Five Came Back

The winner is...

And the winner is...

George Stevens!

William Wyler.

John Huston.

John Ford.

Mr. Frank Capra.

I discovered Frank Capra, like most people in my generation,

through It's a Wonderful Life.

Capra is a master at constructing emotion,

structurally, into a film.

I think I have cried more in Frank Capra films,

and I have stopped thinking more in Frank Capra films,

than in any other filmmaker's work.

I don't really think

that William Wyler saw himself as an artist.

When he set up the camera, he didn't set up the camera

to be told how extraordinary his angle and compositions were.

He set up the camera in such a way to help tell the story better.

And then having met him, I think it was the late '60s,

I so admired that he was somebody that had wielded so much power and authority

and was at the top of his game,

and won three Academy Awards for Best Director,

who was still gracious and kind.

I was drawn to John Huston.

There's a lot of comparison between Huston and Hemingway

because Hemingway had that type of masculine derring-do.

But despite his irascible personal character and personal life,

Huston had this extraordinary intelligence.

He made many, many, many films, and among them, some truly great ones.

The first time I can remember watching John Ford movies

was film club at school.

Ford, by then, had this sort of bifurcated reputation.

On the one hand, he was a controversial arch-conservative figure.

On the other hand...

Hold it!

...he was at that point being revered, as he rightly is,

as the great auteur and master of American cinema.

George Stevens' facility with dramas, comedy,

musicals, was unique.

He was not drawn to that which came easily to him.

He wanted to challenge himself all the time.

Those five filmmakers happened to be in that place then,

when the greatest conflict of all came knocking.

Cinema, in its purest form, could be put in the service of propaganda.

Hitler and Goebbels understood the power of the cinema

to move large populations towards your way of thinking.

All five of them were willing to turn away

from a very comfortable life and serve their country

in the best way they thought they could.

And to go out into the world, where there was no script,

and there was no third act that anybody wrote

where you knew you would come out of it safely.

Each of them participate on an epic scale

in the grandest interventions

in the largest war the world has ever seen.

These documentaries that the five filmmakers made

were powerful for American audiences.

I do think all five of them paid a very personal price.

These filmmakers that came back with footage

about the truth of that war...

were changed forever.

The group of directors that we're talking about...

were part of the first wave.

They were creating the art form.

Film was an intoxicant

from the very first days of the silent movies.

And I think early, early on,

Hollywood realized they had a tremendous tool,

or even a weapon, for change, through cinema.

By the late 1930s,

moviegoing had become an essential part of American culture.

More than half the adult population went to the movies at least once a week,

and before every film theaters played newsreels,

which were the only source of visual news at the time.

Power to the nth power,

proclaimed by Hitler at the Nuremberg Nazi Congress.

The Nazi Party above the state, and he above the Nazi Party,

affirmed by thundering cheers.

In the early years of Hitler's rise,

Hollywood paid little attention.

In movies, there was no Fuehrer. There were no Nazis.

Ford was very early to see the threat that Nazi Germany posed.

Twenty years earlier, when the US entered the First World War,

John Ford was 22 and just starting out as a director.

Ford not serving in World War I...

affected him very, very deeply,

and Four Sons was an attempt to explore the cost of that war.

What it was was the beginning of Ford

trying to address reality.

Ford, the man, was a figure of patrician authority

who believed in duty and tradition, and evoked them wonderfully.

He was a man who sought solace in alcohol,

and had a rebel soul,

and was proud of his Irish rebel heritage.

I'm very courteous to my equals.

More than courteous to my inferiors.

I'm speaking in terms of pictures.

And I'm horribly rude to my superiors, so-called.

Like Ford, John Huston was already aware

of the looming threat in Europe.

He had recently returned to Hollywood after some time in England.

In London, when I was about 25 years old,

a whole series of circumstances mounted up

to my finally being completely broke.

I could've called to my father for help, or friends.

But I'm enough of a believer in the gambler's creed,

that if you're in a bad streak, there's nothing to do about it.

You've just got to play it out.

John Huston was the son of Walter Huston,

who was an important actor,

and he got to learn about acting, and, of course, learned from his father.

I just had only admiration for John Huston.

He's done a lot of things that pirates do.

You know, he'd had a fight with Errol Flynn over Olivia de Havilland.

Oh, that I could've had a fight with Errol Flynn over Olivia de Havilland.

Errol said, "Do you want to make anything of it?"

And... I said, "Yes."

We weren't friends then.

There's no better way to get friends with a man than to have a fight with him.

Huston had many marriages,

and many, in between the marriages, episodes with women,

and was obviously very attractive to women,

and was very attracted to women.

Despite his bad-boy behavior throughout this period,

Huston, as a writer, had this conceptual mind

and had really begun to attract the attention of people

for his screenwriting work.

The end of a nation.

World in alarm at the peril of war.

What will come next? Czechoslovakia?

When will Nazi aggression end?

The democratic nations draw together against the ambitions of the dictators.

Huston was hired by Warner Bros.

to co-write the historical drama Juarez.

He turned the script into a pointed anti-Hitler allegory.

Democracy: The rule of the cattle, by the cattle, for the cattle.

But when the production started,

he faced the tyranny of a movie star.

Paul Muni felt his part was too small

and had his brother-in-law rewrite the script.

Only a little of Huston's work remained.

The lot of the writer in Hollywood at that time

was rather dismal.

One would write what one thought were good pictures,

and they would be changed when they got to the screen

and become bad pictures.

Huston decided the only way he could exert control over his work

was to become a director.

He had a powerful mentor.

His best friend in Hollywood was an established filmmaker

who was his opposite in almost every way:

William Wyler.

They first met when Wyler hired him to write dialogue

for a film starring Huston's father.

The two men quickly became inseparable pals.

William Wyler was very, very soft-spoken.

When he demonstrated that forcefulness of personality

was only when he was on the floor, directing.

I'm demanding, such as the audience is demanding.

I'm demanding of myself, too.

I try to get the best out of people, and if it takes a little more work

and a little more sweat to do it, then that's what we'll have to do.

Which is why they called him 40-take Willy,

because he was a perfectionist.

He was completely in control of when he knew he had gotten it.

Willy Wyler's way of directing was tough.

Believe me, he expected a lot of you,

and you therefore gave much, much better performances.

Miss Davis, I'm very happy to present to you,

on behalf of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,

for the second time, their award for your performance in Jezebel.

Thank you.

I think all directors are actors,

even those that aren't employed to work both sides of the camera.

I think when you have to speak to actors, you become an actor.

And so, I believe that William Wyler was also an actor

when he was working with his actors.

And I think that's what bonds all of these directors.

They were performance directors on top of everything else.

Wyler needed no education about the war.

For him, the stakes could not have been higher.

He had come to America 20 years earlier from Mulhouse,

a French town that Germany had taken during World War I.

Now it was being threatened once again.

Originally, I was supposed to take over my father's business.

My father was a merchant in Mulhouse, had a nice store.

I was not keen about it, but I had no other prospects.

Wyler was sponsored by a distant relative

who happened to run Universal Studios: Carl Laemmle.

He seemed to like me, and suddenly, he said,

"How would you like to come to America?"

You know, at that time, that was like going to the moon today.

My own family, although they were delighted to have me in America,

it was not particularly a thing for a young Jewish boy.

He should become a doctor or a lawyer or something.

But to go into the film business is a bit shady.

I think what speaks to me the most about Wyler

was the fact that he was a Jewish director

who was committed to his faith and his culture.