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U.S. blocked Huston's war films by Doug Moe 
U.S. blocked Huston's war films By Doug Moe The Capital Times, September 8, 2004 WHEN WARNER BROTHERS decided this week not to distribute an "anti-war" documentary by filmmaker David O. Russell,it was following the example set a half century ago by the U.S. government and one of the greatest directors of all time, John Huston. Warner Brothers had given Russell $180,000 to make a documentary about the current war in Iraq that would be included as an "add-on" to a new special edition DVD of "Three Kings," Russell's heralded 1999 movie about the first Gulf War that starred George Clooney. Studio spokeswoman Barbara Brogliatti told the New York Times Thursday that the new documentary, which features interviews with refugees and veterans of the current Iraq war, was "inappropriate" for the DVD. "This came out to be a documentary that condemns, basically, war," Brogliatti said. "This is supposed to be a special edition of 'Three Kings,' not a polemic about war." The Times said the fate of the documentary is not certain, but added that "the studio ... said it was inclined to let Mr. Russell have it back. Mr. Russell, anticipating that outcome, said he would probably try to distribute it independently." Which would be a much better outcome than befell John Huston, who in the 1940s, while serving in the U.S. military, made three war documentaries for the Photographic Division of the Army Signal Corps. Two of them wound up being suppressed by the same military that commissioned them. One of those two would not be shown for more than 30 years. Huston was an unlikely subversive. In 1942, he was fresh off his stunning directorial debut, "The Maltese Falcon," and already living a flamboyant life that would include friendships with Ernest Hemingway and Robert Capa and liaisons with many of the world's most beautiful women. He was famously irresponsible. John's father, Walter Huston, told one of John's later wives that when John was broke and getting married for the first time, Walter gave him $500 for a wedding present. "He spent the whole thing on a chandelier," Walter said. "I haven't worried about him too much since." But if he wasn't overly political, neither was Huston inclined to spout propaganda. He'd had a taste of that with his first Army-commissioned documentary, "Report from the Aleutians," on which he collaborated with studio mogul Daryl Zanuck. "It was to be a propaganda film and I'm afraid there are elements that show," Huston said in a 1982 interview. The film was about the U.S. bombing of Japanese emplacements on the Aleutian Islands off Alaska. "We were cheering our own boys on," Huston told interviewer Midge Mackenzie. "In one of the missions, we said that everybody returned unscathed. Well, very rarely did missions return unscathed." Mackenzie would eventually make an acclaimed documentary of her own, "John Huston - War Stories," about Huston's documentaries. "By 1943," Mackenzie wrote in the New York Times in 2000, "when Huston went to Italy for 'The Battle of San Pietro,' he had stopped identifying with the home front and started identifying with the men he was filming." Huston's movie told of a Texas infantry regiment's attempt to liberate the hill town of San Pietro from a well-bunkered enemy who exacted a terrible toll of American casualties. Huston screened the movie for U.S. Army brass and recalled: "I remember the ranking officer rising around a third of the way through and leaving the theater. And when he was gone, the next-ranking officer rose and he left. And so they went, one after the other, until I was alone in the room." "San Pietro" was briefly suppressed by the Army, until Gen. George C. Marshall saw it and decided it would benefit soldiers going into combat to have a realistic idea of what was in store for them. Huston's third and last war documentary, "Let There Be Light," was actually shot after the war was over, in a military hospital on Long Island. His assignment, Mackenzie said, "was to create a sympathetic documentary on the military's rehabilitation of the 'psychoneurotic soldier,' to educate civilians and help ease the soldiers' re-entry into society." But so devastating was the portrayal of the "casualties of the spirit," as Huston described them, that when the director attempted to screen it at the Museum of Modern Art in 1946, it was seized by military police and kept under wraps until 1980, when at the insistence of Vice President Walter Mondale it was finally declassified. Huston made many remarkable films over his legendary career - from "The Maltese Falcon" to "The Man Who Would Be King" and "Prizzi's Honor" - but he may never have made any more important than those small films that so frightened the U.S. military. Rebuffed by Warner Brothers, David Russell is in honorable company. |