‘Five Came Back’ Is an Extraordinary Look at Hollywood’s Role in World War II

Five Came Back, based on the book of the same name by Mark Harris, is a three-part Netflix documentary released today that tells a remarkable and somewhat under-told story of the role that Hollywood took in World War II. Not just Hollywood, but specifically five prominent directors from the 1930s: Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Ford, John Huston, and George Stevens. In the wake of Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into the fray, these five filmmakers went to war, making documentary films and propaganda pictures in order to aid the Allied war effort.

Narrated by Meryl Streep, Five Came Back becomes at once a Hollywood story and a war story, but at its highest level — and the series operates on an awfully high level — it’s a story of five men who entered the war as an act of service and ended up shaping the war effort for Americans at home through each of their distinct filmmaking personae. And of course the war changes them too, sending them back afterwards to do what many say was the best work of their careers.

While far from a hagiography, Five Came Back holds a genuine fascination for the five directors at its center. Who were these men who embedded themselves in the war effort, and why did they tell the stories they told? We’re given five contemporary Hollywood directors as both talking heads and spirit guides, each one assigned to the man whose style best matches their own. It’s a little like that year the Oscars had five former winners in each category present each nominee with a little personalized speech. Steven Spielberg tells the story of William Wyler, a filmmaker who combined spectacle and ground-level humanity as well as anyone; Guillermo Del Toro’s wide-eyed appreciation of American cinema is a good fit for Frank Capra. Francis Ford Coppola’s cinema of tough, compromised men fits the John Huston mold. Lawrence Kasdan talks about George Stevens’ deep reserves of humanity. And Paul Greengrass is assigned John Ford, in all his technical brilliance and moral certainty. This structure gives Five Came Back a kind of nesting doll effect: Wyler tells the war’s story; Spielberg tells Wyler’s story.

Using a combination of archived footage, newsreels, archived audio, and clips from the films themselves, director Laurent Bouzereau pieces together a historical document with remarkable narrative momentum, a testament to the propulsive readability of Harris’s book. The directors were sent across the globe on their filmmaking assignments, from Midway to Normandy to the frigid north Pacific. Each one entered the war with distinct styles and personalities, and the series works hardest to keep those in focus. Capra, that great believer in Americana, treated the war as a problem to be solved, making dozens of “Why We Fight” films to keep the war effort going at home. Ford filmed The Battle of Midway with an eye on the stories of the men whose unit was decimated.  Stevens, present for the liberation of Dachau, saw his duty to present a historical document that would one day need to be used to convict Nazi war criminals.

 

The three-part documentary takes the first hour to set the stage, meticulously laying out American reticence to enter the war in the time before Pearl Harbor. The second hour focuses on the directors’ stories from the front lines of their war productions. These stories play as compellingly as behind-the-scenes Hollywood stories as they do harrowing war tales, whether it’s Wyler finding a way to place cameras on bomber planes or John Ford going on a three-day bender after being so rattled by D-Day.

Perhaps the most compelling stories are the ones that happen after the war is over. Wyler returns to America having suffered permanent hearing loss from his work in the bomber planes. Ford is vicious to non-combatant John Wayne on set. Capra makes It’s a Wonderful Life and sees it bomb completely. Wyler succeeds wildly with The Best Years of Our Lives. Huston’s final war film, Let There Be Light, is an unblinking look at post-war PTSD that was kept locked up by the government for years. The war changes them drastically, yet they all do their most memorable and acclaimed films upon their return. Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre; Ford’s The Searchers; Wyler’s Ben-Hur; Stevens’s The Diary of Anne Frank.

Five Came Back manages to be laudatory without treading into hagiography. Greengrass doesn’t hold back about what a bastard John Ford could be. Capra’s animated shorts and his Know Your Enemy: Japan feature are depicted as the racist pieces of jingoism they were. Rather than deflating the series, this kind of clear-headedness only bolsters the film’s take on Hollywood. No one’s heads are in the clouds here. And yet, just as the films of George Stevens and William Wyler and John Huston were able to do, Five Came Back brings the Hollywood war effort home to us, in all its harrowing, inspiring glory. It is a hugely captivating docu-series and highly recommended.

Stream Five Came Back on Netflix.