Five Came Back

The new, three-episode Netflix documentary Five Came Back, based on the nonfiction book by Mark Harris, tells the story of five Hollywood directors who left to serve in World War II: Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, George Stevens, and John Ford. The five directed such classics as It’s a Wonderful Life, The African Queen, The Quiet Man, Ben-Hur, and The Diary of Anne Frank.

The U.S. government enlisted the five to produce battle films, ranging from documentaries to propaganda. The war changed the directors and their subsequent films. Stevens directed Spencer Tracy–Katharine Hepburn comedies before the war. At the end of the war he filmed the awful scenes at the Dachau concentration camp (the series replays his footage), a record that was used for the Nuremberg trials. Stevens quit making comedies after that.

This no-frills documentary is sometimes plodding, combining war footage (where soldiers let fly a few profanities) and movie footage with commentary from five modern filmmakers: Lawrence Kasdan, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass, and Francis Ford Coppola. The modern five are mostly reduced to narrators, with a rare moviemaking insight here and there.

The series ends with a quote from Capra about the fundamental goodness of human beings in the face of evil. But an earlier quote is revealing. Of the five, Stevens seemed to have experienced the most trauma, filming D-Day and then the battles for Europe over the next year. When he came upon the Dachau camp, he said, “What kind of creatures are we?” When the starving camp prisoners grabbed at him, “I feel a Nazi,” he said. “That’s a fierce thing to discover within yourself, that which you despise.” At least one of the directors came back from the war with a sense of the darkness of human hearts that contradicted the glitter of Hollywood.