WORLD WAR Documentaries II Movie Review

World War II: Documentaries on Screen

Even before America entered World War II, some of Hollywood's best filmmakers were actively engaged in work against the Germans and Japanese. John Ford had been snooping unofficially with naval intelligence since the 1920s. Actually, there were no real American intelligence services between the wars, but Ford was connected to a group of officers (and with J. Edgar Hoover) who were sure that another war was coming. (John Ford: A Biography. Andrew Sinclair. Dial Press. 1979) Later, Ford would serve with “Wild” Bill Donovan and the O.S.S. as head of the Field Photographic Branch. During the war, he was on a PT boat at the Normandy invasion, and before then, he had directed one of the first important documentaries, The Battle of Midway.

In May 1942, the Navy knew that the Japanese had targeted the island. Ford flew there and shot as much color film as he could of the attack as it was happening. He then edited the “real” footage with staged scenes and added narration to tell a short inspirational story of American resistance to aggression.

In 1943, John Huston made Report from the Aleutians. Though it doesn't have the graphic violence and conflict of Ford's film, it's a fascinating glimpse of a remote part of the war—and the world—that few people know about. Huston found more exciting material when he went to Italy and followed the infantry as it attacked a strong German position. The Battle of San Pietro has existed in several different running times, and some have claimed that the shorter versions sanitize the violence and horror of the campaign. If so, what's left is an impressive piece of work.

The most famous documentary to come out of the war is William Wyler's Memphis Belle, the story of an American B-17 crew flying its last mission from England before going home. Like several other non-fiction films made during the war years, it was given a theatrical run, and like the others, it did not do particularly well. Then, as now, documentaries find it hard to compete with Hollywood fiction.

Perhaps the most widely-seen documentaries were the government's Why We Fight series. These seven films—directed by Frank Capra and Ernst Lubitsch, and written by Julius and Philip Epstein (Casablanca)—present a boldly propagandistic overview of recent (1920s and '30s) history and explain the reasons behind the war. The films were required viewing, literally, for every man and woman in uniform who was going overseas. How much good did that series and the other documentaries do? No one can say with any real certainty, but, hey, we won.