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A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
Penguin Press
March 2014
On Sale: February 27, 2014
500 pages
ISBN: 1594204306
EAN: 9781594204302
Kindle: B00DMCV8BI
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
In Pictures at a Revolution, Mark Harris turned the
story of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967
into a landmark work of cultural history, a book about the
transformation of an art form and the larger social shift it
signified. In Five Came Back, he achieves something
larger and even more remarkable, giving us the untold story
of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II
changed Hollywood, through the prism of five film directors
caught up in the war: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston,
Frank Capra, and George Stevens. It was the best of times and the worst of times for
Hollywood before the war. The box office was booming, and
the studios' control of talent and distribution was as
airtight as could be hoped. But the industry's relationship
with Washington was decidedly uneasy—hearings and
investigations into allegations of corruption and
racketeering were multiplying, and hanging in the air was
the insinuation that the business was too foreign, too
Jewish, too "un-American" in its values and causes. Could an
industry this powerful in shaping America's mind-set really
be left in the hands of this crew? Following Pearl Harbor,
Hollywood had the chance to prove its critics wrong and did
so with vigor, turning its talents and its business over to
the war effort to an unprecedented extent. No industry professionals played a bigger role in the war
than America's most legendary directors: Ford, Wyler,
Huston, Capra, and Stevens. Between them they were on the
scene of almost every major moment of America's war, and in
every branch of service—army, navy, and air force;
Atlantic and Pacific; from Midway to North Africa; from
Normandy to the fall of Paris and the liberation of the Nazi
death camps; to the shaping of the message out of
Washington, D.C. As it did for so many others, World War II divided the lives
of these men into before and after, to an extent that has
not been adequately understood. In a larger sense—even
less well understood—the war divided the history of
Hollywood into before and after as well. Harris reckons with
that transformation on a human level—through five
unforgettable lives—and on the level of the industry
and the country as a whole. Like these five men, Hollywood
too, and indeed all of America, came back from the war
having grown up more than a little.
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