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Title: Five Came Back
Subtitle: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
Author: Mark Harris
Narrator: John Chancer
Format: Unabridged
Length: 20 hrs and 2 mins
Language: English
Release date: 10-26-17
Publisher: Audible Studios
Genres: History, World
Publisher's Summary:
Now a Netflix Original Series, featuring interviews with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Guillermo del Toro.
Before the Second World War, the Hollywood box office was booming, but the business was accused of being too foreign, too Jewish, too 'un-American'. Then the war changed everything. With Pearl Harbor came the opportunity for Hollywood to prove its critics wrong.
America's most legendary directors played a huge role in the war effort: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Between them they shaped the public perception of almost every major moment of the war. With characteristic insight and expert knowledge, Harris tells the untold story of how Hollywood changed World War II and how World War II changed Hollywood.
Members Reviews:
Insightful, Interesting Look at Hollywood History
With the new documentary coming out soon, this is the best time to buy a copy of this book. It's a fascinating look at Hollywood past, and how wartime politics shaped the careers of five similar-yet-different directors. It's an insightful time capsule for movie buffs, and I highly recommend it. (When I finished reading it, I gave my copy to my dad, and he liked it too. This seems like a pretty solid "dad gift.")
History and Cinema
really enjoyed Mark Harris' first book, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, about the changes in the movie industry in the late 60s. It was with great anticipation that I read his latest, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (2014) which combines two of my greatest interest-films and WWII history. Harris follows five Hollywood directors (John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens) who enlist in the armed forces and make propaganda films and record events that take places during the war. It is a rich subject, but it felt as though most of the events that took place during the war were mired in bureaucratic read tape and doesn't make for the most compelling reading. Furthermore, most of the directors depicted in this book don't come off as heroes of the cinema: Ford and Capra in particular come off as a medal-chasing dictatorial drunk and a malleable soft-headed nationalist respectively. Huston is shown as a womanizing cheat, Wyler almost loses his hearing completely and George Stevens, the director I knew the least about is profoundly affected by bearing witness and documenting the liberation of the Dachau Prison Camp that is used as evidence of atrocities at he Nuremberg trials. I suppose it would be impossible but I should like to see a book that follows Japanese directors such as Ozu, who served in the war as well. I found the sections where Huston is assigned to the Aleutian Island War interesting, since it is a campaign I knew little about much like that of the North African campaign that ended with the battle of Tunisia that Stevens arrived to late to film. Ford got some great film at Midway and Huston made a film about the Italy invasion among other highlight. Harris meticulously uses primary and secondary sources to give a detailed picture of the lives of the directors before, during, and after the war.
