‘Five Came Back’: How the Story of Hollywood Directors In World War II Became a Great Netflix Series
Entertainment journalist Mark Harris followed up his well-reviewed 2009 “Pictures at a Revolution” with an even better and more accessible book, the dramatic story of five top Hollywood directors and their roles in producing WWII propaganda films, told over 500 pages: “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. The first book was doomed not to become a movie due to prohibitive clip costs. But the urge to open up Harris’s exhaustive research on “Five Came Back” via dramatic documentary shorts shot in the global arena was irresistible — and they were free.
Read More: ‘Five Came Back’ Review: A Cinephile’s Dream Documentary Becomes Enthralling for Everyone on Netflix
There’s plenty of rich footage to choose from: Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” propaganda, John Huston’s re-enacted “The Battle of San Pietro,” John Ford and William Wyler’s live footage of the D-Day invasion from sea and air,...
Read More: ‘Five Came Back’ Review: A Cinephile’s Dream Documentary Becomes Enthralling for Everyone on Netflix
There’s plenty of rich footage to choose from: Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” propaganda, John Huston’s re-enacted “The Battle of San Pietro,” John Ford and William Wyler’s live footage of the D-Day invasion from sea and air,...
- 4/3/2017
- by Anne Thompson
- Thompson on Hollywood
‘Five Came Back’: How the Story of Hollywood Directors In World War II Became a Great Netflix Series
Entertainment journalist Mark Harris followed up his well-reviewed 2009 “Pictures at a Revolution” with an even better and more accessible book, the dramatic story of five top Hollywood directors and their roles in producing WWII propaganda films, told over 500 pages: “Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. The first book was doomed not to become a movie due to prohibitive clip costs. But the urge to open up Harris’s exhaustive research on “Five Came Back” via dramatic documentary shorts shot in the global arena was irresistible — and they were free.
Read More: ‘Five Came Back’ Review: A Cinephile’s Dream Documentary Becomes Enthralling for Everyone on Netflix
There’s plenty of rich footage to choose from: Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” propaganda, John Huston’s re-enacted “The Battle of San Pietro,” John Ford and William Wyler’s live footage of the D-Day invasion from sea and air,...
Read More: ‘Five Came Back’ Review: A Cinephile’s Dream Documentary Becomes Enthralling for Everyone on Netflix
There’s plenty of rich footage to choose from: Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” propaganda, John Huston’s re-enacted “The Battle of San Pietro,” John Ford and William Wyler’s live footage of the D-Day invasion from sea and air,...
- 4/3/2017
- by Anne Thompson
- Indiewire
Unbridled Passion by Howard Hughes
Following the release in March of ‘A Man Called Gannon’ (1968), Simply Media in the UK continue to release more Universal-International westerns, this time of 1940s and ‘50s vintage. The new releases, out on 18 April, are ‘Calamity Jane & Sam Bass’ (1949), ‘Cattle Drive’ (1951) and ‘Black Horse Canyon’ (1954). This trio of films are literally ‘Horse Operas’, with the accent on thoroughbred steeds and their importance and role in the working west. Be they cattle drovers, stock breeders or outlaws, where would any of them be without the horse? The answer, of course, is walking.
I’ll review the DVDs in the order I watched them. First up is ‘Cattle Drive’, a 1951 western directed by Kurt Neumann. Chester Graham Jnr (Dean Stockwell), the spoilt, arrogant son of railroad magnet Chester Graham Snr (Leon Ames), is accidentally left behind when the train he is travelling on makes a water stop.
Following the release in March of ‘A Man Called Gannon’ (1968), Simply Media in the UK continue to release more Universal-International westerns, this time of 1940s and ‘50s vintage. The new releases, out on 18 April, are ‘Calamity Jane & Sam Bass’ (1949), ‘Cattle Drive’ (1951) and ‘Black Horse Canyon’ (1954). This trio of films are literally ‘Horse Operas’, with the accent on thoroughbred steeds and their importance and role in the working west. Be they cattle drovers, stock breeders or outlaws, where would any of them be without the horse? The answer, of course, is walking.
I’ll review the DVDs in the order I watched them. First up is ‘Cattle Drive’, a 1951 western directed by Kurt Neumann. Chester Graham Jnr (Dean Stockwell), the spoilt, arrogant son of railroad magnet Chester Graham Snr (Leon Ames), is accidentally left behind when the train he is travelling on makes a water stop.
- 5/2/2016
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
When John Huston went to war he took his mission seriously... as an artist. He made four wartime docus for the army. San Pietro and the long suppressed Let There Be Light are the classics we studied in film school; Winning Your Wings is typical enlistment booster material and Report from the Aleutians a remarkably good record of how the war was really fought in far-flung locations. Let There Be Light: John Huston's Wartime Documentaries Blu-ray Olive Films 1942-1945 Color and B&W 1:33 flat full frame 281 min. Street Date January 19, 2016 available through the Olive Films website 29.95 Directed by John Huston
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Of the Hollywood directors who 'went to war' and made high-profile Signal Corps films for the public, John Huston was surely the most innovative. He made one enlistment booster for the Army Air Corps and then three pictures that the Army thought were either too long,...
Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
Of the Hollywood directors who 'went to war' and made high-profile Signal Corps films for the public, John Huston was surely the most innovative. He made one enlistment booster for the Army Air Corps and then three pictures that the Army thought were either too long,...
- 1/19/2016
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
William Wyler's wartime documentary Memphis Belle is fairly well-known, and even had the questionable honor of a dramatic feature film remake by Michael Caton-Jones and David Puttnam. Slightly less celebrated is Wyler's follow-up, which came out after the war had ended. John Sturges assisted.
Thunderbolt (1947)—which you can watch in its entirely via the YouTube embed, above—deals with American fighter-bombers in Italy and might be useful to show to anybody convinced by the George Lucas-produced Red Tails, once they're out of diapers. See Catch 22 for a different view of the same theater of operations.
Who knows how much artifice went into these films? Certainly footage from multiple missions was cut together to create cohesive narratives depicting single missions, but all the combat is genuine and the material was gathered at tremendous risk. Air crews wondered how Wyler could function without collapsing in terror: they had a plane...
Thunderbolt (1947)—which you can watch in its entirely via the YouTube embed, above—deals with American fighter-bombers in Italy and might be useful to show to anybody convinced by the George Lucas-produced Red Tails, once they're out of diapers. See Catch 22 for a different view of the same theater of operations.
Who knows how much artifice went into these films? Certainly footage from multiple missions was cut together to create cohesive narratives depicting single missions, but all the combat is genuine and the material was gathered at tremendous risk. Air crews wondered how Wyler could function without collapsing in terror: they had a plane...
- 7/12/2012
- MUBI
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