THE problem that faced American movie producers from the moment the United States entered the war, which pushed the reluctant industry into declarations as to the nature of the times, was to make clear to movie audiences as much of the problems of fascism and democracy and the struggle between them as can be handled by movies. Since December 8 the movie people have been pecking away at the problem, mostly at the outside of it, but diligently and without stint. In order to show a fascist demagogue, they presented some of his mannerisms, like his salute, a great deal of theatrical brutality and hot temper, a few of his desires for a Nazi world, a small part of the psychology and background that produced him. The movie battlefield has been without exception a neat, heroic and orderly corner of what a real battlefield must be like; one that has exploded realistically enough but never very unpleasantly. Their Americans have been trouble-shooting automatons, licking a hundred times their weight in Nazis and Japanese; the other fighters of the United Nations haven’t been so ingenious, but they have been friendly, industrious and uncomplainingly good people. Everything else that the movies have shown as part of the Allied war effort can be summed up as highly complimentary to it, and anything that has had to do with the fascists, highly uncomplimentary.
The war movie today is appreciably less mawkish, melodramatic and naïve than the films that were made in the First World War. But this progress is only an advance in degree; the house has essentially the same framework, though its surface appeal is less silly, more direct, fresh and simple. Inherent, though, is still the melodramatic attitude, patriotic narrowness and glibness all around, no problem or character ever being encountered in all of its aspects or implications. To understand why this framework must remain, no matter who is building it—Dudley Nichols, William Wellman, Nunnally Johnson or Howard Hawks (who are obviously just as aware of the problem as any of us are)—will demand all the well worn facts of the Hollywood business. Let it suffice to say that it is a whole set of effects and counter-effects arranged to produce films that needn’t say—in fact almost never do say—what anyone actually, sincerely believes to be the truth.
The technique that has been used to present the problem has been, in the majority of cases, that of the Western film, where psychological, economic and social factors are subordinated almost out of sight to chase-fight, chase-fight, chase-fight, and final victory for the hero over the villain despite insurmountable odds. To have discussed fascism on any higher level than this would have made things more difficult than Hollywood likes them, and would, moreover, have brought into play all the forces of which it is most in fear, among them censorship and the supposed feverish resentment of the paying public for anything other than entertainment. The intense activity and heroics of the Western provided Hollywood with a camouflage in which there was a great deal of milling about. It abounds in villains, and so offers a convenient receptacle for Nazis; it gives a pleasant illusion of war, in which killing and destruction, in the midst of mystery, love and shenanigans, seem hardly real. If you decide, as the movie people did, that all you are going to show of fascism is its military aggression, then the Western offers a simple, black-and-white-version of what happens to people who take what doesn’t belong to them.
What has been most lacking is a forthright, informing portrait of the authoritarian character. The Nazis in movies have been either all black or all white, and in either case unsubstantiated. The common soldiers are unmitigated thugs and killers; the highest officers often have been, amazingly, brave, independent, civilized men, who were just barely distinguishable from the highest type of democrat. This interesting case of the Good Nazi is no doubt the result of a feeling that an all-black Nazi is too much of a stock type, too unbelievable and too inhuman. But in making the Nazi more humanly complex, the only psychological construction they could rearrange him into was one composed of the qualities which made their heroes, and he came out simply a good man. Their aim in making a more human Nazi was to make a more rational human being, whereas the Nazi, in fact, is most understandable as a human being acting on his irrational drives. Hollywood has always been averse to exploring or admitting the irrational aspects of human beings, and especially averse to discussing the kind of society that will force those irrational traits into dominating the entire character. This refusal to supply the Nazi with an adequate framework has led to a general vagueness as to just what a Nazi is, a fact strikingly brought out in the only movie Hollywood has made in which there is admitted to be such a person as a homegrown fascist—“The Keeper of the Flame.” The astounding fact about the fascist in this movie is that no one knew he was a fascist, and he was the most renowned person in America.
In an anxious relationship like that of Hollywood to the public, which is rather like the one between a child and the parent whom he wishes to please, the level of Hollywood’s behavior will approximate the level of the public’s response. The public’s response has often been disastrously irresponsible. This was apparent in the most important of wartime movie polls (that taken by Film Daily), in which the nation’s movie commentators were asked whether they thought Hollywood should deal with controversial issues. More than a third of them (38 percent) thought not—“No,” said one, “let’s keep controversy away from our shores as long as possible.” Or, one thought the screen should treat controversial issues of the day “if the facts are presented in such a way as not to influence the opinions of moviegoers one way or another.” In a medium that is so delicately tuned not to provoke its audience, this 38 percent of the nation’s film authorities can sometimes become the voice of the majority—the voice that is echoed by the vice-president of Paramount when he says, “My company carefully avoided injecting any political or controversial material into this picture.”* The picture, “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” But as a rule the effect of expressed opinions is more insidious than this, for it usually causes the producers to demand of their writers and directors just the amount of the sugary element that will in each picture flavor whatever of reality the writer or director would like to express. It is the denaturing ingredient that changes the castor oil into orange juice with a slight castor-oil flavor.
The movie audience’s desires are to a great extent that of the school teacher who would really like to let her students use their own ways of working out a problem, but is unable to leave them alone for fear they won’t all get the right answer. Mrs. Edna R. Carroll, the chairman of the Pennsylvania State Board of Motion Picture Censors, warned the movie people that “‘Desert Victory’ and ‘Prelude to War’ must both be considered from the angle of spreading a particular doctrine or a system of principles—in short, they are propaganda films, and all such excursions into the field of propaganda via the movies are part of a pattern of regimentation which is diametrically opposed to representative, free government.” This is the voice of the censor, one of Hollywood’s biggest problems. Then there is the exhibitors’ voice, another practical concern of the industry, which is continually rancorous, querulous and doubtful. Their chorus is that there are “too many war pictures; we want more musicals and comedies.” But their remarks are always mixed with uncertain statements like this: “In spite of too many war pictures, this one, ‘Commandos Strike at Dawn,’ was an exception and drew a fairly good crowd. It is queer that once in a while a war picture will draw a good crowd, and I can never guess ahead of time which one it will be.”
Also, above the exhibitors and the censors, are constant threats from die-hards in Congress that the country should do something about these “propaganda movies”—the last one being the Ploeser resolution demanding a congressional investigation of such pictures. Variety’s statement was that the resolution “should make the men in pictures realize that Congress does not recognize for the industry the same rights of free expression and free opinion which newspapers, radio and other businesses have.”
In trade journals ominous notes appeared. From The Hollywood Reporter: “Dies, Tenney and others who have taken the trouble to look deep into the activities of many of our writers and the groups that surround them are of the most definite opinion that those boys and girls are out to get communism on the screen, IF they can. BUT whether they know it or not, there are a lot of hands that handle the script before it goes to the production stage and there are more executives and producers to stop such writing than there are writers to write it.” The confusion as to what movie artists can or cannot say ended in such travesties as that surrounding “The North Star” in which the producer censored his writer’s script for mention of communism, the Hearst press excoriated the producer for mentioning communism, and the film’s most ardent upholders praised it for not having any communism whatsoever.
The war movie comes in four shapes: the in-praise-of-a-branch-of-the-service film; half-fiction, half-historic accounts of actual battles; a kind that in the early part of 1943 threatened to swamp the exhibitors, which shows the resistance of native populations in Europe to the conquerors; and home-front films. The first and second produced the best pictures, the fourth the worst and the third the most.
The ingredients of all servicemen films are identical psychologically. The central character, whether he is a bombardier in a Flying Fortress or the captain of a United Nations ship sailing supplies to Murmansk, has by the end of the picture become a hero of the war no matter how he started—as a sulker, the brother of the captain’s hated rival, or an idiot. These heroes are treated in groups rather than as individuals, and though they are given a democratic texture of names like Winocki, O’Doul, Feingold and Ramirez, they are given only one personality. Winocki-O’Doul-Feingold-Ramirez is a man of average looks, on the handsome side, very friendly, short on ideas and emotions, philosophically on the Saroyan side of the street and capable of trading you a wisecrack. At an early point in the picture the hero finds he is fighting a righteous war, because he sees the Germans or the Japanese taking blood from children to use for their own soldiers, firing on survivors of ships they have torpedoed, behaving ruthlessly in Pearl Harbor or Czecho-Slovakia, ripping up a painting by Picasso or the house that Tolstoy lived in.
The only conflicts in the pictures arise out of someone’s discontent with the way things are going, e.g., that he should have been promoted instead of flunked out of pilot school, that he is too conceited, surly and know-it-all to be liked, or that he is asked to be officer of the day too many times in a row. And all this has a rotten effect on the group’s morale. This conflict is resolved during the first battle, when the unruly one awakens to the fact that the Germans or the Japanese are bestial, that he would rather be fighting them than leave the service for a shore job, or when he finds that the captain is not the hard-boiled egg he supposed, because the captain asked him to play parchesi. The tolerance of this American is exhibited by his love and care for a dog, which he finds or is given by another group, and which he often calls Tojo or Hirohito. Usually there is a father in the battle whose son is killed, or has to have his leg cut off, which is meant to imply that the war is as grim as could be imagined; and there is a mother, wife or sweetheart at home to read a letter from one of the soldiers, to show that the home front is behind the boys and to show the importance of the family tie. Death and destruction in war are diluted almost out of sight by various devices. Only one of the group would be killed, and so the death was hardly noticed, or the emphasis turned from individual dying to mass slaughter so that it became no longer a matter of men dying but endless streams of extras running wildly out into the open and falling down. Death would be further sterilized by switching immediately to more heroics, intense activity or scenes with a merry note.
This does not add up to saying that all the war movies are bad. It would be closer to say that they are all slight. Their scope in no way admitted all of the material that should be encountered in dealing with the problems they set up. Many of the best films took original material that was superficial and tawdry and made the best they could out of it—this was the case with “Bataan,” “Air Force” and “Sahara,” which gave a good idea of the nature of the fighting and of the terrain. In them the living from moment to moment in war was splendidly realized; there were pieces of good dialogue and the beginnings of fine characterization. Yet it was all like a cheap watch that is kept running by expert attention but is doomed nevertheless to a short and not too happy life. There were films that started with sincere grasp of an actuality, but for one reason or another saw fit to erect an artificial, inadequate structure around it. Still, in films of this nature, like “Wake Island,” the main procedure—the nature of one battle in the war—is still discernible and informative. The work of expert hands was always noticeable: the production handling of Nunnally Johnson on “The Moon Is Down,” that of Hawks and Tay Garnett on everything they direct, the writing of Dudley Nichols, Robert Andrews and Lillian Hellman. Players like Humphrey Bogart, Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Lloyd Nolan projected in look and gesture a strength of character that made up for much of the content lost in the script, though naturally their talents projected only humanity and not ideas. The virtue of an otherwise dull movie of how the Czechs struck back at the Nazis and their mad hangman Heidrich was that the producers of “Hangmen Also Die” stated forcefully how much they hated Nazis and the weight of this emotion was, within its scope, completely convincing. Despite everything, Hollywood’s mass of film will leave to posterity the greatest mirror of a kind that has ever been left of a war.
Though there was muttering in various quarters (including this one) about the quality of war films, and though the public itself was heard to complain, it at the same time encouraged what it was getting. When, in the poll of the movie commentators mentioned before, the question was asked as to whether too many war pictures were being made, there were 42 percent who thought not, but did think, with Archer Winsten of The New York Post, that there were “not too many but too many routine ones.” The 58 percent who thought there were too many war pictures had often the same thing to say: “Yes [no war pictures], but principally because there have been so many shoddy, cheap, downright bad war pictures.” In spite of these judgments and the constant pleading of the motion-picture exhibitors to please stop making war films, the fact is that few war pictures of better Hollywood quality have failed since the war started to be what the box-office statisticians label an outstanding hit. In 1942 alone, this included twenty-one pictures. “Mrs. Miniver” made $5,000,000 in 1942, “Sergeant York” had made $4,000,000 in 1941, and “So Proudly We Hail” was on the way to doing that well in 1943.
In fact, the confusion of criticism and suggestion was further confused by the fact that “Mrs. Miniver” and “Wake Island” were the public’s favorites last year, the latter by the men, the former by the women and the children. (The children are extremely interesting: in the poll of the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures they caused consternation by voting “Kings Row,” which was a grim movie concerning psychiatry, sadism and incestuous fathers and daughters, as the fourth-best picture of the year, after the newspaper critics had roundly upbraided it: what they say about war pictures is well summed up by a conversation about a typical film of this kind. Eleven-year-old girl: “Little children in 1A, 2A, 3A are afraid of war pictures”; thirteen-year-old boy—“If they see these pictures they will learn not to be scared—five, six years old, they got to learn some time.”) Obfuscating the enormous popularity of “Mrs. Miniver” were the nation’s soldiers, who went to thirty other films more often than they went to “Mrs. Miniver,” which they seemed to dislike violently, but no more so than “In Which We Serve,” which the New York Film Critics judged the best of the year.
The agitated perplexity of the exhibitors is understandable; but there seemed no reason in the war years for them to take their perplexity seriously. People went to see anything. The figures for the 1942 year of the war shows that four and a quarter million more people went to the movies weekly than went in 1941, for five and a half cents more on an average for a ticket. In 1941 the seven major film companies had made $36,000,000 more than they had in 1939 (when the foreign market was still there). For every twelfth American there was a movie seat—the others stood outside and waited for him to get up. The hardest time to get in was at 7:30 p. m. on Sunday.
The character of the movie audience has changed radically during the war years. It no longer seems to be the silent, rapt mass it once was: there is a noticeable quality of more or less cynical detachment, it has become a little more like the audience at a ball park where the crowd is broken up into pockets of people who do not give up their personality wholly to the spectacle but in one form or another express their own reactions—moviegoers nowadays are running conversations with one another, criticizing the film while watching it, taking the whole thing far less seriously than formerly. The reasons, and there are many, must have largely to do with the war: people have more money and are less fiercely intent on getting the most for it; they are living outside the settled equilibrium of home existence; they are going more frequently, less to see the movie than to get somewhere simply to sit down (this is particularly sadly applicable to servicemen and their girls); the crowds are younger and less frozen; longer hours of work for parents make the movie theatres improvised nurseries; and perhaps most of all, a curious atmosphere that wartime is to some extent vacation time, a transition period in which life is not quite the same as it has been before.
The attitude of the audience showed itself in many odd ways. Prices could be raised as much as twenty cents in some cities and attendance would still increase. As people made more money, the attendance at neighborhood houses fell off, because the people preferred theatres showing the latest movies and charging the highest admissions. The plight of the small theatres, it was said, was equally the result of the blackout—an inability to see such theatres as well as the fear of housewives to venture into less frequented, dimmed-out streets. Vandalism hit a peak in ferocity. One man was stopped in a New York theatre who had an upholsterer’s knife on him; when questioned by the police, he said he was going to rip up all the seats. Drapes were being hauled down and pushed into toilets, in some cities it became popular to put lighted cigarettes into the seats—which was so successful in the Campus Theatre in Berkeley, California, that it burned to the ground. Smoldering chairs were found in the State Theatre in Oakland on four successive nights, and the manager of an El Paso, Texas, theatre strode the aisles with a shotgun to keep order. People in Boston complained that young males removed their hats less and less. The theatres’ position in the morality of the community was equivocal: the United Automobile Workers wanted them to stay open from one to five-thirty a.m. so that defense workers would be kept away from drink, while the Good Government Club of St. Louis moved that they close at ten p.m. so that the residents would buy more war stamps, get more sleep and stop drinking.
In Hollywood itself the war has made many changes. By 1943 one of the most peculiar and important wartime effects was that some thirty former scriptwriters had become directors and producers. Their first efforts proved to be serious undertakings which were more like novels or plays than the movies had ever been before. Once more the stage and everything in it came to Hollywood; from Broadway came stage producers, the entire Theatre Guild and every play and musical comedy in sight. Leading men were scarce as hen’s teeth, and actors who had been in retirement for years were coming back. The studios were having trouble getting enough Japanese-looking males for battle scenes—you were seeing the same little man die five times in one movie—and enough extra men who looked big enough and strong enough to act American soldiers. In the confusion of the question as to whether or not to make war pictures, musicals became more popular than they had been in the peak year of the early talkies, and dancers were at a premium. Any orchestra venturing into Hollywood came out minus half its members, who stayed behind at good pay to dub in music. Hollywood also met the mysterious demand for horror pictures, but no one surpassed Universal, and no one surpassed Variety in describing what Universal was doing: “Universal to toss Wolf Man and Ghost of Frankenstein into one horrendous grapple. Lon Chaney Jr. who played monster in both pictures to clinch with himself.”
The contribution of the movies toward entertaining troops, selling bonds and instructing newly recruited factory workers, was of a size that only Hollywood achieves. By June, 1943, 2,000 actors had made 13,000 camp appearances, 3,000 bond-selling tours, 300 special films for the government—the first on sex hygiene, the last, “Battle Formations”—the “Rifle Platoon.” Twelve hundred 16mm. prints of current pictures were circulating to troops overseas, which made 7,000, all told, in circulation. The Hollywood canteen had entertained approximately 1,000,000 servicemen since its opening; motion pictures were training aircraft workers faster than they had ever been trained before.
The most significant work in motion pictures during the war has been contributed by official government information services in England, Russia, Canada and this country which have communicated the actual life and temper of the war in factual films. Even this documentary arm, which is the only one on the movie body that is alive and comparatively free, is forced to function within the social and political boundaries that prevailing opinion in each country sets for it. But within these boundaries the artist is given the freedom and means to express his subject matter with all the power and persuasion he possesses, and on the whole the limits have allowed material that is more adult and sensible than what is permitted in Hollywood. In the documentary film there is a quality of straight, level communication with the audience on as high a level as the makers of the film know and it is this direct honesty that marks the principal difference of the documentary from the Hollywood film.
The documentaries have been made in England, Canada, Russia and by the Signal Corps in this country. Among the finest have been the Russian “Moscow Strikes Back” and “Siege of Leningrad.” There have been a great number of significant English films, the prize specimens probably being “Desert Victory,” “Target for Tonight,” “Listen to Britain” and “The Silent Village.” Documentaries in Canada have concentrated on an editorialized newsreel compilation (“World in Action” series) which has been the only one to view the war consistently as a worldwide affair rather than a narrow, nationalistic one, and the only one to interpret its patterns as they progressed. Here, the Signal Corps, under the direction of several Hollywood artists like Capra, Litvak and Keighley have produced what many people feel is the best American work in years (“Prelude to War,” “Battle of Britain,” “Battle of Russia”). For the first time the importance of the documentary has been brought home to the great mass of moviegoers, and it must certainly be the most significant assault so far on the myth that surrounds movies—that there is one and only one kind of movie of any worth, Hollywood’s. It provides, too, as witness the sudden swerve to naturalism taken by recent Hollywood war films, the competition that Hollywood so long needed. This information-film production has trained thousands of new movie technicians, whose entrance into the field indicates that we may expect a wider, more varied postwar movie world.
The war has once more pointed up the need for complete freedom from repression for the movie artist, and also the incongruous fact that in a war where freedom is the most prominent word, the most popular medium of expression is nowhere free. Censorship, as always, has been the real villain of the war-movie piece, and it is responsible for the war movie that seems never to start from inside the individual but from a filing cabinet of accepted forms. My own idea is that the movies cannot well remain exactly as they are now; the balance that has been maintained among the forces of big money, censorship and artists is becoming an imbalance, and one that I think is being affected predominantly by the striking importance of the war documentary. Hollywood artists who were not supposed to care for or want to work in anything but the accepted style of commercial cinema have shown that when given a chance at anything else they take it and produce work far above their Hollywood average. I do not think it likely that all of these artists will return to Hollywood and take up contentedly where they left off; nor do I think it probable that the movie world will be so completely dominated by Hollywood after the war. Meanwhile, the coming attraction is going to be pretty much like the one you saw last week.
January 3, 1944
* For this and other quotations, as well as for many facts and figures, I am greatly indebted to Variety.