audiobook Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War by Mark Harris in History

Review

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful. Insightful; Interesting Look at Hollywood HistoryBy Evan PurcellWith the new documentary coming out soon; this is the best time to buy a copy of this book. It's a fascinating look at Hollywood past; and how wartime politics shaped the careers of five similar-yet-different directors. It's an insightful time capsule for movie buffs; and I highly recommend it. (When I finished reading it; I gave my copy to my dad; and he liked it too. This seems like a pretty solid "dad gift.")1 of 1 people found the following review helpful. History and CinemaBy Patrick Mc Coyreally enjoyed Mark Harris' first book; Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood; about the changes in the movie industry in the late 60s. It was with great anticipation that I read his latest; Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (2014) which combines two of my greatest interest-films and WWII history. Harris follows five Hollywood directors (John Ford; William Wyler; John Huston; Frank Capra; and George Stevens) who enlist in the armed forces and make propaganda films and record events that take places during the war. It is a rich subject; but it felt as though most of the events that took place during the war were mired in bureaucratic read tape and doesn't make for the most compelling reading. Furthermore; most of the directors depicted in this book don't come off as heroes of the cinema: Ford and Capra in particular come off as a medal-chasing dictatorial drunk and a malleable soft-headed nationalist respectively. Huston is shown as a womanizing cheat; Wyler almost loses his hearing completely and George Stevens; the director I knew the least about is profoundly affected by bearing witness and documenting the liberation of the Dachau Prison Camp that is used as evidence of atrocities at he Nuremberg trials. I suppose it would be impossible but I should like to see a book that follows Japanese directors such as Ozu; who served in the war as well. I found the sections where Huston is assigned to the Aleutian Island War interesting; since it is a campaign I knew little about much like that of the North African campaign that ended with the battle of Tunisia that Stevens arrived to late to film. Ford got some great film at Midway and Huston made a film about the Italy invasion among other highlight. Harris meticulously uses primary and secondary sources to give a detailed picture of the lives of the directors before; during; and after the war. It's another fascinating book about American cinema and the Second World War.2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. First Rate Piece of Historical ReportingBy mjbMark Harris’ “Five Came Back” is a first rate piece of historical reporting; the book details how five (John Ford; John Huston; George Stevens; William Wyler; Frank Capra) well known directors (and in the case of Capra and Ford; arguably Hollywood’s two most powerful directors) joined the military in WW II and what each of them went through. It takes some time to get going and there are moments in the first third where it feels over-detailed; but Harris maintains a critical eye throughout and never allows himself to dip into mushy praise for any of the filmmakers’ films; before; during and after the war (he’s particularly strong on the documentary films where these directors re-enacted battle scenes without fully acknowledging it; the most famous being Huston’s “The Battle of San Pietro” which has almost no actual footage; though Huston refused to his death to admit that and always made it seem like he was there to witness the battle; which he was not) and he includes a short chapter on their post war careers with astute insights about the ways in which their experiences did (and in Capra’s case did not) influence their post war films. It’s no surprise that Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives is the most personal of the post-war films and he manages to make all three main characters in some ways an extension of himself.Mostly; their experiences were far more harrowing than I imagined; particularly for Wyler and Stevens. Though none of the five was ever in serious danger of dying; Wyler lost most of his hearing while shooting footage on a B17 and Stevens who seems the most affected by the war (he was considered a master of the light comedy before the war and never made another after); shot an immense amount of film during the liberation of Dachau; something he never really fully recovered from emotionally. Significantly; Wyler and Stevens are the two who are least enamored of returning to Hollywood after the war; they weren’t sure they could return to a normal life and both struggled when they finally did; Stevens in particular.The book is full of information I knew little about. For example; I didn’t know that Stevens’ footage of Dachau played an important part in the Nuremberg trials (it seems to me that much of the footage we have of the residue of the Holocaust – the piles of bodies; the bulldozing of those bodies -- came from Stevens and his people) or that Capra really never left Washington DC. There’s nothing here about Ford that would surprise anyone; he was devoutly pro-military and joined up before anyone else; got himself into a position of power early on; hooking himself to William Donovan’s OSS train (Donovan provided a lot of cover for Ford over the years of the war); and understood how to play the system. The most important footage he shot was of the Battle of Midway and though he claimed credit for all the footage shot; he actually shot only a small part of it. He also in later years seriously inflated his experiences and while his unit was deeply involved in filming D-Day and Ford claimed to be the first filmmaker to hit the beach; Harris thinks it unlikely he actually left the ships in the English Channel until at least a couple of days after the initial invasion. Harris also thinks that the vitriol which Ford directed at John Wayne for not joining up (and Ford’s incessant trolling for medals post war) masked guilt at not having done enough during the war.And though Capra is seen as a preening neurotic (and his career seems the most ruined by the war; of the five; he was the one who struggled the most to figure out how to integrate his experience with his work and beyond It’s a Wonderful Life; which was a box office failure; never made another significant film) whose films pre-war in particular were confused politically; mostly because Capra was confused politically (for example; in 1937; he supported Franco’s fascists in Spain); he comes off better than Huston; who joined up because he wanted an adventure; saw a tiny bit of battle (mostly some dead bodies); freaked out; and started drinking and whoring like a mad-man and generally was in way over his head and desperate to get back to his Hollywood career; though he undoubtedly did some interesting work during the war (most notably a documentary about vets and post traumatic stress; which clearly Huston was also suffering under; which was a serious effort than no one saw until the 70s).It’s also amazing how many Hollywood figures crossed their paths during the war as part of the military; writers; directors and cinematographers in particular; and at various times these five worked with Gregg Toland; Budd Schulberg; John Sturges; Mel Blanc; Chuck Jones; Carol Reed; Paddy Chayefsky; Carl Foreman; Anatole Litvak; William Clothier; Dr. Suess; Frank Tashlin; Stuart Heisler; Garson Kanin; William Keighley;At one point; Stevens runs into Andre Malraux and his band of resistance fighters (he said Malraux’s men were fanatically loyal to him); at another; Wyler via Stevens employs Hemingway’s brother (said to be fearless) as his Jeep driver on a harrowing drive to his home town in Germany; a place he left in the early 30s because of growing anti-semitism. It's a book well worth reading.