"Believe half of what you see and nothing of what you hear."
“Five legendary, Oscar-winning movie directors abandoned their lucrative Hollywood lifestyles to volunteer for often-grueling military service during World War II as part of a corps of hundreds of filmmakers who recorded the Allied advance across occupied Europe and in the Pacific.
“Five Came Back,’’ a new book out Monday by film historian Mark Harris, recounts their adventures — sometimes under enemy fire — and details how they sometimes secretly faked combat footage that has been passed off as the real thing for decades in documentaries.
“They all could have gotten out of service because they were too old and/or their work as civilians was so important to American morale,’’ says Harris. “But they all wanted to be in the thick of it and served for at least three years.’’
John Ford, who had already won three of his unmatched-to-date four Oscars and received a Purple Heart for wounds received while shooting the Academy Award-winning feature documentary “The Battle of Midway,’’ also co-directed “December 7,’’ which won the 1944 Oscar for Best Short Documentary.
Less than four minutes of film records the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, so Ford and co-director Gregg Toland (who photographed “Citizen Kane’’) staged footage using miniature battleships and airplanes on the Fox lot in Hollywood.
This was embellished with entirely staged shots taken in Hawaii of sailors manning surface-to-air guns “in time to perfectly frame our response to a surprise attack,’’ Harris says. “Even 70 years after Pearl Harbor, we still so want that to be true.’’
Once America entered the war, logistical problems and bureaucratic snafus sometimes made it difficult to get film crews to the front lines in time. This was especially true in Africa, where British army crews recorded lots of impressive footage, but most of the few combat scenes photographed by Americans during the invasion of Casablanca went down with a sunken ship.
So Frank Capra (whose three Oscars included “It Happened One Night’’ and who oversaw an ambitious series of army training films) assigned George Stevens (whose two Oscars after the war included “Giant’’) to spend two weeks in Algiers staging re-creations (that Harris says were obviously faked) using tanks and soldiers assigned to him.” • NY Post
NYSL:Mark Harris, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
John Huston Fakes Combat Footage
“Personally supervised by Capra, director John Huston staged additional “African’’ footage in California’s Mojave Desert with dummy tanks being bombed from the air, as well as additional recreations of dogfights between Allied and (fake) German fighters that were shot in Orlando, Fla.
Decades later, Huston labeled the faked footage, which turned up in an Anglo-American documentary called “Tunisian Victory,’’ as “disgraceful.’’
But Harris says Huston — Oscar winner for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’’ and father of actors Anjelica and Danny Huston — was less frank about the authenticity of “The Battle of San Pietro,’’ his critically acclaimed documentary about an Italian battle that was selected in 1991 for the Library of Congress’ prestigious National Film Registry.
Harris’ research reveals that Huston arrived at the very end of the battle, which took the lives of more than 1,000 Allied soldiers. But with encouragement of his superiors, who provided equipment and hundreds of GI extras, he shot what Harris regards as the most convincingly faked footage of a World War II battle — shot on the actual locations with real participants.” • NY Post
Read More:
Ronald Reagan's World War Two Fakery Revelaed
NY POST: How Oscar-winning directors faked WWII combat footage
NPR: Hollywood Goes To War In 'Five Came Back'
The Early History of Faking War on Film - Smithsonian Magazine
John Huston’s Fake Documentaries Of World War II
Lights, camera fiction: Second World War documentary footage a Hollywood fake
Filming, faking and propaganda: The origins of the war film, 1897-1902
When an Army of Artists Fooled Hitler - Smithsonian Magazine
Reconstructed newsreels by Georges Méliès
