Frank McLynn
Lights, Camera, Action
Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War
By Mark Harris
Canongate 511pp £30 order from our bookshop
Mark Harris’s subject is the war service from 1942 to 1945 of five distinguished directors: John Ford, Frank Capra, George Stevens, John Huston and William Wyler. Like those other authentic war heroes James Stewart, David Niven and Clark Gable, these men all volunteered for the armed services, taking a massive pay cut and the risk that, if the war dragged on, they would become Hollywood’s forgotten men.
Harris’s approach is novel, but the book suffers from an uncertainty of focus. It is never quite clear what moral or message he intends us to draw from his narrative or who the target readership is. Movie buffs who have read the biographies of the five men will know 95 per cent of the story and the anecdotes already. For those who have not, the arcana will doubtless elicit a head-scratching response. But Harris’s work is pleasingly unpretentious and well served by a strictly chronological narrative.
John Ford is best known as the director of classic westerns (The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Stagecoach and so on), as well as other outstanding
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
The first holiday camps had an 'ethos of muscular health as a marker of social respectability, and were alcohol-free. How different from our modern Costa Brava – not to mention the innumerable other coasts around the world now changed forever'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/from-mont-blanc-to-magaluf
'The authorities are able to detain individuals in solitary confinement for up to six months at a secret location', which 'increases the risk to the prisoner of torture'.
@lucyjpop looks at two cases of China's brutal crackdown on free expression.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/xu-zhiyong-thupten-lodoe
'"The Last Colony" is, among other things, part of the campaign to shift the British position through political pressure. As with all good propaganda, Sands’s case is based in truth, if not the whole of it.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/empire-strikes-back