The Big Screen (30 page)

A world war is fought everywhere, and by the time of World War II, the screen was a battleground, too. Sometimes a young mind could confuse the real thing with screen action. In J. G. Ballard's novel
Empire of the Sun
, the boy Jim is stranded in Shanghai as the Japanese invade.

That hallucination is vivid on the page. In his film version of
Empire of the Sun
(1987), Steven Spielberg had a spectacular view of a huge
Wind
hoarding as the city disintegrated, but without the two kinds of smoke.

The Second World War concluded more than sixty-five years ago. You wonder if it could be retired. But it never stops, or goes away. Is it really over? The First World War is beyond explanation: we understand it was terrible, but who knows now why it was fought? For the second war, we think we know that answer. It was the crisis of modern history, and it persists as a state of thought and feeling because of the Holocaust and nuclear weapons. Such dire things were done then, or revealed about us, that the atmosphere of our self-betrayal will not disperse.

Filmmakers—some of them not born until after the war—remain gripped by the issues of war, and the ways ceaseless horror was identified in the years 1939–45. That may come from interest in the war itself, but we also realize how closely allied war and film were. War is the climax in the history of the movies as a public institution, and their vindication. It compelled the attention of masses of strangers in the dark, hanging upon the outcome. We know well enough that opposed governments produced films to “raise” morale, to make the war seem winnable and necessary. But the cinema itself—the place and its community—was as important as air-raid shelters.

That notion can easily seem sentimental; it could be that the public was misled in deciding what the war was about. But once conflict was under way, the leaders and the commanders had less time for ideology, geopolitical strategy, and secret meanings than for survival. Wherever battle was joined, it was total, ruinous or glorious. The German onslaught in Western Europe was savage and story-like—the conquest of several countries was achieved in months, in ways that made the stalemate of the First World War seem archaic. No matter the “phony war” of 1939, 1940 was a year of devastation and remaking the maps, and its high summer saw a battle such as the world had never known, a struggle for air control. The Battle of Britain (the phrase was used at the time) was a public crisis in which the British felt the threat of invasion, and sometimes watched the dogfights that might determine it. They could follow the war like a sports event, and they had no reason for not knowing how serious the outcome would be, even if in 1940, say, the British public had only a sketchy idea of the evil at work in Germany.

After that, it was one big match after another: the melodrama of Pearl Harbor, the struggle in North Africa, the sea battles in the Pacific, the German invasion of Russia, the invasion of Italy, D-day, the attack on Japan, and the steady map of Europe that ruled the front pages with heavy black arrows showing the convergence of Allied and Russian advance. People went to the movies in record numbers in these battle years. Few movie shows played without a newsreel. The public bought newspapers. They gathered around the radio. Many households followed progress with their homemade maps and paper flags to mark victories. The “news” was censored, obviously, but people trusted it—or needed it. The newsreels, when seen now, can seem embarrassingly facetious and rigged, but they were received with earnest applause in theaters. The home front mattered.

The film director John Boorman (born in South London in 1933) was old enough to know: “How wonderful was the war! It gave common cause, equal rations, community endeavour, but most delightful of all it gave us the essential thing we lacked: it gave us a myth, a myth nurtured by the wireless, newspapers, the cinema that allowed us semi people to leap our garden gates, vault over our embarrassments into the arms of patriotism.” In that spirit, Boorman would make
Hope and Glory
(1987), one of those films that knows the adult tragedy of air raids competing with the kids' feeling of a free fireworks show.

Boorman's dad, forty, joined up, and Mum was freed from a less-than-perfect marriage. Before the war, the Boormans had felt trapped in suburbia and knowing their own restricted place. So war was revolutionary: “There we were, marooned in this unformed fantasy, drowning but too polite to wave, when along came the war with lifelines for all. All our uncertainties of identity and dislocations could be subsumed in the common good, in opposing Evil—in full-blown, brass-band, spine-tingling, lump-in-throat patriotism. We had found our heroes—ourselves.”

In Britain early on and in Germany later, movie theaters in urban centers were danger spots. A packed theater and a direct hit spelled disaster. For this reason alone, major sports events were restricted. But after the initial disquiet, theaters were allowed to function so that the great show of heroism could play. And if there was a problem telling the hero story at first—just because defeats were more common—then history was waiting as a treasure-house. That's how Churchill and Alexander Korda conspired to make
That Hamilton Woman
with Olivier as Nelson.

There were American filmmakers champing at the bit, eager to draw up battle lines on the back lot but restrained by America's official policy of nonintervention. So
Sergeant York
(1941) re-created the First World War and reveled in the imagery of Gary Cooper picking off German soldiers like wild turkey. It is one of Howard Hawks's few vulgar films, but the public swallowed it. Only a few months after
Sergeant York
,
To Be or Not to Be
suggested there might be finer movies made because of the war—and by a Berliner. Ernst Lubitsch was in agonies over the war, and he was not drawn to conventional, bloodthirsty heroism. Instead, he dreamed up the idea of Polish actors doing
Hamlet
for the Nazis, with the timid Jack Benny having to be brave. It is a film that has Sig Ruman marching around to the running joke “So they call me Concentration Camp Erhard, do they?” Something else added to the sting of this picture: by the time it opened, its leading lady, Carole Lombard, was dead, killed in a plane crash in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in January 1942 at the end of a trip to sell war bonds. She would be the only American movie star lost in the war effort.

There were those who said no country capable of making
To Be or Not to Be
was going to lose the war. Yes, it was anti-Nazi, in a very witty way, but it was also a movie about show business—first things first, for Lubitsch: sex or show business—as if to say, war is no excuse for losing your priorities. So let's not forget that it is in the years of war that Hollywood produced some of its best comedies.
To Be or Not to Be
is a member of that class—and you'd have to include
To Have and Have Not
(1944), which makes passing references to Vichy and sometimes sniffs the proximity of war, and must have astonished the Hemingway unaware of having written a comedy.

The more earnest Hollywood became, the more fatuous it seemed.
Mrs. Miniver
(1942) was entirely well intentioned, and based on short stories by Jan Struther about being a housewife in Britain during the war. It was directed by a serious man, William Wyler, played by Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon, and by many accounts it assisted the task of persuading Americans to join the war. As such, it won Best Picture for 1942 and did terrific business. Still, it is ludicrous, especially in its claim that these Minivers are “ordinary middle-class people” who buy exotic hats and a sports car and live on an acre or two.
Mrs. Miniver
is unplayable today, and in 1942 it was derided in the Britain it is supposed to depict.

There had been misunderstandings on
Mrs. Miniver
. The film was shot at M-G-M in 1941, before Pearl Harbor. There was a downed German flyer in the script, sheltering in the Minivers' spacious garden. He was drawn as a decent type, but in the filming Wyler (who was Jewish and had been born in Germany) turned him into a Göring-type thug. When Louis B. Mayer saw the dailies, he called Wyler to his office. What are you doing? he wanted to know. “We don't make hate pictures…We're not at war…We have theaters all over the world, including a couple in Berlin.” The astonished director replied, “Mr. Mayer, you know what's going on, don't you?” Mayer paused and backed down, though Wyler suspected the boss might still reshoot the problem scene with another director. By the time the picture opened (on June 4, 1942, in New York, and a month later in London), Mr. Mayer had realized what was going on, and he stood behind his courage when
Mrs. Miniver
won Best Picture.

But it was a hit because it came at the right moment. It opened in America just a few months after war had been declared, so it was the ribbon on a fait accompli. Luckier still in its timing, and far more entertaining, was
Casablanca
, a war film that follows the useful advice of having no battle scenes. Showing your troops the vaguest picture of what battle looks and feels like is generally less productive than giving them a movie in which the guys sit around and talk big.

No one dreamed of
Casablanca
being the war statement it became. As the title of the play that began it all (
Everybody Comes to Rick's
) suggests, it is about a nightclub in an exotic place, the capital of French Morocco. It is a love story set against the intrigue of a town where Vichy, the Nazis, and as-yet-unassigned Americans are waiting. It was purchased by Warners and set up as a Hal Wallis production that might suit several of Warners' contract players.

By now, it is a mythic work, and one of its legends is the credo of the factory: that if everyone does his bit, the film will feel as if someone made it. People tell stories about how George Raft or Ronald Reagan might have been Rick, with Hedy Lamarr or Ann Sheridan as Ilse. And “might have been” was a weather condition in the Hollywood factory. Still, most shrewd heads thought Rick was meant for Bogart, even if that wisdom came after he was seen in
High Sierra
and
The Maltese Falcon
. As for Ingrid, she did it because David Selznick told her to, and because he made a profit on the loan-out.

Michael Curtiz directed the film, and that flamboyant Hungarian was the model of a factory system director who had a knack for turning every assignment into the same cheap silk. Auteurists have not raised Curtiz to the pantheon, in part because of the jokes told about his awful English and the way he would telephone his wife, Bess Meredyth, a screenwriter, whenever he had a problem. This is a little severe, or humorless. Curtiz is in a class of directors, along with Mitchell Leisen and Gregory La Cava, who seldom let a film down.

The script for
Casablanca
was by several hands—the Epstein brothers, Howard Koch, Casey Robinson, and maybe others—and your parents can quote lines from the film as if they were set in stone. There's Dooley Wilson singing “As Time Goes By” at the piano that holds the letters of transit, and Paul Henreid with an elegant scar on his face to prove he's been in a concentration camp. There is also the hokum of a love triangle in which two top lovers agree to let each other go for the war effort. When it comes to Hollywood thinking, the money for ten destroyers is one thing, a second front another, but letting your best girl go because it doesn't matter a hill of beans is what a real man was made for. Every boy deserved this Second World War.

One of the delights in
Casablanca
is seeing how quickly Los Angeles had become a home for refugees: so there is Conrad Veidt (from
Caligari
) as Strasser, the German star who had to get out of Germany with his Jewish wife; there is Marcel Dalio (a Marquis not so long ago for Renoir), who knows how to bring up the right number at Rick's roulette table; and there is Peter Lorre, still marked down for murder, even if he's more viable as a victim now. All these engaging “supports” (including Sydney Greenstreet) have as their godfather Claude Rains, the one-time acting teacher at RADA (Charles Laughton was his student) who gave up London for Los Angeles and who was making his way through six wives as if they were just movies, becoming an epitome of cynicism as Captain Louis Renault.

Ask the man on the street today to name a Hollywood picture, and
Casablanca
will be there in the first list. It's such a nostalgia-encrusted classic that we are spared having to notice that it is fake, foolish, and fanciful beyond belief. Yes, it won Best Picture and it was blessed by one further bonus: just as the picture was ready to be opened, the Allied armies landed in North Africa and relieved another town, a real one, also named Casablanca, on November 1, 1942. There was no fooling the public: they knew providence had hit them and they went home singing “As Time Goes By” or “La Marseillaise.” A movie is just a movie, and if you insist on seeing the Second World War as a song contest made for heroes and magic,
Casablanca
is the best fun.

When the real Casablanca was taken, Warners' first thought was to add a new last shot where Rick and Renault, entering the mist of their “beautiful friendship”—the sort available in North Africa?—hear FDR announcing the Allied landing. But Rains was out of town. Other spectators thought the film was just fine as is. Maybe someone even suggested that a single note of the outside world could crush the butterfly. The picture opened on Thanksgiving Day 1942, just as Roosevelt and Churchill met in Casablanca.