When Hollywood Went to War : After Dec. 7, 1941, pacifist movies gave way to films that energized a populace bracing for conflict; a few ring true in 1991

Before dawn on Dec. 7, 1941, there was one America, and after the morning of the next day--when most Americans read about the “Day of Infamy” in which the Japanese air fleet had bombed Pearl Harbor--there was quite another.

In that sudden, violent stroke, as the Pacific defenses crumbled, the country lost something: its innocence, perhaps, its sense of inviolability, its most insular modes of thinking. It became vulnerable. Americans had suffered through a First World War, they had whooped it up mindlessly in the ‘20s and then they suffered through the Great Crash and a numbing Depression.

Now, they had been thrust into the chaotic machinery of the world around them. And, in many ways, the beliefs and habits of its citizenry would never be the same.

Neither would their movies. For up until then, since the close of World War I, a spirit of pacifism had pervaded many American films. The most popular picture of the 1920s had been King Vidor’s tender portrayal of love against the dark backdrop of battle, “The Big Parade.” The most critically lauded war movie of the 1930s was Lewis Milestone and Maxwell Anderson’s adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s scalding critique of militarism, “All Quiet on the Western Front.” And there were others--”The Dawn Patrol,” “No Greater Glory,” “Broken Lullabye”--all showing war’s horrors, all pleading for brotherhood and understanding.

Just four years earlier, one of the world’s greatest critical successes had been a French film, “Grand Illusion,” in which Jean Renoir, basing his scenario partly on his own experiences as a World War I pilot, made a nakedly emotional plea for Frenchmen and Germans to forget their enmities. But though “Grand Illusion’s” admirers included German Field Marshal Hermann Goering, it had no effect on the sentiments of world leaders. And by 1941, Renoir himself was a French expatriate in Hollywood, working for the studio he called “15th Century Fox.”

The pacifist Hollywood movies of the ‘20s and ‘30s had little effect either--not even, it seemed, on the men who made them. In 1940, Frank Borzage, who made the 1934 “No Greater Glory” (a beautiful pacifist parable about war among street children ) would make “Flight Command,” a celebration of the Navy Hellcats. In 1943, Howard Hawks, who directed the melancholy 1930 “Dawn Patrol,” would make the robust “Air Force,” a quintessential Flying Fortress melodrama. And throughout the next decade, “All Quiet on the Western Front’s” Lewis Milestone would turn out one brawny battle epic after another: “Edge of Darkness,” “The Purple Heart,” “The North Star” and “A Walk in the Sun.” Perhaps it wasn’t that these men had changed their opinions or were being disingenuous; they were all accommodating chaos.

Resolve hardened as the war drew near. Borzage, perhaps the most genuinely pacifist American filmmaker, made “The Mortal Storm,” attacking the inhumanity of Europe’s fascists. Suspense master Alfred Hitchcock sniffed out international intrigue in 1940’s “Foreign Correspondent.” Charlie Chaplin, in his 1940 “The Great Dictator,” reclaimed his mustache from the German warmonger who had seemingly expropriated it and turned Hitler into a globe-kicking buffoon.

The Michael Curtiz-Errol Flynn swashbuckler “The Sea Hawk,” nominally based on a Rafael Sabatini novel, was refashioned by screenwriter Howard Koch (who later wrote “Casablanca” and “Mission to Moscow”) into a tirade against isolationism. And in 1941, the most popular new movie--the most popular movie of all, excepting that year’s re-release of “Gone With the Wind”--was “Sergeant York.” Director Hawks and screenwriter John Huston based the film on the real-life story of gentle Tennesseean Alvin York, a sharpshooter and pacifist from the hill country, who swallowed his convictions in order to save his fellow soldiers in battle. It was “Sergeant York” that the sailors on Vice Admiral “Bull” Halsey’s aircraft carrier Enterprise were watching as they steamed back toward Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7.

What was happening then, what happened to the movies before and after Dec. 7, 1941, may be more significant than the results of similar, later historical convulsions--for, throughout the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, the pictures were connected to the public in richer, more communal ways. There was something of vaudeville and hokum in the movies--with their dish nights and bouncing ball sing-alongs--but also something of a town hall meeting, theater and even church.

So, when the movies, with a vengeance, turned their energies to the “war effort,” they reflected and energized the sentiments of the populace. Films were made specifically as morale-builders--the all-star extravaganzas such as the Irving Berlin show “This Is the Army” (starring future Sen. George Murphy and future President Ronald Reagan), “Stage Door Canteen” and “Hollywood Canteen.” They celebrated great Allied victories: Jimmy Doolittle’s daring raid in “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo” or the crucial sea battle in John Ford’s on-the-spot documentary “The Battle of Midway.” The vehemently pro-Russian “Mission to Moscow” was made at the behest of the U.S. Government. And documentary after documentary was turned out by directors in the armed forces: not just Ford’s, but Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” series,” William Wyler’s “Memphis Belle” (real-life source of the recent David Puttnam film) and John Huston’s cooly ironic “The Battle of San Pietro.”

Even Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Donald Duck entered the fray--and after Donald zapped cartoon Nazis in the Oscar-winning “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” Bugs, Daffy and the gang regularly popped up behind Axis lines, wreaking havoc, screwing up cartoon Hitlers and Mussolinis, driving their goose-stepping foes to distraction.

It can be argued that no great war movies are ever made in times of war; that, like the writers of “War and Peace” or “The Red Badge of Courage,” the moviemakers usually need the benefit of time or distance or both. During the Vietnam War, filmmakers--except for John Wayne in the cliche-riddled “Green Berets”--shied away; “The Deer Hunter” and “Apocalypse Now” were several years away.

But Vietnam was an unpopular war--one about which most moviemakers, like most artists or performers, had objections or deep qualms. By the end of December, 1941, there were few qualms about World War II. Isolationism lost most of its intellectual defenders after Hitler’s invasion of Russia alienated those American Communists who had held fealty to Stalin’s foreign policy. The German-American Bund might still rail against intervention, or Lindbergh or Senator Borah or a few others; now their voices were drowned. Hollywood, ever the feeder of populist sentiment, heard that, seized on it.

In many respects, the great watershed movie of World War II came barely a year after Pearl Harbor: “Casablanca.” A huge hit in its day, it is one of the few multiple Oscar-winners that people still genuinely love. Ostensibly, it’s a story not about war itself but about civilians caught up in war: refugees, policemen, go-betweens, partisans.

Actually, “Casablanca”--whose platoon of writers included, notably, Julius G. and Philip Epstein and a young ex-staff writer for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theater, Howard Koch--is not even about that. Instead, it’s a movie about Hollywood itself: about the necessity for the Hollywood community to welcome the dispossessed artists and refugees of Europe, take a stand against international Fascism, and get strongly involved in the war effort. The saturnine, magnetically world-weary Bogart is the key. He’s the quintessential American outsider who must swallow his pride and make a choice.

Surrounding him is a virtual international convocation: the Hungarian director Michael Curtiz, Swede Ingrid Bergman, Hungarian-German documents dealer Peter Lorre (of “M”), French croupier Marcel Dalio (of “Rules of the Game”), German Nazi commandant Conrad Veidt (of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”), Austrian partisan Paul Henried (of the Max Reinhardt troupe), suave Britishers Claude Rains and Sidney Greenstreet (playing respectively a corrupt Vichyite and a Moroccan black marketeer) and innumerable others.

When the seemingly hedonistic and cynical Rick makes his choice to defy the Nazi commandant, he is embraced by this international contingent (or “Cuddles” Sakall, who stands in for everybody). And when he kills the commandant, he definitively turns the even more cynical and hedonistic Louis (Rains), whose clipped “Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects ,” inevitably gets the longest, loudest burst of applause in the entire film.

“Casablanca” is a war movie that never shows us war, but that virtually demands that its American audience accept a moral position as savior of a troubled world. It is an internationalist film and it signals the internationalism of the entire period--a time when Germany’s Fritz Lang and Bertolt Brecht and France’s Jean Renoir could make movies set in Czechoslovakia or provincial France (1943’s “Hangmen Also Die” and “This Land Is Mine”) on Hollywood sound stages with multinational Hollywood casts. Though both of them are Hollywood concoctions--Renoir’s film was ridiculed in France after the war for its pasteboard French village and non-French Frenchmen--the studio stylization doesn’t mitigate their portrayals of moral courage. Few ‘40s movie scenes are more effective than the climax of “This Land Is Mine”: the final proud declaration of love and disloyalty with which erstwhile meek schoolteacher Charles Laughton seals his own doom in the dock.

It is in the actual battle movies that Hollywood’s World War II effort sometimes seems most equivocal, with their racially stereotyped villains and GIs who never swear and rarely sweat. James Agee--who also ridiculed “Casablanca” in his original review--disliked most of these films and spent the early part of the war holding up actual battle documentaries in preference: movies like “Desert Victory” or, later, Huston’s “San Pietro.”

In fact, numerous battle movies were made or released during the war years--but few became classics. And of the handful that did, a small number survive, including Howard Hawks’ 1943 “Air Force” and four 1945 films: Milestone’s “A Walk in the Sun,” William Wellman’s “The Story of G.I. Joe,” Raoul Walsh’s “Objective Burma” and, most of all, John Ford’s “They Were Expendable.” They seem different--grittier, perhaps, rawer, more emotional, more human--from the many contemporary movies--the “Guadalcanal Diarys,” “Bataans,” “Back to Bataans,” “Wake Islands,” “Destination: Tokyos” and “Wing and a Prayers”--that surround them. Different even from the more serious, literate efforts like “A Bell for Adano.”

The great World War II-era battle films suggest something seemingly paradoxical, something that many directors who specialize in war movies, like Sam Fuller, insist on: every good, or honest, war movie is, in a way, anti-war. By making the situations real, and the characters human, the filmmakers, implicitly, question violence and war itself.

That isn’t always obvious. John Ford obviously identifies intensely with the military and his “They Were Expendable” and Wellman’s “Story of G.I. Joe” contain moments of almost transcendent bravery and sincerity. “Air Force” is often hellishly exciting. Yet, though none of these movies are totally free of the cliches and simplifications of the period--”Air Force” is exactly the sort of war-community-in-microcosm movie that Stanley Kubrick was satirizing in “Dr. Strangelove”--all transcend their time and genre.

Of all Hollywood directors, Ford was the one most honored and admired by his colleagues. But critics are not always as kind: They often attack him unfairly as a sentimentalizer and historical falsifier.

In a way more complex and fascinating than these critics perceive, he is a falsifier. “The Battle of Midway,” however, is fact: Ford photographed it himself, while planes attacked, ships exploded and the battle raged around him. But it’s also poetry. And so is “They Were Expendable,” which is based on the experiences of PT Boat innovator and Commander John Bulkeley a. k. a. “Brickley”(Robert Montgomery), a friend of Ford’s, and second in command Rusty Ryan (John Wayne). It covers the early part of the war, the period before and immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, when American forces suffered one defeat after another at the hands of the Japanese.

There is no jingoism in the movie, no sadism and little demonization of the enemy. Indeed, the enemy is never shown. What the film conveys instead is the sometimes unearthly beauty of the ocean and the ships who ply it, and the staggering sacrifices of the soldiers who fought in the Philippines--and who, after MacArthur and the officers decamped, were left behind, to be killed or captured.

It is nothing these soldiers couldn’t have anticipated; they were expendable. And that, of course, is the bleak fortune of war. Pearl Harbor may have ended a certain period of American innocence. But something replaced it: a different kind of innocence, a more terrible naivete--and when the era of the pacifist war movie would return, years later, it would take nightmarish rather than realistic or lyrical forms: a “Dr. Strangelove” rather than a “Broken Lullabye.” Of course, by then, the war and its new machinery had so escalated all stakes that an ultimate conflict, maybe the last, was no longer an impossibility.