NEW ORLEANS -- What a difference a few decades can make.
Hollywood has taken on a leading role in the Iraq war debate, lending its political voice against the invasion and offering up any number of films examining the war's personal costs. But as a new show at the National World War II Museum makes clear, the relationship between the movie business and international armed conflict hasn't always been so polarized.
While the exhibition, "Real to Reel: Hollywood and World War II," wasn't purposely designed to dramatize this then-and-now juxtaposition, visitors to the impressive Louisiana museum can't help but notice the 180-degree shift.
"This is not just a show about how Hollywood affected the war," said the museum's marketing director, Clem Goldberger, "but about how the war affected Hollywood."
It's not just that some of the town's biggest stars -- including Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Jimmy Stewart and Sterling Hayden -- left the movie business to become decorated soldiers, pilots and spies. The more interesting difference is to see through the exhibit's artifacts and displays how closely Hollywood and the White House collaborated. The two pooled resources not only to build support for the war before America's entry but also to generate a steady stream of training films and propaganda movies to make sure the nation grew ready and united.
Prewar effort
Well before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and while the United States and Germany were officially still at peace, a handful of anti-fascist filmmakers was creating movies challenging America and Britain's isolationist bearings.
Among the first films highlighted in the exhibit are Charlie Chaplin's 1940 comedy "The Great Dictator," which ridiculed Hitler and Mussolini, and Russian-born Anatole Litvak's "Confessions of a Nazi Spy," a 1939 drama arguing that the Germans were determined to crush democracy. Both films were denounced (and investigated) by Sen. Gerald Nye, a Republican senator from North Dakota and a strong supporter of the America First Committee, which argued against America's entry into the rapidly escalating global conflict.
By the early 1940s, though, the relationship between Hollywood and Washington had changed dramatically, in ways that seem inconceivable today. As the small but thoughtfully curated exhibition (which runs through Aug. 31) makes clear, the U.S. Office of War Information believed the movie business could help win the war, and it published a manual to guide filmmakers on how best to merge art and politics without being didactic.
The excerpts from the OWI manual offer one of the exhibition's most compelling displays. Read today, the government's suggestions feel like script notes from a recent film school grad. "Audiences don't want to listen to lectures," one OWI memo says. "They want to identify themselves with the characters they see on screen. They react coldly to being told to do something, but they are strongly influenced by being shown."
Another OWI dispatch prompts moviemakers to remind audiences of the "unsung heroes" of the Merchant Marine and not to neglect the "calm, smiling" nurses in Bataan. Another suggests that civil rights messages will help coalesce war support: "The Negroes have a real, a legal and a permanent chance for improvement of their status under democracy and no chance at all under a dictatorship."
The OWI also encouraged filmmakers and studios to depict our Soviet Union allies favorably. Among the resulting films were Lewis Milestone's "The North Star" (1942), Michael Curtiz's "Mission to Moscow" (1943) and Gregory Ratoff's "Song of Russia" (1944).
But the movies came with a costly personal price. Even though Warner Bros. asked "Casablanca" co-screenwriter Howard Koch to write "Mission to Moscow," Jack Warner subsequently called him a communist sympathizer. Called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), Koch refused to name names and was subsequently blacklisted and had to write under a pseudonym. "Song of Russia" scribe Paul Jarrico, who refused to testify before HUAC, also was blacklisted, left the United States and never reestablished an American screenwriting career.
"The government wanted us to reach out to the Russians and be allied with them," said curator Stacy Peckham, the assistant director of collections and exhibits. "And then some of them ended up getting dragged into" the hearings.
Wartime films
The exhibition grew out of a film conference held at the museum in mid-April, and clips of WWII-era movies (both narrative and documentary) and posters promoting them occupy a central place in the show. Rather than focus on more recent movies about the war ("Saving Private Ryan," for example), the emphasis is solely on contemporaneous works. Among the films represented are Frank Capra's "Why We Fight," John Ford's "The Battle of Midway," John Huston's "The Battle of San Pietro," George Stevens' "D-Day to Berlin" and Louis Hayward's "With the Marines at Tarawa."
