement. Selznick, who had produced Gone With the Wind in 1939 and Rebecca in 1940, wrote the script for Since You Went Away himself. John Cromwell directed. The film starred Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones, Shirley Temple, and Agnes Moorhead and portrayed life at home while father fights in the war. The whole family pitches in, though, and unlike Mrs. Miniver, Since You Went Away has a happy ending. OWI loved the film. Another happy ending of a different kind occurred in Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942), now considered one of the truly great films of the war years. Humphrey Bogart plays Rick, a cynical idealist trying to survive in refugee-laden Casablanca. Bogart mastered his "tough guy with a soft heart" persona in Casablanca. He resists getting involved in the politics of the time but ultimately risks his life and sacrifices his love for the larger good. His speech at the airport as he forces Ingrid Bergman to board the plane without him concisely sums up the war-era feelings OWI tried to promote. The problems of "two little people" don't amount to a "hill of beans," Rick tells Ilsa as his dormant idealism emerges. Rick has chosen the better good over personal triumph. OWI loved it, as did the American public. The film won an Oscar for best picture in 1943. Another popular war-era film was Preston Sturges's Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), a satire of the home front. OWI did not like the movie, but they underestimated the American public's willingness to laugh at itself.

Russia

Ironically, the effort to please OWI led to a series of films about Russia, America's ally against Germany. Though Joseph Stalin had fallen out of favor among American leftists in the late 1930s due to his purge trials and nonaggression pact with the Nazis, he had regained some American sympathies during his years as America's ally. At the request of OWI, Hollywood produced pro-Soviet films that depicted Russians as remarkably similar to Americans and on the side of right. In 1943 Mission to Moscow (directed by Michael Curtiz) was released. A controversy ensued, but the film was a hit. Based on a book by Joseph Davies, the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Mission to Moscow portrayed Stalin as a strong, moral leader; by 1947 it became an embarrassment as the Cold War spread. Warner Bros, destroyed all of its release prints, and Mission to Moscow, like other films such as Song of Russia (M-G-M, 1943) and The North Star (1943, with screenplay by Lillian Hellman, music by Aaron Copland and lyrics by Ira Gershwin) became a focal point of Washington's anti-Communist hearings after the war. Jack Warner, producer of Mission to Moscow, denounced the movie before the House Un-American Activities Committee and then named his screenwriter Howard Koch a Communist.

THE MALTESE FALCON: B MOVIE TO
FILM HISTORY

George Raft could have had the part but did not want it. "Not an important picture," he said. The 1931 film version of the novel had been a flop. He had Bogart removed from Manpower (1941) so he could take a starring role in the film. Bogart was free, then, to become Sam Spade for Hollywood's third attempt at filming Dashiell Hammett's 1930 novel, The Maltese Falcon. The other two versions had failed miserably, in part because they had taken too much license with Hammett's tightly plotted work.

The film was John Huston's first as a director. He wrote the script, staying true to the novel. Warner Bros, had low expectations for The Maltese Falcon. They liked it as a low-budget production. Bogart was not yet a major star, though High Sierra, released earlier in 1941, had increased his stature. Mary Astor was reconstructing a shaky career ruined by scandal in 1936. Sidney Greenstreet was a sixty-one-year-old Englishman who had never appeared in a movie. Peter Lorre was a struggling character actor. They began an unlikely assembly preparing to make another low-grade production. Instead they made film history. The Maltese Falcon is today considered a classic and is often referred to as the first real film noir, a strictly American style of film making that reached its peak in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Sources:

Jonathan Coir, Humphrey Bogart: Take It and Like It (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991);

"The Maltese Falcon," Newsweek. 18 (13 October 1941): 66-67.

Aftermath

The war in Japan ended in two flashes in August 1945. The nuclear age arrived, and the United States and its film industry would never be the same. On 31 August 1945 President Harry Truman disbanded the Office of War Information. Hollywood was again free to produce movies without government intervention. Within two years, however, despite its cooperation during the war years, Hollywood was again the target of Washington investigations. As life returned to normal following the war, focus on the laws of the land also returned, and the Justice Department began its investigation into the studio system and the Hollywood monopoly. The investigation concluded with a Supreme Court decision that effectively stripped the studios of their theater chains. The decision, in tandem with a high personal-income tax rate that hit Hollywood stars hard, spelled doom for the studio system. Stars such as Bing Crosby and Bob Hope agitated to be released from their studio contracts and to be allowed to form their own independent production companies to avoid the high income tax. Independent theaters limited the studios' profitability. When HUAC began investigating Hollywood in 1947, the studio system was on its last legs; the introduction of television the following year hurt the studios even more. Although Hollywood as a place continued to produce films, and the studios remained in operation, the factory system of cinema production, which had ushered the nation through war, disappeared.