Harris’ research reveals that Huston arrived at the very end of the battle, which took the lives of more than 1,000 Allied soliders. Personally supervised by Capra, director John Huston staged additional “African’’ footage in California’s Mojave Desert with dummy tanks being bombed from the air, as well as additional recreations of dogfights between Allied and (fake) German fighters that were shot in Orlando, Fla.ĭecades later, Huston labeled the faked footage, which turned up in an Anglo-American documentary called “Tunisian Victory,’’ as “disgraceful.’’īut Harris says Huston - Oscar winner for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre’’ and father of actors Anjelica and Danny Huston - was less frank about the authenticity of “The Battle of San Pietro,’’ his critically acclaimed documentary about an Italian battle that was selected in 1991 for the Library of Congress’ prestigious National Film Registry.
Real war footage ww2 series#
So Frank Capra (whose three Oscars included “It Happened One Night’’ and who oversaw an ambitious series of army training films) assigned George Stevens (whose two Oscars after the war included “Giant’’) to spend two weeks in Algiers staging re-creations (that Harris says were obviously faked) using tanks and soldiers assigned to him.īesides capturing “already blown-up cities being blown up some more,’’ as Stevens described it, “We took tanks and ran them through the water like they did when the British Seventh Army cut off the Germans by taking their tanks out into the water.’’ This was especially true in Africa, where British army crews recorded lots of impressive footage, but most of the few combat scenes photographed by Americans during the invasion of Casablanca went down with a sunken ship. Once America entered the war, logistical problems and bureaucratic snafus sometimes made it difficult to get film crews to the front lines in time. “Even 70 years after Pearl Harbor, we still so want that to be true.’’ This was embellished with entirely staged shots taken in Hawaii of sailors manning surface-to-air guns “in time to perfectly frame our response to a surprise attack,’’ Harris says. Less than four minutes of film records the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, so Ford and co-director Gregg Toland (who photographed “Citizen Kane’’) staged footage using miniature battleships and airplanes on the Fox lot in Hollywood. John Ford, who had already won three of his unmatched-to-date four Oscars and received a Purple Heart for wounds received while shooting the Academy Award-winning feature documentary “The Battle of Midway,’’ also co-directed “December 7,’’ which won the 1944 Oscar for Best Short Documentary. “But they all wanted to be in the thick of it and served for at least three years.’’ “They all could have gotten out of service because they were too old and/or their work as civilians was so important to American morale,’’ says Harris. “Five Came Back,’’ a new book out Monday by film historian Mark Harris, recounts their adventures - sometimes under enemy fire - and details how they sometimes secretly faked combat footage that has been passed off as the real thing for decades in documentaries.
Real war footage ww2 movie#
Five legendary, Oscar-winning movie directors abandoned their lucrative Hollywood lifestyles to volunteer for often-grueling military service during World War II as part of a corps of hundreds of filmmakers who recorded the Allied advance across occupied Europe and in the Pacific.
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