(Capra, who immigrated to the US from Italy when he was 5 and had been referred to in a 1930s magazine profile as “the little wop,” hoped desperately to be accepted by his country, hence his pitching in on the war effort.)Īnd yet Capra, who reigned as king of Hollywood in the 1930s, would largely see his career demolished by his efforts. Terrified by the raw power of Leni Riefenstahl’s Hitler-glorifying 1935 documentary Triumph of the Will, Capra decided the US was leaving its own powerful propaganda efforts on the table - after all, who made better movies than Hollywood? - and launched his own foray into producing films meant to explain the war and propagandize for its necessity to his countrymen. Netflixįive Came Back sometimes bounces too haphazardly among the five as they crisscross the world to make their documentaries, but it has a loose protagonist in Capra, who remains stateside to coordinate the directors’ efforts and act as a go-between with the US government. John Ford shoots one of his war documentaries. (Huston also won for screenwriting.) And all five put hugely promising careers on hold - often at the peak of their powers - to document the American war effort, at the commission of the government. Capra, Wyler, George Stevens, John Ford, and John Huston were perhaps the five most successful directors of their generation, with 13 Oscar wins for Best Directing among them. Hearing Spielberg talk about William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (which he has clearly studied in great detail) or del Toro dissect Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life would be enough to make the documentary worth watching, even without all the rarely seen combat footage.īut it’s that combat footage - drawn from the five directors’ World War II documentaries and outtakes from the same films - that makes up the bulk of Five Came Back, and with good reason. They fill in necessary detail about the lives of Five Came Back’s subjects and the movies they made before, during, and after the war. (The impressive scope of that list becomes easier to understand once you realize Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment produced the documentary.)īut these talking heads are present for more than just color quotes. The documentary roster of commentators boasts Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass, and other current Hollywood legends its narrator is none other than Meryl Streep. The first thing you might notice about Five Came Back is its stacked list of talking-head interview subjects. Five Came Back has a great story - and the right interview subjects to flesh it out
There isn’t anything revelatory here for fans of the book, but simply getting to see footage from the films the book described will likely be enough, especially in the series’ moving final hour, which contrasts the heavy burden of depicting the war’s end, the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps, and Hollywood’s shift toward the more ambivalent films of the 1950s and ’60s. Naturally, any book about the movies is crying out for supplemental footage, and that’s exactly what Netflix’s Five Came Back, a solid three-part adaptation of the book - which captures most of its highlights - offers. Vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark vox-mark
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