Hollywood

Hollywood, the world's movie capital, offered the American—and British—public escape from the war and at the same time tried to build a popular consensus behind the war effort. The war suffused cinemas, from government promotional films, to newsreels (which, before television, were the public's primary visual source of news), and features. Average weekly attendance in the USA soared to 100 million people—three-quarters of the population—and profits reached record levels.

Films attracted government regulation of their content that was unprecedented, before or since, in American media. The Office of War Information (OWI) closely monitored the studios' output. It issued a lengthy manual for the studios (‘Will this picture help win the war?’ was the ultimate question by which to judge a movie) and tried to steer producers to the war themes it favoured. OWI officials read the screenplays of most major pictures as production went forward, offered suggestions (sometimes gratefully received and sometimes angrily rejected), on occasion went so far as to write dialogue, and reviewed finished films. Although lacking censorship power, OWI achieved considerable influence through patriotic persuasion and through its liaison with the Office of Censorship, which held Hollywood's vital foreign market by the throat.

The studios tried to remould attitudes about enemies and allies to fit the war's political viewpoint. A top priority was revising the image of the USSR, most strikingly in Warner Brother's Mission to Moscow, based on the memoirs of Joseph E. Davies, the American ambassador to Moscow from 1936 to 1938. Converting the USSR into a worthy democratic ally, Mission to Moscow invented a pleasant land of plenty, cast the dreaded secret police as harmless comic gumshoes, reverently portrayed Stalin as an ominiscient world statesman, and even endorsed the discredited Kremlin line that the massive purges of the 1930s had been necessary to root out fifth columnists. Controversial politics and dull entertainment, Mission to Moscow became a Cold War embarrassment.

China and the UK were easier to bend to propaganda needs, although the results often proved misleading. Allies became Americans with quaint customs and mildly different looks. Representations of China followed Hollywood's well-worn formula of warm-hearted, condescending exoticization. Dragon Seed starred Katharine Hepburn, made up with slanted eyes. China had to be shown as a modern, unified nation. At OWI's insistence peasants' mud huts were transformed into neat little brick houses ‘with a considerable feeling of civilization about them’. Holly wood's Chinese were likeable, loyal fighters, but always overshadowed by the Americans.

The British excited American admiration. The White Cliffs of Dover, based on Alice Duer Miller's mawkish and hugely popular poem of the same title, perpetuated a sentimental identification with Britain. The biggest hit about the British was Mrs Miniver ( 1942), which reassured audiences that the UK had the will to win and was democratizing the class system, which rankled with many Americans.

The USA, too, was painted in warmly idealized tones. Hollywood and the OWI collaborated to show a unified nation, happily mobilized for victory to its smallest details. A woman who hoarded 127 tubes of lipstick was shamed by her housemates in Tender Comrade. Screeching tyres were slashed from Preston Sturges's screwball comedy Hail the Conquering Hero so as not to undermine rubber conservation drives. Industrial disputes gave way to labour–management co-operation for the war effort in King Vidor's paean to capitalist industry, An American Romance. Racial discrimination, the biggest blot on American democracy in a war for the Four Freedoms, was harder to cure: OWI settled for occasional positive roles for blacks in films such as The Ox-Bow Incident and Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat. Blacks sometimes got a better break on the screen than in real life; Bataan featured a racially integrated combat unit when none existed in the real army for democracy (see also African Americans at war).

The ultimate expression of the home front, David O. Selznick's lavish Since You Went Away, invoked every wartime cliché. A husband leaves for war, his nervous wife takes a job as a welder in a bomber factory, her daughter postpones college to work as a nurse, the black maid works overtime for no pay, a wimpish young man attains manhood and dies valiantly in battle, and dad returns to the cosy home in the suburbs on a snowy Christmas Eve. Selznick reassured Americans that they could cope with death, domestic disorder, and changing sex roles, and everything would be put back to normal after the war.

Combat movies offered the irresistible combination of vivid action, exotic locations, and clearly defined heroes and villains. Early combat films made the battle front seem scarcely more deadly than a football game. Only towards the end of the war did Hollywood begin to come to terms with reality, most notably in The Story of G.I. Joe, based on dispatches by the war correspondent Ernie Pyle. The Story of G.I. Joe avoided the false heroics of most combat pictures. Death was a lottery and another firefight loomed up the road. Hollywood typically reassured audiences that the war was rational and that military service promised upward mobility after the war.

The enemies wore black hats, but with important differences. OWI insisted that the war was with Hitler and the Nazis, not the entire German people. Hollywood's Nazis were appropriately ruthless, though the movie-makers, like most of the public, could not allow themselves to contemplate the Nazis' utter depravity. Even in serious treatments of Nazism such as The Hitler Ganganti-Semitism was barely acknowledged. But the distinction between good (if duped) Germans and bad Germans was an uneasy one. Howls of protest greeted the inclusion of a sympathetic young German army lieutenant in The Moon is Down.

Hollywood granted the Japanese no sympathetic individuals; they were always a mass, fanatically devoted to the war-mongering emperor. They were ‘prints off the same negative’, according to Frank Capra's Why We Fight films for the army. While the Germans fought a recognizable war, the Japanese were depicted as little better than jungle animals.

By 1944 the cycle of war pictures had begun to wane. Like Europeans earlier in the war, Americans no longer wanted fictional re-enactments. Escape took the form of musicals, such as Going My Way with Bing Crosby, a story of two priests which swept the Oscars in 1944, and Judy Garland in Meet Me In St Louis, with its nostalgic return to 1904. ‘Elegant shockers’, such as Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet, put violence in a familiar domestic context. Religious pictures, such as Song of Bernadette, offered divine reassurance. In 1945 Darryl F. Zanuck campaigned for internationalism with Wilson, a tedious effort to sanctify Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924), the US president from 1912 to 1920, as a prophet of world peace, but a public tired of war savoured what had always been Hollywood's preferred product: escape.

Clayton R. Koppes

Bibliography

Koppes, C. R., and and Black, G. D. , Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (New York, 1987).