The winner is...
And the winner is...
George Stevens!
[cheering]
William Wyler.
John Huston.
[cheering continues]
John Ford.
Mr. Frank Capra.
I discovered Frank Capra, like most people in my generation,
through It's a Wonderful Life.
Capra is a master at constructing emotion,
structurally, into a film.
I think I have cried more in Frank Capra films,
and I have stopped thinking more in Frank Capra films,
than in any other filmmaker's work.
[Steven Spielberg] I don't really think
that William Wyler saw himself as an artist.
When he set up the camera, he didn't set up the camera
to be told how extraordinary his angle and compositions were.
He set up the camera in such a way to help tell the story better.
And then having met him, I think it was the late '60s,
I so admired that he was somebody that had wielded so much power and authority
and was at the top of his game,
and won three Academy Awards for Best Director,
who was still gracious and kind.
[Francis Ford Coppola] I was drawn to John Huston.
There's a lot of comparison between Huston and Hemingway
because Hemingway had that type of masculine derring-do.
But despite his irascible personal character and personal life,
Huston had this extraordinary intelligence.
He made many, many, many films, and among them, some truly great ones.
[Paul Greengrass] The first time I can remember watching John Ford movies
was film club at school.
Ford, by then, had this sort of bifurcated reputation.
On the one hand, he was a controversial arch-conservative figure.
On the other hand...
Hold it!
...he was at that point being revered, as he rightly is,
as the great auteur and master of American cinema.
[Lawrence Kasdan] George Stevens' facility with dramas, comedy,
musicals, was unique.
He was not drawn to that which came easily to him.
He wanted to challenge himself all the time.
Those five filmmakers happened to be in that place then,
when the greatest conflict of all came knocking.
Cinema, in its purest form, could be put in the service of propaganda.
[military drumming]
Hitler and Goebbels understood the power of the cinema
to move large populations towards your way of thinking.
[Kasdan] All five of them were willing to turn away
from a very comfortable life and serve their country
in the best way they thought they could.
And to go out into the world, where there was no script,
and there was no third act that anybody wrote
where you knew you would come out of it safely.
[Guillermo del Toro] Each of them participate on an epic scale
in the grandest interventions
in the largest war the world has ever seen.
[Spielberg] These documentaries that the five filmmakers made
were powerful for American audiences.
I do think all five of them paid a very personal price.
These filmmakers that came back with footage
about the truth of that war...
were changed forever.
[Kasdan] The group of directors that we're talking about...
were part of the first wave.
They were creating the art form.
[Spielberg] Film was an intoxicant
from the very first days of the silent movies.
And I think early, early on,
Hollywood realized they had a tremendous tool,
or even a weapon, for change, through cinema.
[narrator] By the late 1930s,
moviegoing had become an essential part of American culture.
More than half the adult population went to the movies at least once a week,
and before every film theaters played newsreels,
which were the only source of visual news at the time.
[man] Power to the nth power,
proclaimed by Hitler at the Nuremberg Nazi Congress.
The Nazi Party above the state, and he above the Nazi Party,
affirmed by thundering cheers.
[narrator] In the early years of Hitler's rise,
Hollywood paid little attention.
In movies, there was no Fuehrer. There were no Nazis.
[Greengrass] Ford was very early to see the threat that Nazi Germany posed.
[narrator] Twenty years earlier, when the US entered the First World War,
John Ford was 22 and just starting out as a director.
Ford not serving in World War I...
affected him very, very deeply,
and Four Sons was an attempt to explore the cost of that war.
What it was was the beginning of Ford
trying to address reality.
Ford, the man, was a figure of patrician authority
who believed in duty and tradition, and evoked them wonderfully.
He was a man who sought solace in alcohol,
and had a rebel soul,
and was proud of his Irish rebel heritage.
I'm very courteous to my equals.
More than courteous to my inferiors.
I'm speaking in terms of pictures.
And I'm horribly rude to my superiors, so-called.
[narrator] Like Ford, John Huston was already aware
of the looming threat in Europe.
He had recently returned to Hollywood after some time in England.
[John Huston] In London, when I was about 25 years old,
a whole series of circumstances mounted up
to my finally being completely broke.
I could've called to my father for help, or friends.
But I'm enough of a believer in the gambler's creed,
that if you're in a bad streak, there's nothing to do about it.
You've just got to play it out.
[Coppola] John Huston was the son of Walter Huston,
who was an important actor,
and he got to learn about acting, and, of course, learned from his father.
I just had only admiration for John Huston.
He's done a lot of things that pirates do.
You know, he'd had a fight with Errol Flynn over Olivia de Havilland.
Oh, that I could've had a fight with Errol Flynn over Olivia de Havilland.
[Huston] Errol said, "Do you want to make anything of it?"
And... I said, "Yes."
We weren't friends then.
There's no better way to get friends with a man than to have a fight with him.
[Coppola] Huston had many marriages,
and many, in between the marriages, episodes with women,
and was obviously very attractive to women,
and was very attracted to women.
Despite his bad-boy behavior throughout this period,
Huston, as a writer, had this conceptual mind
and had really begun to attract the attention of people
for his screenwriting work.
[man] The end of a nation.
World in alarm at the peril of war.
What will come next? Czechoslovakia?
When will Nazi aggression end?
The democratic nations draw together against the ambitions of the dictators.
[narrator] Huston was hired by Warner Bros.
to co-write the historical drama Juarez.
He turned the script into a pointed anti-Hitler allegory.
Democracy: The rule of the cattle, by the cattle, for the cattle.
[narrator] But when the production started,
he faced the tyranny of a movie star.
Paul Muni felt his part was too small
and had his brother-in-law rewrite the script.
Only a little of Huston's work remained.
[Huston] The lot of the writer in Hollywood at that time
was rather dismal.
One would write what one thought were good pictures,
and they would be changed when they got to the screen
and become bad pictures.
[narrator] Huston decided the only way he could exert control over his work
was to become a director.
He had a powerful mentor.
His best friend in Hollywood was an established filmmaker
who was his opposite in almost every way:
William Wyler.
They first met when Wyler hired him to write dialogue
for a film starring Huston's father.
The two men quickly became inseparable pals.
[Spielberg] William Wyler was very, very soft-spoken.
When he demonstrated that forcefulness of personality
was only when he was on the floor, directing.
[William Wyler] I'm demanding, such as the audience is demanding.
I'm demanding of myself, too.
I try to get the best out of people, and if it takes a little more work
and a little more sweat to do it, then that's what we'll have to do.
[Spielberg] Which is why they called him 40-take Willy,
because he was a perfectionist.
He was completely in control of when he knew he had gotten it.
Willy Wyler's way of directing was tough.
Believe me, he expected a lot of you,
and you therefore gave much, much better performances.
Miss Davis, I'm very happy to present to you,
on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,
for the second time, their award for your performance in Jezebel.
[Davis] Thank you.
[Spielberg] I think all directors are actors,
even those that aren't employed to work both sides of the camera.
I think when you have to speak to actors, you become an actor.
And so, I believe that William Wyler was also an actor
when he was working with his actors.
And I think that's what bonds all of these directors.
They were performance directors on top of everything else.
[narrator] Wyler needed no education about the war.
For him, the stakes could not have been higher.
He had come to America 20 years earlier from Mulhouse,
a French town that Germany had taken during World War I.
Now it was being threatened once again.
Originally, I was supposed to take over my father's business.
My father was a merchant in Mulhouse, had a nice store.
I was not keen about it, but I had no other prospects.
[narrator] Wyler was sponsored by a distant relative
who happened to run Universal Studios: Carl Laemmle.
[Wyler] He seemed to like me, and suddenly, he said,
"How would you like to come to America?"
You know, at that time, that was like going to the moon today.
[laughs]
My own family, although they were delighted to have me in America,
it was not particularly a thing for a young Jewish boy.
He should become a doctor or a lawyer or something.
But to go into the film business is a bit shady.
[chuckles]
[Spielberg] I think what speaks to me the most about Wyler
was the fact that he was a Jewish director
who was committed to his faith and his culture.
He understood what Hitler was doing.
He understood what was going to happen to the Jews.
[narrator] Wyler's family and friends were still in Europe and terrified.
His attempts to bring them over and sponsor them all
pushed him to his financial limits.
On a single night in Germany, in November, 1938,
dozens of Jews were killed
and thousands of business and temples destroyed
in the violent pogrom that came to be known as Kristallnacht.
The rise of intolerance in Germany today,
the suffering being inflicted on an innocent and helpless people,
grieve every decent American.
It makes us fearful for the whole progress of civilization.
[narrator] By the late '30s, conflict had broken out across the globe.
Italy flexed its military muscle in Africa.
[man] In a blazing radio address,
Mussolini proclaims his decision: "War. Italy will conquer Ethiopia."
[narrator] Imperial Japan invaded China.
[explosion]
[man] The blast of war strikes Nantou,
and people flee from the terror and thunder of the bombs.
In the event of war in Europe, I think we should stay out of it entirely.
I haven't the slightest idea of European affairs.
[Gerald Nye] Americans want no more war.
Most of all, they want no more participation in foreign wars.
Hollywood was in a very delicate situation.
[man] Fear of war grips Europe.
Travel greatly impeded.
The men that ran the film companies, who were mainly Jewish men,
did not want to cut off this big market of Germany.
They did not understand completely what was going on.
And they certainly weren't understanding the threat from Japan.
So, there was a very strong feeling in the country
of, "Let's stay out of this war."
[narrator] By his own admission, George Stevens did not realize
the extent of the threat Hitler and Japan posed in 1938.
He wanted his next film to be an adaptation
of the acclaimed anti-war novel Paths of Glory,
which was set during World War I.
What's interesting is Stevens' ambition.
He was very successful at making these lighthearted musicals and comedies.
This is the guy that made Alice Adams,
Vivacious Lady,
and Swing Time,
the most elegant coverage of Astaire and Rogers.
This is a man who had a gift for light entertainment.
He's looking to expand his range.
The moment that he would have a success in a genre or form,
he wanted to try something new.
He had a very curious mind.
[George Stevens] It always interested me, with films,
the opportunity for exploration of a new experience.
I think, mostly, the films that I did,
I did because I hadn't done that kind of a film.
The directors in Hollywood, movie directors,
are the princes of Hollywood.
They're never the kings.
Always hovering above the directors are the people with the money.
And he ran into a brick wall when it came to making Paths of Glory.
[narrator] RKO told Stevens, "This is no time to be making an anti-war picture.
War is in the offing."
Stevens replied, "What better time for an anti-war picture?"
But the studio steered him towards Gunga Din instead.
[man] On location with Gunga Din,
they see director George Stevens and his crew
film a bit of action for the big outdoor spectacle.
[Kasdan] He went off into the desert,
and made an extraordinarily fun, swashbuckling adventure,
a film that had a huge impact on Raiders of the Lost Ark,
and a hundred other movies.
But it is the opposite of Paths of Glory.
It makes war look like fun.
[narrator] Stevens later said of the film,
"It celebrates the rumbling of the drums and the waving of the flags.
Another year, and I would've been too smart to do it."
In February, 1939, Frank Capra won his third directing Oscar
for his film You Can't Take It With You.
He had won previously for It Happened One Night
and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.
[del Toro] Before the war, his dominance in the industry
was quite close to complete.
Capra bridges comedy
from the silent, which was a gag-driven time for comedy,
to the verbal.
What are you going to do?
It's a system all my own.
[del Toro] It becomes accessible to the man on the street,
and that makes his product eminently American.
Consumable, and yet of undeniable quality.
[narrator] Capra wanted his next film to be about the American Revolution,
with George Washington as its hero.
But Harry Cohn, Capra's boss at Columbia, turned it down,
and the reason was something Capra hadn't considered.
Cohn didn't want to finance a picture
in which British soldiers were portrayed as villains,
not when England might soon be in a fight for its existence.
It was the start of an awakening for Capra.
He decided to train his cameras on contemporary Washington instead.
While scouting his next film in D.C.,
Capra, a conservative Republican, met with President Roosevelt.
Let no one imagine that America will escape,
that America may expect mercy.
The peace-loving nations must make a concerted effort
in opposition to those violations of treaties
and those ignorings of humane instincts,
which today are creating a state of international anarchy,
international instability,
from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.
[narrator] Capra was dazzled by what he called "FDR's awesome aura."
He came home convinced that Roosevelt was right.
America had to stop Hitler at any cost.
Like Ford, Capra went public at a rally.
He told the audience that capitulation to Hitler
would mean barbarism and terror.
He never looked back.
The interesting thing about Capra, also, for me,
is that he is an immigrant.
Capra comes from Italy,
which, at that time, is not seen as a country that is sophisticated.
[narrator] Despite his fame,
the Sicilian immigrant was still the target of slurs.
A Collier's magazine profile called him a "Little Wop."
[del Toro] He is incredibly eager and incredibly pressured
to prove himself.
That spirit is still the spirit that he shares
with millions of other immigrants from other countries in America.
And I think that is not only in him and his career,
but in his characters.
America is almost dreamlike for him.
The dream of the Land of the Free
and the idea that one man can stand against the system.
[man] The galleries are packed.
In the diplomatic gallery are the envoys of two dictator powers.
They have come here to see what they can't see at home:
Democracy in action.
There's no place out there for graft, or greed, or lies,
or compromise with human liberties.
His films express this basic need to be good.
Telegrams, 50,000 of them, demanding that he yield this floor.
[del Toro] It always shows me the true yearning inside of Capra,
which was existential and not political.
I think politically, he was very confused,
but the yearning, the need to be loved, the need to be saved,
was true inside him.
I guess this is just another lost cause, Mr. Paine.
[man] The Germans start bombing, attacking Poland.
The Second World War begins with terror from the sky.
Hitler has reconstructed Germany for war
and built a military juggernaut too great for Poland to resist.
Britain declares war.
Two million men under arms
as the French Army makes ready for battle.
America stands at the crossroads of its destiny.
A few weeks have seen great nations fall.
[narrator] By September, 1940, Nazi Germany had conquered Belgium,
Holland, Norway, Luxembourg and France
and had begun a bombing campaign over England.
[man] Winston Churchill exhorts unbending resistance.
Downing Street, where the Prime Minister resides, is bombed.
He is the voice of British determination to stick it out.
[Charles Lindbergh] France has now been defeated,
and, despite the propaganda and confusion of recent months,
it is now obvious that England is losing the war.
And I have been forced to the conclusion
that we cannot win this war for England,
regardless of how much assistance we send.
That is why the America First Committee has been formed.
[narrator] In 1940, John Ford solidified his reputation
as one of the most socially
and politically engaged filmmakers in Hollywood
with two new films:
The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath.
[Greengrass] The Grapes of Wrath is the great, great Hollywood film
about the nature of society.
Well, maybe it's like Casy says.
A fella ain't got a soul of his own,
just... a little piece of a big soul,
the one big soul that belongs to everybody.
You can see reality coming ever closer to Ford...
in The Long Voyage Home,
where you have the reference to Norway having fallen.
To introduce an element that's so specific, so contemporary,
I mean, literally ripped out of that day's newspapers.
He did it deliberately. It was a deliberate choice.
[airplane approaching]
One of my most interesting experiences in filmmaking
was The Long Voyage Home, by Eugene O'Neill.
I never realized at the time that, in a few months,
I'd be being bombed from the air by the same type of planes.
[narrator] By then, addressing the war in movies was no longer enough for Ford.
He petitioned the Navy to start an official photographic naval unit
to be called Field Photo.
And he recruits cameramen, soundmen, editors,
all the elements that he would later bring to the US government.
[narrator] Field Photo met once a week on the Fox lot
and ran through drills with props and costume uniforms.
The unit was soon designated an official part of the Naval Reserve.
The whole idea of John Ford in uniform, which he was obsessed by, incidentally,
the idea of John Ford, of all people, fitting into a Navy hierarchy...
It's that divided personality.
He yearned to be that disciplined man of rectitude.
But it was at odds with the rebel outsider.
Behind the sort of hard drinking,
he was a highly attuned thinker and artist,
who could see that the world was collapsing.
[narrator] Ford received his third Best Director nomination that year
for The Grapes of Wrath.
William Wyler was also nominated for the third time
for his work on The Letter.
[Spielberg] All of Wyler's movies before the war,
they were like sitting down with a good book.
But they weren't relevant to the affairs of the world in any way.
[man] Next, the awards.
[Spielberg] Frank Capra brought the nominees
that were in attendance at the Oscars that night onto stage,
which was kind of weird.
And then, while they were standing there, he gave the award to John Ford,
who never even showed up, because Ford was out fishing on his boat.
[narrator] Wyler, once again, went home empty-handed.
[trumpets play]
[man] The Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences
hears an inspiring radio message
direct from the president in the White House.
We have seen the American motion picture become foremost in all the world.
We've seen it reflect our civilization throughout the rest of the world.
The aims and the aspirations and the ideals of a free people
and of freedom itself.
[narrator] In June, 1941, Nazi Germany began a massive invasion of Russia,
in a dramatic escalation of the war.
[man] These are the first motion pictures of the Nazi-Soviet war.
Film released by Moscow.
The Red Army in action.
The Germans drive deep into Russia.
Stalin has ordered the destruction of everything in their path.
[narrator] A month later, Warner Bros. released Sergeant York.
Huston was one of the writers of the film,
a true story about a decorated hero in World War I.
[Coppola] It's the story of, essentially, a man who was a conscientious objector,
who believes that the Bible says that we should not kill,
and he does not want to kill.
Of course, he turns out to be the most effective soldier.
He takes out an entire German gun emplacement.
[gunfire]
Them guns was killing hundreds, maybe thousands,
and there weren't nothin' anybody could do but to stop them guns.
[Coppola] The movie slowly built its premise
that someone who could be so against killing
could ultimately also be a very effective soldier
if the idea behind it could make sense to him.
[narrator] Sergeant York became the highest-grossing film of 1941.
Its runaway success rankled the isolationists in Washington,
and they decided the time was right to go after Hollywood.
Senator Gerald Nye claimed
that the studios were colluding with the Roosevelt Administration
to make pro-war propaganda, and he called hearings.
Studio heads and filmmakers were summoned to testify before Congress.
In Harry Warner's testimony, he stated,
"In truth, the only sin of which Warner Bros. is guilty
is that of accurately recording on the screen the world as it is."
[man] Incendiary bombs and high explosives
rained down on every part of the British capital indiscriminately.
Chungking, a mass of flaming ruins
after one of the most frightful of air raids,
reminding us grimly that, while Europe holds the headlines,
the China war drags on with unending tragedy.
Yet, the stubborn defense against Japan goes on.
I got a call from my agent.
He wanted to see me about a picture called Mrs. Miniver.
I didn't know anything about it.
He said it's about England at war.
Oh, well, I was interested right away.
[Spielberg] I really think that he began to try to find a cause.
And I think his first cause as a filmmaker was Mrs. Miniver.
[bomb whistles, getting closer]
[very loud explosion]
[airplanes overhead]
He really told the story of solidarity and strength.
Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon,
and the power of that marriage and that family,
that they were unshakeable.
It just was something that we want to live up to ourselves.
[little boy giggles]
And I think he knew that he could make a contribution.
I think Wyler knew that he was strong enough in his self-confidence
to know that he could tell a story about the real war
and have a tremendous impact with that story stateside.
There was a scene with a German pilot who was shot down over England,
and he was caught by Mrs. Miniver somehow.
And I said, "This man has got to be one of Mr. Göring's little monsters."
And I got a call to go see Mr. Louis B. Mayer.
He said, "We're glad to have you here with us,
and we're glad you're making this picture,
but you must remember one thing:
we are not making a hate picture.
We don't hate anybody. We're not in the war."
I said, "Mr. Mayer, you know what's going on in the world.
I mean, do you know what's going on?"
He said, "Yes, I know. But look, we have stockholders.
You know, we cannot satisfy our own personal feelings."
I said, "Look, Mr. Mayer, I'm sorry.
I have one German in this picture.
If I had several Germans, I wouldn't mind having one nice, friendly chap.
But I've only got one, and if I make this film,
this one German is going to be one of Mr. Göring's little monsters
who wants to destroy the world and kill all the Jews,
and so on and so forth.
And otherwise, I don't make the film."
[ominous slow drumming]
[Roosevelt] December 7, 1941:
a date which will live in infamy.
I ask that the Congress declare
that, since the unprovoked and dastardly attack by Japan,
a state of war has existed
between the United States and the Japanese Empire.
About halfway through making Mrs. Miniver...
Pearl Harbor.
Germany declares war on us.
We didn't even have to declare war on them.
We declared war on Japan, Germany declares war on us.
I get a call from Mr. Mayer.
"I've been thinking a lot about what you said."
He said, "You know, maybe you were right.
You go ahead and do the way you want it.
It's okay for now. All right."
[chuckles]
He'd been giving it a lot of thought.
Rotterdam we destroy in two hours.
That's thousands killed. Innocent--
-Not innocent! They were against us! -Women and children!
Thirty-thousand in two hours.
And we will do the same thing here!
[shouts in German]
And at the end of Mrs. Miniver,
with the pullback that reveals the gutted church...
Wyler's talking directly to audiences,
talking directly to the British audiences,
talking directly to the American audiences.
It just seemed like a declaration of commitment,
that we're all in this together, and we're going to fight until we win.
And it was a very beautifully-written speech.
This is the people's war. It is our war.
We are the fighters. Fight it, then.
Fight it with all that is in us.
And may God defend the right.
If you can make a film that has something to say...
[quiet singing]
...entertaining, of course, is the main purpose of it,
but if film can contribute something to the social conscience of your time,
then it becomes a source of great satisfaction.
[Spielberg] That was his first contribution to the war effort.
[industrious, fast-paced strings play]
[Greengrass] For each of those five filmmakers,
they wanted to respond
as so many millions of men and women responded.
They chose to serve.
[strings continue to play]
[man] Overnight, America's heavy industry has converted
to full-time war production.
[narrator] Ultimately, one-third of Hollywood's male workforce would join up.
But in the first days after the attack,
the movie industry was uncertain about what its role should be.
Business as usual felt impossible.
Working hours were curtailed. So was nightlife.
The clubs and bars and restaurants where Hollywood congregated
were all closed, as the West Coast, terrified of an air attack,
enforced blackouts every night.
Capra went to Washington almost immediately after Pearl Harbor
to begin one of the largest filmmaking efforts of the war.
[Capra] The genesis of this originated in the mind of General Marshall.
He was Chief of Staff.
And we were in the war.
We had no troops, we had nothing yet, but we were at war.
He called me in and said, "We have an enormous problem.
We'll soon have 12 million kids in uniform,
and many of them have never seen a gun.
These kids, with their long suits and their long chains
and all their precocious things they were doing at the time,
what are they gonna do?
What are they gonna do when they get this terrible disease of homesickness?"
He wondered how we could put into the minds of these young kids
the necessity of why they were in uniform.
And he said, "I think it could be done with film.
It should be done with film."
[man] He had tried it with lectures. He had tried it with books.
It wouldn't work. They weren't interested.
The boys weren't learning anything.
They wanted something that boys knew about.
Now, boys liked films.
When I got out of his office,
I went into the nearest, excuse me, can,
and sat down and said, "Jesus Christ, what the hell am I..."
I never saw a documentary.
I thought documentaries were silly things that rich kooks made.
And I think that the effort in America of all propaganda films
was an effort of recruitment and belief.
[man] Give the boys a reason to fight and don't lie.
They must believe it.
If they don't believe it, we're dead.
[narrator] Capra came up with an ambitious idea:
a series of seven films called Why We Fight
that would detail the history
of German and Japanese aggression leading up to America's entry in the war.
He started urging screenwriters to come to Washington and begin work.
Additionally, the War Department sent emissaries
to convince some of Hollywood's most talented men
to leave their jobs behind and lend their abilities to the cause.
[Huston] Captain Sy Bartlett was a kind of envoy from Washington,
also a Hollywood writer.
There were a list of people, Anatole Litvak, Willy Wyler,
John Ford, Frank Capra,
who were asked to come into the service,
and I was the least of these.
[Coppola] Probably at that time, there was no young director
with a more exciting career than John Huston,
with his breakthrough production on The Maltese Falcon.
[narrator] Huston's directorial debut had become a surprise hit,
both commercially and critically.
But he would be able to do only one more film
before reporting for duty.
[Kasdan] These five men all chose to go,
knowing it could be the end of them.
It wasn't just that their movie careers would be put on hold.
And so, they were saying goodbye to families, in many cases,
who never knew if they would return.
They did not have to go. George Stevens did not have to go.
When he's finishing Woman of the Year, Pearl Harbor happens,
and the whole world does a roundabout.
Woman of the Year is the first time that Hepburn and Tracy worked together,
and that started a run of pictures
and a relationship between Hepburn and Tracy
that is iconic for American movies.
[narrator] Stevens was eager to turn his attentions to the war,
instead of distracting people from it,
but he was still under contract to make two more films at Columbia.
Pearl Harbor was only the start of the Japanese military offensive.
[gunfire, airplanes]
In the weeks and months that followed, Japan invaded Hong Kong, Guam,
Burma and Singapore,
and drove American forces to retreat from the Philippines.
In June, Ford, now overseeing all Navy filmmaking, was sent to Midway Island.
[Greengrass] When Ford made Midway,
he thinks he's going to film flora and fauna,
you know, in a remote, far-flung base.
In fact, what happens is, he's told there's to be a Japanese attack.
He had to make a choice about where he went.
What he wanted to do, I think, was to be in the thick of it.
That was his instinct as a man.
He's there on a raised platform.
Well, in an air raid,
the one place you don't want to be is on a raised platform,
because you're very, very visible.
But he picked that because that was the place
where he was gonna be able to see...
He could see this perspective, but he could also see that.
Ford always knew where to put the camera.
[man] Suddenly, from behind the clouds, the Japs attack!
[airplanes humming loudly]
[gunfire]
His response is purely cinematic.
At that moment, reality comes to him, and he moves to meet it.
[humming, explosion]
[man] Planes roared from the decks of our carriers.
Army bombers, Marines,
thunder destruction over a 300-mile battle area.
When he was shooting, you see the messiness
and the framing, and the struggle for the framing,
and the sprockets coming loose...
[explosion]
...and the film becoming itself, the image distressing,
and that accidental quality conveying the raw drama.
That's one of the most modern moments in cinema.
For somebody like myself, who came originally from documentaries,
it's very interesting to me to see that Ford was there decades before,
wrestling with those same problems.
[John Ford] A blast of shrapnel that knocked me...
I got wounded pretty badly there.
[man] Meantime, our warships stopped the Jap fleet.
[Greengrass] Then he takes the rushes. He knows what he's got.
He didn't just want it to be rushes
to be cannibalized by the Department of the Navy
or bureaucrats somewhere else in the Pentagon.
He wanted to make a film.
He got the film and got out and brought it to Washington.
How he did it, I don't know.
I suspect he said it was a box of cigars or something.
I don't know how he got it out, but he got it out.
"Here, take this and start organizing it.
But don't do it here. Go to California."
Officially, I was in the Navy,
and I said, "Well should I report to the Navy barracks there?"
And he said, "No, I think you ought to report to your mother.
Go live at your mother's house."
Now, the truth was, of course,
that he knew that the bureaucracy would catch up,
and they would say, "Do you have any film here that was brought back?"
And he could say no, he didn't.
He had to construct not a documentary account, exactly,
but a John Ford account of reality.
The decision about whether to show that film
in the form that Ford had made it
ultimately went up the chain,
until finally President Roosevelt watched the film.
He gave me a little roll of film like that and he said, "Don't look at this
and don't put it in the picture until I tell you to."
And, of course, the first thing I did, as soon as I got out of the cutting room,
I looked at it immediately.
[Greengrass] He found a shot.
We'll never know whether it was a shot that he shot there,
or it was a shot that he found somewhere else,
but a shot of President Roosevelt's son.
[Robert Parrish] Then he set up a running of the film at the White House
with President Roosevelt.
And just before the White House running, he said, "Now put this in."
I was told at that running, Roosevelt talked, the way people do,
and that Roosevelt would say, "Oh, yes, that's a B-17, and that's..."
He kept on. You know, he had a lot to say about the film.
Then, when Jimmy Roosevelt's picture came up, everything was silence.
Dead silent.
Nobody spoke from the time that that shot was on the screen
until the end.
And then Roosevelt turned to Admiral Leahy,
who was his senior aide,
and said, "I want every American to see this film as soon as possible."
[Greengrass] Anyone who's made a film knows those sorts of decisions,
that all is fair in the battle to ensure the sanctity of your piece.
And that shot helped him. Let's put it like that.
[laughs]
And the result is profound across the US.
[gunfire]
People are suddenly brought close to what that conflict is.
[explosions]
[narrator] The Battle of Midway
was eventually shown in three quarters of American theaters.
It was the first time Americans saw the war in color,
which, until then, had been associated with escapism and fantasy.
It was also the first time the audience witnessed an American victory.
[man] Yes. This really happened.
[women sing "The Star-Spangled Banner"]
[Greengrass] But you can still see in that film, you know,
he picked out close-ups.
He picked out moments.
[man] Men and women of America,
here come your neighbors' sons, home from the day's work.
[Greengrass] That was quite new.
No one had ever approached unfolding warfare,
and approached it with such a humane storyteller's eye.
He had witnessed the annihilation of a...
of a military unit.
[man] At eventide, we buried our heroic dead,
the last salute from their comrades and their officers.
[gentle singing]
[Greengrass] He was not to know, at the moment that he shot,
that this was a small part of a much grander American victory.
So far as he was concerned,
he was witnessing a unit that had been wiped out.
That, I think, marked him very, very powerfully.
[Ford] I am really a coward.
I know I am. So, that's why I did foolish things.
I was decorated eight or nine times, trying to prove that I was not a coward.
But after it was all over, I still know that I was a coward.
You go ahead and do a thing, but after it's all over,
your knees start shaking.
[chuckles]
[narrator] While Ford was filming on the front lines,
Capra was struggling to get Why We Fight off the ground.
He was battling with his screenwriters constantly,
and soon realized he'd have almost no budget to shoot the films.
Then, in New York he saw the Nazi propaganda film,
Triumph of the Will,
which had been directed by Leni Riefenstahl
during the 1934 Nazi Party Congress.
[crowds cheering]
[drumming]
[del Toro] Along with America, he awakes to the monstrous ambition
and ruthlessness of Hitler
and the propaganda machine that Goebbels has assembled in Nazi Germany
when it's almost too late.
[ominous music]
I saw that, and it scared the hell out of me.
I went back to my little chair in my office and my one telephone,
and I sat there, and I sat there...
I was a... I was a very unhappy man.
How can I possibly top this?
The power of the film itself showed that they knew what they were doing.
[del Toro] And when he sees it, his reaction is extremely telling,
because he comes out of seeing it, saying,
"We're lost. We can't win this war. These guys are gonna beat us."
Because that is how effective a weapon thought is.
[crowds shouting]
[Capra] So, how do I reach the kid down the street, you know?
-[interviewer] The American kid? -[Capra] The American kid.
How do I tell him? He's riding his bike, and. "Hey, hey."
[whistles]
"You... Do you know what you've got in front of you?
You've got this and this." How do I reach him?
[industrious fast-paced strings play]
The thought hit me: "Well, how did it reach me? "
They told me.
So, I said, "Aha. Let's let the boys see only their stuff.
We make nothing. We shoot nothing.
We use their own stuff as propaganda for ourselves.
Let them see. Let them see the guys. Let them see these guys."
[shouting in German]
[man] "Stop thinking and follow me," cried Hitler.
"I will make you masters of the world."
The people answered, "Heil!"
[all shouting] Sieg Heil!
[man] "Stop thinking and believe in me," bellowed Mussolini,
"and I will restore the glory that was Rome."
The people answered, "Duce! Duce!"
[crowds shouting]
[man] "Stop thinking and follow your god emperor,"
cried the Japanese warlords,
"and Japan will rule the world."
And the people answered, "Banzai! Banzai!"
[crowds shouting]
Capra takes a route that is unique in propaganda,
which is, he makes it folksy.
[man] Take a good look at these humorless men.
These were to be the rulers of the ruling race.
Speaking for the little guy. "See those guys?
See the airs they put on?
See how they think they are superior? Well, we're gonna show them.
We're gonna show them wrong."
[Capra] Hitler looked like Charlie Chaplin.
He came on:
[imitates Hitler in German]
And actually, you know, it was one of the Marx Brothers.
For the people that saw him, a lot of people laughed.
And when Mussolini did his big, his big stuff,
why, he, too, was a clown.
If it weren't so evil, if there weren't so many people getting killed,
it was a comedy.
[children singing]
[Capra] Well, I said, "We have an enormous story to tell."
Here I got the greatest heroes, the greatest villains,
on the world stage.
Real. Not actors. Real.
[ominous music]
The truth was that if we lost, we'd lose our freedom,
certainly, above all.
And I thought freedom was our most precious commodity.
And if we lost our freedom, we'd lose everything.
[ominous music continues]