Five Came Back

I just finished watching "Five Came Back" on Netflix. It's a documentary of the five major Hollywood film directors who joined the service during WWII to make training films, documentaries, and outright propaganda films. Frank Capra, George Stephens, John Ford, John Huston and William Wyler were never the same afterward, not in their personal lives or in the films they made.

This is a remarkable piece of work which I would encourage you to watch. It shows an America which is very different from today's U.S.A., both for better and for worse. It made me proud, it made me think, it hurt me. It is well worth your time.

 

Five little ducks went swimming one day ...

 

Want to see that. John Huston is a bad ass.

 

This exact same thing popped into my head when I saw the thread title.

 

'Five Came Back' and the Frightening Power of Propaganda

Netflix's Five Came Back turns a great Hollywood history into an absorbing documentary

 

They all were, each in his own way. George Stephens and a film crew followed and filmed the infantry across Europe from D-Day till the day Germany surrendered. What he saw and filmed at Dachau helped convict the Nazis at Nuremberg and scarred him for life. He was known for his touch with light comedies, but never filmed another comedy after the war. William Wyler followed the troops to his family's home town in France only to find that virtually every Jew there including his family had been killed in the death camps. He later lost his hearing due to filming while riding with his ears unprotected in a B-25.

Huston's last film made while still in the Army documents the treatment of a group of shell-shocked soldiers, men who were so devastated by what they had seen and done that they were barely functional. What we now call PTSD and consider a medical condition was largely considered cowardice... remember Patton slapping around a soldier in the Army hospital for it?

The Army brass considered this film so disturbing and powerful that they sat on it for thirty years before Huston was finally able to pry it loose. It is now an honored documentary in the Library of Congress.

Really interesting doc about a little known subject.