A Return to Normandy, ‘Where It All Began’ : Movies: A segment of the week-long Festival of American Cinema focuses on ‘Films for the Fight,’ a remembrance of how Hollywood depicted World War II.

Nazi bombs were exploding in the stage-set streets of Paris when Ingrid Bergman leaned close to Humphrey Bogart. “Is that cannon fire,” she asked, “or is my heart pounding?”

Ah, yes, World War II was a memorable, even glorious time, for a very patriotic Hollywood. And this week in Normandy, just down the coast from the beaches where thousands of Americans died to liberate Europe 50 years ago, Hollywood dug into its film vaults to pay tribute to its own role in the war.

At a Sunday night celebration, as the 20th annual Festival of American Cinema opened this week in Deauville, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored “Films for the Fight” in a nostalgic soiree that included that scene from 1942’s “Casablanca” and dozens of clips from “The Longest Day,” “Twelve O’Clock High,” “Mrs. Miniver,” “A Guy Named Joe,” and other movies of--and about--that era.

This week, as the French media is introduced to “Forrest Gump,” “Wolf,” and other films that open soon in France, festival screens also are showing such war-time movies as “Follow the Boys,” a 1944 feature with Marlene Dietrich; “13 Rue Madeleine,” 1946, with James Cagney; and the 1945 Office of War Information film, “True Glory.”

“Normandy is where it all began,” explained Jack Valenti, 72, head of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Like some still in show business today, Valenti was a soldier in World War II, commanding a B-25 bomber and flying 51 combat missions.

“Of course, the movie industry was vastly different then,” Valenti said. “Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner were ferocious patriots. They really believed their movies were contributing to victory.

“Some of those movies were wonderful,” he added. “But movies don’t only celebrate the past. They reflect the mood and ambience of the time. And that was a war in which there were no doubts. Honor. Duty. Service. Victory. I guess we were living in an age of innocence then.”

World War II certainly provided plenty of heroes and villains for Hollywood. And it also gave actors, directors and screenwriters the kind of stories with passion and tragedy that can only come from true-life drama.

Some of Hollywood’s stars enlisted as soldiers, of course. But the film industry also sponsored “canteens,” where soldiers could meet their favorite stars, and entertainers toured the world in USO shows for the troops.

But it was the stories of valor and sacrifice on the big screen that helped inspire a generation of Americans, and, perhaps more importantly, captured the memories of that war for later generations.

Among Hollywood’s biggest boosters was Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who encouraged film makers to use their craft to build morale among American troops stationed abroad. “The stories and the sets . . . bring home their home country vividly to their memories,” Eisenhower said in 1942. “Let’s have more motion pictures.”

Col. W. Mason Wright Jr., chief of the Army’s Pictoral Branch in 1942, put it this way: “In times of peace, motion pictures are a luxury, but in times of war they are a necessity.”

And there was no better time or place to recall those contributions than here in Normandy at the end of a summer of anniversaries that began with worldwide telecasts of ceremonies on the beaches nearby and ended with parties in the streets of Paris last month.

For festival-goers in France, living so close to the events that Hollywood brought to the screen, the retrospective of “Films for the Fight” was an often-poignant reminder of why the Allied soldiers are still hailed in Normandy as “the liberators.”

“When memory fails, art becomes memory,” said Ruda Dauphin, an American official with the Deauville festival. “Artists give meaning to suffering and complete history.”

But the retrospective also suggested just how important France was to Hollywood, which used its back lots to re-create the Occupation in Paris, in Normandy and in the small villages that dot this country’s splendid countryside.

“Hollywood was kept good and busy during 1940 to 1945,” said Robert Osborne, host of the Movie Channel cable television network and emcee for the academy tribute. “And no country got as much attention from Hollywood as France.”

About 1,000 people turned out for the tribute at the beachside convention center in Deauville. Among the guests were the children and grandchildren of Gens. Eisenhower and Omar Bradley; Pamela Harriman, U.S. ambassador to France and former daughter-in-law of Sir Winston Churchill, the war-time British prime minister

Hollywood was also well-represented, from director Arthur Hiller, whose 20 feature films include “The Americanization of Emily,” to Roddy McDowall, whose credits include “The White Cliffs of Dover” and “The Longest Day.”

Also on hand was Jean-Pierre Aumont, who starred in “The Cross of Lorraine” and who earned France’s highest military decoration in the Free French Army.

Maxine Andrews, who appeared with the Andrews Sisters in “Hollywood Canteen” in 1944 and toured with the USO, showed she has retained her vigor as she belted out “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.”

Recalling the Andrews Sisters’ first USO mission, she said she had been surprised by the tender age of the soldiers. “I did a lot of growing up back then,” she said. “I realized that what we were doing back in Hollywood was playing. What these boys were doing was real. It made me think of the folly of war.”

Van Johnson, 78, climbed onto the stage as the audience applauded his romantic scenes with Elizabeth Taylor beneath the Arc de Triomphe in the 1954 film, “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” A stage and screen veteran, Johnson first gained fame in wartime classics such as “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” “Battleground” and “Two Girls and a Sailor.”

Johnson joked that his part in the war had included “flying 200 missions over June Allyson’s dressing room. It wasn’t easy in those days,” he said. “I had to get up at 5:30 in the morning, go to the studio and kiss Elizabeth Taylor all day. It was tough.”