"Five Came Back: Five Legendary Film Directors and the Second World War" extracts

George Stevens's responsibilities as president of the Screen Directors Guild were considerable, and he was also under contract to make two more pictures for Columbia, which greeted any sign of wavering on his part by warning him that if he went off to war, his career would stall just when it was on the ascent. But Stevens felt increasingly consumed by a sense of duty, and resolved to work off his Columbia deal as quickly as he could manage.

Immediately after finishing 'Woman of the Year,' he began preparing 'The Talk of the Town,' a high-minded comedy-drama that was designed to give Columbia exactly the kind of semisophisticated, vaguely political, somewhat romantic crowd-pleaser it had sought since Capra left the studio. Stevens brought a light touch to the story of a prison escapee (Cary Grant) framed for arson and the Supreme Court nominee (Ronald Colman) who attempts to exonerate him. But during production, he retreated into himself more than ever, taking hours between scenes to contemplate each setup and driving his cast and crew half-mad with his impassive mien and stony silences.

Although critics applauded the results—the film became Stevens’s first Best Picture nominee—many of them noted that he was working in a vein that had already been well mined by Capra, a similarity that was only underscored by his use of the costar (Jean Arthur) and screenwriter (Sidney Buchman) of 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'. 'The Talk of the Town' was Stevens’s first attempt to go “a bit thicker” —it makes a political statement, but the statement is about the horror of lynch-mob rule and vigilante hysteria, which had been a favorite Hollywood subject since the mid-1930s and was by 1942 a relatively safe way for a film to be topical. Nelson Poynter, the young, progressive deputy of the BMP, praised Talk for dramatizing “one of the basic things we are fighting for —a decent social contract.”

Unable to decide whether Jean Arthur’s character should end up with the firebrand played by Grant or the older, more professorial Colman, Stevens put the question to moviegoers, wondering whether they would prefer a man of action or a man of intellect. The audience chose Grant, but for reasons Stevens hadn’t anticipated. “While there are men of draft age on the screen, the girls should marry them,” read a typical comment card. “Later on the mature men will have it all to themselves.” Another viewer, rooting for Colman, wrote, “Send Grant off to war without Arthur to stay true to life.” It was the beginning of the era of the 4-F movie hero—three years during which, if a young man appeared on screen in a contemporary film set in the United States, moviegoers wanted to know why he wasn’t in uniform.

The Talk of the Town had just opened when Stevens ran into Capra on the lot, and by then he had made up his mind. His agent, Charles Feldman, tried one last time to scare him out of leaving. “You go in, this war will last seven years, or five years —you’re finished as far as the films are concerned, if nothing worse happens to you,” he told his client.

Richard Gaines, director George Stevens and Jean Arthur between takes of 'The More the Merrier' (1943)

Stevens was undeterred. He informed a resigned Harry Cohn that his next picture for Columbia, a romantic comedy called 'The More the Merrier' in which he planned to reteam Grant and Arthur, would be his last. [Joel McCrea replaced Cary Grant] Stevens's active duty would begin just days after he finished work in the editing room. “The war was on... I wanted to be in the war,” he said later. “It’s hard to get a fifty-yard-line seat like that.” World War II was no longer a shock; it was an ongoing fact of life with no end in sight. Any hopes that an American victory would be swift had evaporated with daily headlines about fresh casualties and new combat zones in the Pacific. Over the summer, U.S. planes had flown their first, tentative missions over France, and the army would soon begin Operation Torch, opening a new front with its first major deployment of ground troops in North Africa. As summer turned to fall, nobody in Hollywood was calling the war an “adventure” any longer.


William Wyler and George Stevens came back to London at the end of October 1943, just as Huston and Capra were leaving. Wyler’s return was tense and urgent—the result of a summons by cable from Eighth Air Force commander General Eaker. In late August, the crew of the 'Memphis Belle' had finally ended its national rallying tour and arrived in Los Angeles to work on the picture. Wyler saw their visit as an occasion to honor their achievement, and as a treat, he threw them a welcoming party, asking each crewman in advance which Hollywood star he most wanted to meet.

Nobody turned down his invitation—by then, the ten flyers, the youngest of whom was only nineteen, were celebrities in their own right, and for an evening they happily chatted and flirted with Veronica Lake, HedyLamarr, Olivia de Havilland, and Dinah Shore. Wyler may have been in no hurry to finish the film, but he wasn’t lingering in Hollywood because of any eagerness to return to the movie business. When Sam Goldwyn asked him if he was ready to come home yet —studios and producers were increasingly anxious to get their top-tier talent back in the fold— Wyler told him he intended to stay in the war for the duration. Goldwyn then asked him to sign a punitive amendment to his contract which stipulated that he was to resume work in Hollywood within sixty days of his discharge and gave Goldwyn the right to terminate their deal. -"Five Came Back: Five Legendary Film Directors and the Second World War" (2014) by Mark Harris