Transcript
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Crafting images for wartime viewers isn't new. During World War II American audiences poured into movie theaters week after week to be consoled. Film critic Richard Schickel was a member of that Great War audience and he recently revisited the reels that shaped his boyhood for a memoir called, Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip. But in returning to these pictures, his now mature and critical eye finds the films about the war and not about the war to contain contrived and not always truthful messages.
RICHARD SCHICKEL: Almost every Hollywood movie to this very day buttresses the basic values of the country! I mean the whole idea of certainly movies of the '40s and even of the '30s were always bringing everybody into camp and then out of camp into a heroic endeavor, and I don't think they had any doubts or hesitations about lining up with the government on that! And the government did take an interest in Hollywood film! Most movies were supposed to in some way or other, either directly or metaphorically, support the war effort.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Let's talk about some of the movies that came out during the war but that were set on the home front. What were the themes that they tended to point to over and over again?
RICHARD SCHICKEL: The main thing about home front movies, and they were often not necessarily even set contemporaneously, you know; a movie like Meet Me in St. Louis is set at the turn of the century! But what they emphasized was that duty might call -- in that case the father --to go elsewhere - take a job in New York in this particular case -- and the family hated that idea. They hated the notion that they would have to uproot themselves as so many Americans had to do during the war. [SOUNDTRACK CLIP FROM MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS]
MARGARET O'BRIEN: [WEEPING] No you can't! You can't do anything like you do in St. Louis!
JUDY GARLAND: Oh, no darling - you're wrong! No, no -- New York is a wonderful town! Look -- everybody dreams about going there! But we're luckier than lots of families, because we're really going!
RICHARD SCHICKEL: And eventually they don't have to in this movie; that's kind of like the, the lovely thing that happens in the movie. But before it happens, there's that song Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas which is about somebody having or trying to have a merry little Christmas far, far, far from home -- far, from the people and the places that they love and which shape them. And that's a big theme in domestic American movies. Take, for example, a wonderful movie directed by Elia Kazan -- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I mean in that the beloved father dies, but the children pick up their lives and they go on, and the father is the kind of--benign inspirational figure in their lives even though he has disappeared from the movie and disappeared from their lives. [SOUNDTRACK CLIP FROM A TREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN]
PEGGY ANN GARNER: It's called The Man People Loved. Please don't make me read it, mama.
DOROTHY MACGUIRE: Read it.
PEGGU ANN GARNER: [READING] Perhaps many people might have said of him that he was a failure. It is true that he had no gift for making money. But he had a gift for laughter and for making people love him. He had the gift of making you feel proud to walk down the street with him. He had nothing to give but himself, but of this he gave generously, like a king.
DOROTHY MCGUIRE: Like a king. That's like it was. Walking down the street with him you always felt like that.
RICHARD SCHICKEL: The notion that we could suffer loss and at the same time go on with what we had to do, whether it was personal or geo-political was a huge theme in movies that were not directly addressing the war as, say, a combat movie might.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: What themes did Hollywood avoid during the war years for the most part?
RICHARD SCHICKEL:I mean, the Holocaust was never once mentioned in the movies. The government had surveys which indicated that America was endemically anti-semitic. So as a war aim, the notion of rescuing Jews in Europe was thought to be by the American government not a good idea to put before the American people. And so we fought the war in Europe on the screen as a war of downtrodden idealists doing their best to oppose the Nazi juggernaut.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: You note in your book that Hollywood seemed to be a lot tougher on the Japanese than they were on the Germans.
RICHARD SCHICKEL:The Japanese were, in wartime movies, the great "other." They took the place of, let's say, the American Indian; they were people who were shown to be animalistic, to be beyond the purview of civilized conduct. The Germans, according to the American government, were always to be shown to have some measure of redemptive possibility. They were shown to be people who had been misled; it was shown to be a sort of a temporary aberration on the part of the Germans. It was not shown to be anything like what we came to know about the organized killing of a vast European minority. That was basically not shown to us in World War II movies.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:One of the prevailing themes you note in your book is that the movies always stress the value of every individual. There's no sense of cannon fodder in the wartime movies that you saw.
RICHARD SCHICKEL: The cannon fodder was always in the back of the frame, but, you know, those people who were in the starring roles, if they were forced to confront death, always did so heroically. I mean there is this kind of reach for transcendence as the final trump is about to be sounded for a lot of heroes, that you know -- yes, they're going to become physically dead, but that death will be redeemed; he will be remembered. They made a movie of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls with Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper, and he has broken his leg and he has blown the bridge but even so on come the phalanges, and this little guerilla band that he is hooked up with which includes his lover has to retreat. But his leg is busted, so he can't retreat, although it seems to me he might have given it a try-- [LAUGHTER] I mean-- [SOUNDTRACK CLIP FROM FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS]
INGRID BERGMAN: No! No! I'll stay with you. [WEEPING]
GARY COOPER: No. Each of this must do this thing alone. We do it for each other.
INGRID BERGMAN: No!
GARY COOPER: But if you go, then I go with you. That way I go too.
RICHARD SCHICKEL: There was this notion that if you were heroic and if you were American and if you were fighting for the right cause that you would not die fully. I mean, there were a lot of, incidentally, wartime movies in which people like Spencer Tracy would die! But they would go on! You know? They would be ghosts! They would be whispering advice to Van Johnson in the next reel! Remember Tender Comrade, you know, Robert Ryan dies far away and Ginger Rogers picks up a picture of him and she has this little baby in his [sic] arms - she says you know I'm, I'm going to introduce you to your father. And he died for the best world you can imagine; you know, it's a world not with hate in it and we're all going forward into prosperity and pacification and all of that. I mean all of these tropes are just preposterous! You know? I mean [LAUGHS] - I mean I don't say that it wasn't a good war or a war we shouldn't have fought, but you know the fact of the matter is we were consistently lied to and it, it has taken me-- and I suspect a lot of people of my generation -- a long time to get over those lies and to begin to see the war whole and to see, you know, what it was really about. I don't particularly like being lied to about serious issues, and I, I suppose if there's a theme to Good Morning Mr. Zip Zip Zip it's that - that this is a cinema that essentially and with malice aforethought lied to us! And-- lied to us about important matters -- not least of which was the Holocaust.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well, Richard Schickel, thank you very much!
RICHARD SCHICKEL: Thank you!
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Richard Schickel's new book is called Good Morning Mr. Zip Zip Zip: Movies, Memory and World War II-- and he joined me from the NPR West studios in Los Angeles. [THEME MUSIC]
BOB GARFIELD:That's it for this week's show. On the Media was produced by Janeen Price, Katya Rogers and Megan Ryan with Tony Field; engineered by Dylan Keefe, Rob Christiansen and George Edwards, and edited-- by Brooke. We had help from Brian Tilley. Our webmaster is Amy Pearl.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:Arun Rath is our senior producer and Dean Cappello our executive producer. Bassist/composer Ben Allison wrote our theme. You can listen to the program and get free transcripts at onthemedia.org and e-mail us at onthemedia@wnyc.org. This is On the Media from NPR. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
BOB GARFIELD: Whereas, by contrast, I'm Bob Garfield. [MUSIC TAG]