Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

New
Paperback
2015
$17.94

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES, featuring interviews with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Guillermo del Toro Before the Second World War the Hollywood box office was booming, but the business was accused of being too foreign, too Jewish, too 'un-American'. Then the war changed everything. With Pearl Harbor came the opportunity for Hollywood to prove its critics wrong. America's most legendary directors played a huge role in the war effort: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Between them they shaped the public perception of almost every major moment of the war. With characteristic insight and expert knowledge Harris tells the untold story of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II changed Hollywood.

Synopsis

NOW A NETFLIX ORIGINAL SERIES, featuring interviews with Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and Guillermo del Toro Before the Second World War the Hollywood box office was booming, but the business was accused of being too foreign, too Jewish, too 'un-American'. Then the war changed everything. With Pearl Harbor came the opportunity for Hollywood to prove its critics wrong. America's most legendary directors played a huge role in the war effort: John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens. Between them they shaped the public perception of almost every major moment of the war. With characteristic insight and expert knowledge Harris tells the untold story of how Hollywood changed World War II, and how World War II changed Hollywood.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 560
Edition: Main
Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
Published: 05 Feb 2015
ISBN 10: 1847678564
ISBN 13: 9781847678560
Book Overview: A fascinating and lively history of Hollywood and WWII

Media Reviews

The bombs fall on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 and Hollywood rolls up its sleeves and swaps the diplomatic velvet glove for the patriotic steel fist . . . A story well worth telling * * Observer * *
A captivating history . . . makes you want to revisit many of the films * * Daily Telegraph * *
Mark Harris conducts a fastidious investigation into the five top filmmakers who put their careers on hold to help the war effort . . . Fascinating * * Total Film * *
Harris deftly threads the story of each man into the wider canvases of Hollywood and the war * * Scotland on Sunday * *
Gripping . . . reveals how an elite squad of Hollywood's greatest directors recorded the bravest - and bloodiest - actions of World War II * * Mail on Sunday * *
Tough-minded, information-packed and irresistibly readable * * New York Times * *
Can't-put-it-down history of the World War II propaganda film * * San Francisco Chronicle * *
Harris has a huge story to tell, and he does so brilliantly . . . an inspirational, if cautionary, tale of the triumph of the individual over the collective, of personal vision over groupthink, and ultimately of art over propaganda * * Wall Street Journal * *
Harris is a lively commentator, and a master weaver of multifarious threads * * Empire * *
Impeccably researched and irresistibly entertaining * * Belfast Telegraph * *
Full of colourful anecdotes about the golden age of Hollywood as well as unflinching descriptions of what the directors faced on the frontline, the 500-plus pages just fly by. This would make a great movie... * * Aberdeen Evening Express * *
This is as epic an undertaking as those historical Hollywood sagas of the '30s and '40s, including anecdotes from this golden age of film * * Good Book Guide * *
I enjoyed the honesty of this book. It opened my eyes * * The Truth About Lies * *
A startling account of how five exemplary film-makers (John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, Frank Capra) enlisted in every branch of the US forces, only to return, deeply moved and changed, to approach cinema in new ways * * Financial Times * *

Author Bio

Mark Harris is the author of Scenes From A Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood, which was a New York Times notable book of the year and was named one of the ten best non-fiction books of the decade by Salon. An editor-at-large for Entertainment Weekly, a columnist for Grantland and a contributing editor for New York Magazine, he has written about pop culture and film history for many other publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, and GQ. A graduate of Yale University, he lives in New York City with his husband, Tony Kushner.