Repicturing the Second World War: Representations in Film and Television

Repicturing the Second World War Representations in Film and Television

Edited by

Michael Paris

Repicturing the Second World War

Also by Michael Paris THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND POPULAR CINEMA (1999) WARRIOR NATION (2000) OVER THE TOP (2004)

Repicturing the Second World War Representations in Film and Television Edited by

Michael Paris University of Central Lancashire, UK

Selection and editorial matter © Michael Paris, 2007 Chapters © their authors, 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin^s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9780230002579 hardback ISBN-10: 0230002579 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

Contents Acknowledgements

vii

Notes on Contributors

viii

1 Introduction: Film, Television, and the Second World War – The First Fifty Years Michael Paris 2 ‘Rose-tinted Blighty’: Gender and Genre in Land Girls Wendy Webster

1

12

3 Policing the People’s War: Foyle’s War and British Television Drama James Chapman

26

4 An Autobiographical Allegory: Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini Robert W. Matson

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5 Soccer with the Dead: Mediterraneo, the Legacy of Neorealismo, and the Myth of Italiani Brava Gente Saverio Giovacchini

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6 Safe Conduct: A Tribute to The French Film Industry During the Second World War Diane Afoumado

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7 Aimée, Jaguar and Sophie Scholl: Women on the German Home Front Helen Jones

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8 ‘This Film is based on a True Story’: The Tuskegee Airmen S.P. Mackenzie 9 ‘What Happened was Wrong’: Come See the Paradise and the Japanese-American Experience in the Second World War Michael Paris v

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105

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10 Commissioning Mass Murder: Conspiracy and History at the Wannsee Conference Simone Gigliotti

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11 Laughing Against Horror: Life is Beautiful and Train of Life Pierre Sorlin

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12 Enemy at the Gates as a ‘Soviet’ War Film Denise J. Youngblood

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13 Bomber Harris: Raking Through the Ashes of the Strategic Air Campaign Against Germany Mark Connelly

162

14 Realism, Historical Truth and the War Film: The Case of Saving Private Ryan Toby Haggith

177

15 Downfall and Other Endings: German Film and Hitler’s War after Sixty Years Tony Barta

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Notes and References

205

Index

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Acknowledgements My thanks must first go to the contributors to this book; friends and colleagues, who greeted my original proposal with enthusiasm and who have subsequently so generously given of their time and expertise to make this book a reality; and to Pierre Sorlin, who has taught us so much about the interaction between the moving image and history and who, as always, was generous with ideas and advice at the time this project was being developed. Thanks also to my friends Bob Matson, Wendy Webster and James Chapman for sound advice and support, and to Jill Lake at Palgrave Macmillan, editor for the project, for her encouragement and support. Michael Paris

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Diane Afoumado was formerly Assistant Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Paris X, and now works at the Memorial de la Shoah – CDJC in Paris. Author of a number of essays, she has published with co-authors Serge Kalarsfield and Andre Delahaye (La Spoliation dans les Camps de Province (2002)). Her latest book is on the Jewish refugees of the SS St. Louis. Tony Barta is Associate of the School of Historical and European Studies, La Trobe University, Australia. He has published a number of essays on film and history including Nazi Germany: Understanding the Third Reich (2004) and edited the collection Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History (1998). James Chapman is Professor of Film at the University of Leicester. He has wide-ranging research interests in the history of British popular culture, especially film and television, and his books include The British at War: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 (1998), Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film (2005) and Inside the Tardis: A Cultural History of ‘Doctor Who’ (2006), all published by I.B. Tauris, London. He is currently writing an exploratory study of War and Film for Reaktion Books, London. Mark Connelly is Reader in Modern British History, University of Kent, at Canterbury. His many publications include Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War Two (2001), We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (2004) and, as co-editor, War and the Media: Reportage and Propaganda, 1900–2003 (2005). Simone Gigliotti is a lecturer in the History programme at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and a fellow in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Her recent publications include The Holocaust: A Reader (Blackwell, 2005). She is currently working on a book on deportation journeys in the Holocaust, to be published by Berghahn Books. viii

Notes on Contributors

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Saverio Giovacchini is Associate Professor of History and Media Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of Hollywood Modernism (2001). His current project, The Rise of Atlantis: Cultural Co-Production and the Creation of Western Cinema after World War Two, examines the development of the North Atlantic film industry, film culture and film genres. Toby Haggith is public services officer and film programmer at the Imperial War Museum, London. He has written many articles on film and the Second World War and is the joint editor, with Joanna Newman, of The Holocaust and the Moving Image (2005). He is currently completing a book on British film and slum clearance and town planning, 1918–1951. Helen Jones teaches on the German Studies and Film and Media degree programmes at the University of Central Lancashire. Her published work is on narrative structure and East European literature and identity, and more recently she has worked on East German cinema and German documentary films. She has published several articles on the former East German author Brigitte Reimann and is a co-founding member of the Brigitte Reimann Society in Neubrandenburg, Germany. S.P. Mackenzie is Professor of History at the University of South Carolina and an acknowledged expert on the history of the Second World War. Among his many publications are The Home Guard (1995), British War Films, 1939–1945 (2001), and The Colditz Myth (2004). Robert W. Matson is Professor of History at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, where he has been a member of the faculty since 1983. He teaches international subjects, including diplomatic and religious history. He is the author of William Mulholland, A Forgotten Forefather (University of the Pacific, 1976), and Neutrality and Navicerts: Britain, the United States and Economic Warfare, 1939–40 (Garland Press, 1994), as well as numerous articles, columns and book reviews. Michael Paris is Professor of Modern History at the University of Central Lancashire. His research interests are in war and popular culture. His most recent publications include Over the Top! The Great War and Juvenile Literature in Britain (2004), Warrior Nation: Images of War in British Popular Culture (2000) and, as editor, The First World War and Popular

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Cinema (1999). He is currently researching a book on British television and representations of the Second World War. Pierre Sorlin is Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris III and works in the Audiovisual Department at the Instituto Parri in Bologna. Among his many publications are Film in History: Restaging the Past (1980), European Cinema, European Societies (1991), Mass Media (1994) and Italian National Cinema, 1896–1996 (1996). Wendy Webster is Professor of Contemporary British History at the University of Central Lancashire. She has published widely on questions of national identity, ethnicity, immigration, gender and imperialism, including Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’ and National Identity, 1945–1964 (UCL Press, 1998) and Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (Oxford University Press, 2005). Her current project, funded by a Leverhulme research fellowship, is on Englishness and Europe, 1940–1973. Denise J. Youngblood is Professor of History and University Scholar at the University of Vermont. She has written extensively on Russian and Soviet cinema, including five books, the most recent of which is Russian War Films: On the Cinema Front, 1914–2005 (University Press of Kansas, 2006). She is presently researching the role of Cold War cinema in the construction of Soviet post-war culture.

1 Introduction: Film, Television, and the Second World War – The First Fifty Years Michael Paris

It is now almost 70 years since the Second World War began, in 1939, yet the war is still a subject of enormous interest for scholars, students, and the public alike. This interest is perhaps most evident in Britain and America, but is also to be found among all the European nations that fought, suffered and endured the most cataclysmic event of the twentieth century. Current interest in the war has been, in large measure, stimulated by the many anniversaries celebrated between 1989 and 2005 and, perhaps most movingly, by what British television dubbed ‘D Day 60’ – the sixtieth anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy – the key event in the liberation of Europe – an occasion made especially poignant because it was the last official parade of the surviving members of the Normandy Veterans Association. Such events not only revived old memories for veterans and for those who had lived through the war, but also served another purpose. They powerfully evoked the war story for those born long after the conflict had ended and for whom the Second World War had been little more than a distant echo. Through the media coverage of those anniversaries, generations born after 1945 began to discover that the war was in fact a significant part of their own family histories and that what happened between 1939 and 1945 has shaped their world. This created considerable interest in the conflict and a desire to learn more, and an enormous amount of material has been generated to serve that purpose – books, magazines, television documentaries, video games, films, and assorted ephemera. While much of this has been produced simply to profit from a new and lucrative market, a great deal of thoughtful work has been produced by academics, authors, television producers and filmmakers who share the same fascination and who want to understand the full significance and meaning of the war. 1

2 Introduction

Increasing distance from the war, the opening of once-closed archives, and revisionist scholarship have, however, ensured that since the late 1980s the memory of the war has begun to be re-interpreted, re-shaped in a variety of subtle ways, and because we live in a highly visual age, the manner in which film and television have re-pictured the war is particularly influential. Indeed, it might well be argued that the popular memory of the Second World War has always been shaped more by the moving image than by any other form of cultural transmission. In 1939, the cinema was undoubtedly the pre-eminent form of mass entertainment, the ‘essential social habit of the age’, as A.J.P. Taylor famously noted.1 In the United States, the world’s leading filmproducing nation, some 80 million people visited a cinema every week, and throughout Europe film was equally popular; in Soviet Russia, for example, there were 30,000 cinemas, in Britain 5300, in France 4600, and even Belgium with a population of just 8.3 million could boast over 1100 cinemas.2 But as well as providing exciting entertainment, the cinema was also an important source of information, a vital element in shaping the worldview of the audience. Film interpreted great events, made sense of the world and the past. And because film operates on the emotions it was also an effective medium of mass persuasion. In the darkened auditorium, the audience become part of the unfolding narrative on the screen, identifying with those portrayed on film, sharing their struggles, their fears, and aspirations; and when the audience left the theatre, some small residue of that experience remains, helping to shape their response to similar situations and moulding attitudes to the issues and problems shown on the screen. As film was so popular and so persuasive it quickly became an important weapon in the propagandists’ arsenal. The First World War demonstrated the effectiveness of film propaganda and by the 1930s virtually all governments had come to accept that film was a simple but effective method of mass persuasion. Between 1939 and 1945, cinema became even more popular with audiences, and was widely used by all the combatant nations as a primary source of war information for their citizens and to help shape their attitudes to the conflict. The war could almost be described as a cinematic event for almost every significant episode was filmed at the time by frontline cameramen or recreated later in the studio. The effectiveness of film as an agent for mass persuasion, as well as entertainment, ensured that contemporary newsreels, documentaries, and feature films not only explained and justified the war for contemporary audiences, but helped shape the way in which it would be remembered. Second World War

Michael Paris

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films, however, did not simply deal with stories about the experience of men and women on the battlefield or home front, but equally explored personal relationships affected in some way by the war, or in which the war was the catalyst for action. War stories, then, whether films or subsequent television dramas, have always explored the variety of human experiences in wartime, and filmmakers have adopted a variety of genres through which to explore that experience: action-adventure, drama, romance, and comedy. In the years since 1945 the ways in which successive filmmakers have interpreted the war experience has not remained constant, for after 1945 the war was re-pictured from time to time as social and political attitudes changed. In Britain, for example, by the 1950s Second World War films were very different from those made during the war itself. Gone was the wartime sense of a national consensus and the idea of the ‘people’s war’, which had been reflected in films like Millions Like Us (1943) and The Way Ahead (1944); while in their place filmmakers began to focus upon the heroic doings of elite groups – pilots, commando officers, and upper-class prisoners of war (POW) in films such as Reach for the Sky, Ill-Met by Moonlight (both 1956) and The Colditz Story (1954). As Britain struggled to re-assert her position as a world leader in an age dominated by the Superpowers, representations of the war of the common man gave way to representations of an elite leadership paving the way to victory.3 Britain might be in decline with her empire in disarray, but these films demonstrated that she could still play a leadership role in times of crisis. In America too, a transformation in the way the war was pictured was also noticeable. By the late 1940s, Hollywood, firmly gripped by Cold War paranoia and soon to be locked into a new military struggle in Southeast Asia, focused almost exclusively on the combat film which demonstrated the military might of the Republic and the vast technological and economic power at her disposal. The combat film was not only a celebration of commitment and military power, but also a none-too-subtle reminder to potential enemies of the almost limitless resources and the ideological resolve of the United States.4 The end of the war in 1945 gave voice to European filmmakers silenced by the years of occupation. Czechoslovakia had been annexed by the Third Reich in the spring of 1939, and Poland was conquered before the end of the year. Thus in both countries filmmaking virtually disappeared until the liberation, as it did throughout most of Occupied Europe. Some clandestine production took place, but anything resembling normal production had to wait for the liberation. The ‘liberation’ of central Europe by the Red Army and the subsequent imposition of

4 Introduction

political regimes controlled from Moscow created further difficulties for Central European filmmakers. In both Poland and Czechoslovakia, nationalised film industries were quickly established together with new film schools, and filmmakers of both nations were soon enjoying an international reputation. Life under German occupation and the problems of accommodation, collaboration, and resistance were powerful themes for filmmakers anxious to explore the meaning of the war years and were examined in films such as Aleksander Ford’s Border Street (1949), Andreas Wajda’s Kanal (1956), and the Czech production Assassination (1964). But unable to comment on the contemporary political situation, films about the German occupation also offered the opportunity for an allegorical approach to the current ‘Soviet occupation’. Films about resistance and the heroism of the partisans took on an obvious significance for nations still under the control of a foreign power.5 In France some filmmaking had continued under the occupation in spite of strict controls and rigid censorship. French filmmakers, unable to comment on the German presence, focused on period dramas, musicals or fantasy, and through such vehicles sometimes managed to make veiled references to the realities of occupation, as in Henri George Clouzet’s The Raven (1943). However, as the Allies fought their way from Normandy towards Paris, filmmakers took to the streets to film the Parisians’ struggle to free themselves from the occupier. Le Journal de la Resistance (1944), a filmed account of the struggle to force the Germans to evacuate the city, was not only a record of resistance but was itself an act of resistance. The film makes virtually no reference to the approaching Allied armies or to the fact that the German evacuation of Paris was mainly due to other factors. Rather it suggests it was the popular uprising that forced their hand, with the added implication that while France might have been occupied in 1940, it had never been truly defeated, that the French themselves finally threw off the German yoke largely through their own efforts and minimising the Allied contribution to liberation. As Pierre Sorlin has noted of the post-war films, ‘Resistance is depicted as a private domestic activity, and contacts with the Allies are reduced to wireless messages about weapons supply.’6 Little wonder, then, that as a salve to wounded national pride, resistance became the major subject for post-war French films about the war. But increasing distance from the war allowed European filmmakers to reflect on the experience of occupation, and what was revealed did not always sit comfortably with national myths of resistance. This was particularly true in France, where the furore created by Marcel Orphul’s

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1969 documentary The Grief and the Pity clearly demonstrated the political dangers of challenging such myths. This well-documented film was shocking in its revelations about just how far collaboration penetrated French society after 1940. Controversial and widely criticised, it nevertheless persuaded other filmmakers to tackle the subject and explore the nature of collaboration. In 1974, for example, Louis Malle’s study of the problem in Lacombe Lucien aroused such controversy that the director spent the next decade in self-imposed exile in America.7 The problem of resistance and collaboration during the war years are still with us even in the twenty-first century, as Paul Verhoeven’s latest film Black Book (2006), set in Occupied Holland, clearly demonstrates. In the defeated nations, Germany and Italy, the bombastic certainty of the fascist years, expressed in films such as Karl Ritter’s Stukas (1941) or Francesco de Robertis’s 1940 epic of the Italian Navy Men Under the Sea, gave way to a very different projection of war after 1945. In Italy the Allied invasion and subsequent fighting disrupted the film industry and filmmakers, faced with the lack of studio facilities, turned to location shooting for films such as Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (1945). But the Neo-Realist style they developed was in its early days, ‘intimately connected with the politics of resistance’, as Chapman has pointed out.8 But in Italy the need to explore the war years was relatively short-lived as filmmakers turned to present realities – political corruption, poverty and the social problems of reconstruction. The war, which few Italians had supported, had little resonance among post-war audiences and was seen as an unfortunate and destructive episode best forgotten. Consequently, few Italian filmmakers have been drawn to the war years.9 By early 1945, Germany was devastated and the film industry had temporarily ceased to exist. However, as Mark Baker has explained, German post-war film re-emerged in ‘October 1946, with the release of Wolfgang Staudte’s The Murderer’s are amongst us’10 – the first of the so-called ‘rubble films’, films that resurrected the expressionist style of classic German cinema overlaid with Neo-Realism. Rubble films dealt with the realities of everyday life in the shattered cities and above all with the burden of the Nazi past. Often interpreted as films through which audiences could come to terms with their guilt, they can also be seen as cinematic expressions of German suffering under Nazism – ‘Look’, they seem to proclaim, ‘see how we have suffered too’. Staudte’s film was made in East Germany through the Soviet-controlled national film company (DEFA), but in the West as well, film production had resumed by 1946. The emerging German cinema predominantly dealt with post-war problems – the plight of refugees and the problems of

6 Introduction

re-construction – understandably reminders about the war years were not popular with audiences who preferred to look forward to recovery rather than back to a blighted past. Nevertheless, a number of films, especially in the mid-1950s, did look back to the war to make the case that not all Germans had been Nazis. Canaris and The Last Bridge (both 1954) and the Devil’s General (1955), all dealt with men and women who had resisted Hitler’s regime at the cost of their lives. The only traditional combat film of the early post-war period, Star of Africa (1957), based on the heroic exploits of the fighter pilot Hans Joachim Marseilles, was withdrawn by the Allied Control Commission for fear it might glamourise the Luftwaffe. But German audiences, like cinemagoers in Italy, found little attraction in reminders of a war that had resulted in such unprecedented destruction. Production of films about the Second World War in both Europe and America peaked in the late 1950s, and then gradually declined through the 1960s; although a significant number of war films continued to be made both in Europe and in America they tended to be small-budget productions or primarily intended for television screening, and attracted little critical attention. Cinema audiences, by then predominantly aged between 18 and 25 years, had little interest in the Second World War and were increasingly influenced by anti-war sentiment, a result of concerns about nuclear weapons and the debacle of American involvement in Vietnam. But the popularity of cinema itself was on the wane. Partly this decline can be explained by the increasing popularity of television, which offered a varied diet of visual entertainment in the home, and other competing forms of entertainment – for example, the dynamic growth of popular music, particularly among the young, offered a new and exciting alternative to the ‘pictures’. Filmmakers had indeed to offer something special to tempt audiences back into the cinema. Filmmakers responded with the big-budget ‘spectacular’, the blockbuster movie with an international cast of star names, and the war film was not exempt from this kind of treatment. Occasionally the blockbuster war films attempted to recreate and re-interpret the great events of the war – The Battle of Britain (1969) or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) – but too often they were simply exciting adventure stories set against the backdrop of war, The Guns of Navarone (1961) or Where Eagles Dare (1968); glossy comic book heroics which gave younger audiences a distorted view of what the war was actually like. More serious attempts to re-tell war stories, Richard Attenborough’s cynical A Bridge Too Far (1977), for example, were financial disasters. The spectacular variation of the war film was not just confined

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to Anglo-American filmmakers. In 1968, for example, the Italian director Giorgio Ferroni produced The Battle of El Alamein and the following year the Yugoslavian filmmaker Velijko Bulajic created the epic Battle of the Neretva – both were lavish international co-productions with American and English stars as well as Italian and Yugoslavian actors. But the high cost of these films was prohibitive, and many were expensive failures. It seemed that as far as cinema was concerned, audiences had lost interest in stories of the Second World War. But as the war film virtually disappeared from cinemas, a major new market for the war story was emerging among television audiences, particularly in America and Britain, where television had developed remarkably quickly after 1945. In broad terms, television audiences tended to be older and still retained an interest in the war. Second World War movies had quickly became a substantial part of the television landscape, especially for afternoon viewing, but even more important were the highly popular war dramas and series commissioned by television production companies from the 1960s and destined to become a major source for information about the war. Wartime themes were common even in the early days of live drama transmissions, as Jason Jacobs has noted: The play shown on the opening day of the restored [BBC] service in June 1946, The Silence of the Sea, concerned the relationship between a German soldier (played by Kenneth More) and an elderly farmer and his daughter in Occupied France. More returned to play an RAF officer the next week in They Flew Through Sand.11 These, and many other single plays with a war theme, were broadcast live through the 1940s and early 1950s, but as the BBC had neither the means nor the interest in recording performances, these dramas have been lost to us. However, by the 1950s the economics of television production were pushing programmers towards the drama series – seriality meant that actors, props, and sets could be used more than once, and if the series were filmed or telerecorded, the production could be easily repeated or even sold abroad. The popularity of the governmentsponsored documentary series War in the Air (1954) clearly demonstrated that there was a market for war-related material, and by the later 1950s drama series like Spycatcher (BBC 1958) had established a pattern for the narrative war story which developed in a variety of forms over the next three decades – comedy in the American-made Hogan’s Heroes (CBS 1965–1971) or Dad’s Army (BBC 1968–1977); family drama in A Family at War (Granada 1970–1972); and POW adventure in Colditz

8 Introduction

(BBC 1972–1974), along with dramatisations of popular war novels like Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War (Paramount 1983). Even the Holocaust, previously thought to be too horrifying to be made into drama, was adapted as a family saga in Philip Green’s Holocaust broadcast by NBC in 1978. Dramatic representations of war were enormously popular with audiences and quickly became a staple ingredient in television programming.12 Television producers, however, are constrained by the limitations of the medium in a number of ways. The television play, telefilm, or series episode has to conform to a specific time slot and stories are cut or expanded to fit that slot; thus the producer is denied the flexibility of the filmmaker to tell their story. Yet with a series, the author can develop the story over a number of weeks: A Family at War (1970–1972), for example, ran for 52 episodes and Band of Brothers (2001) for 10 episodes. Thus storylines could be developed in ways that filmmakers can only envy. But there are also significant visual differences between television and film. As John O’Connor has pointed out, The small television screen does not lend itself to the vast panoramas and long shots that are so powerful in moving pictures.    Television footage, much more than film, involves head-and-shoulder shots of individual actors or small groups of actors.13 Thus early representations of the war as domestic drama such as A Family at War were perfect for television – a relatively small cast, limited internal sets, and an emphasis on dialogue rather than action, and by using the popular serial format, they adopted a formula already familiar to and popular with audiences. Yet television technology has changed dramatically over the last thirty or so years. The use of cinematic techniques, location shooting, and bigger budgets have ensured that production values have begun to rival those of film; and the made-for-television movie, which first emerged in the early 1970s in the United States, has ensured a closer alignment between film production and television drama. From the 1980s, television companies have developed a close working relationship with filmmakers so that the distinctions between film and television production became increasingly blurred. The BBC, Channel 4, and most American and European television networks began to finance feature films for both theatrical release and television screenings. What is particularly interesting is the way in which television producers have now begun to develop a range of new techniques for, and particularly in, filming war

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dramas, and this was particularly evident in the docudramas made for the sixtieth anniversary of D Day in 2004. Both ITV’s Ten Days to D Day and the BBC’s D Day 6.4.44 incorporated computer-generated graphics in the style of Spielberg’s Private Ryan, alongside more traditional television techniques of interviews with veterans, re-enactments, and original footage; a style that would seem to blend the best of cinematic and televisual styles, while widescreen and digital technology have transformed the viewer’s experience. But while historians of television might argue for a unique aesthetic for the medium, it would seem that the average viewer sees remarkably little difference between watching films and watching televised drama, particularly as films are now just as likely to be seen on the television screen at home as at the cinema. There is, however, one significant difference – the viewing environment. Watching television takes place in a domestic environment, and what is lacking is the dedicated atmosphere of the cinema auditorium. Television historians have argued that ‘intimacy’ is a powerfully distinguishing and effective aspect of the small screen,14 but however enthusiastic and committed the viewer, there is, on some channels, the constant interruption of commercial breaks, the possibility of telephone calls, visitors, the desire to make coffee – all of which disturb the carefully constructed mood of the drama. It would seem that what is lacking in this domestic environment is the enfolding sense of involvement created within the cinema auditorium. This has not detracted from the popularity of made-for-television war dramas, nor prevented them from becoming a major source for the history of the Second World War, but does, perhaps, suggest that they may well be less engaging and less influential than the cinema film? The fiftieth anniversary celebrations that began in 1989 witnessed a renewed public interest in dramatic representations of the war in both film and television. While in part driven by commercial motives to profit from high-profile events and public interest, there was a genuine concern from many in the media to explore elements of the war story that remained untold or had been unquestioningly absorbed into national myths, and a spate of new films and television productions followed; some like Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) received wide critical acclaim and provided another level of understanding about the war, while others such as U 571 (2000) or Pearl Harbour (2001) simply achieved notoriety for their clumsy inaccuracies. The films and television programmes examined in this book have in general terms attempted to re-assess the experience and meaning of the war or have

10

Introduction

drawn attention to areas of the conflict that were, for a variety of reasons, generally ignored during the war itself and in the early post-war period. The predominance of Anglo-American productions examined here simply reflects the fact that these films will probably be more familiar to a world audience than many, equally interesting European films. Yet, in this global age both filmmaking and television production have become such an international business that perhaps we are hearing the death knell for national cinemas. It is becoming increasingly difficult to identify just what a ‘British’ (or a ‘French’ or a ‘German’) film actually is and how it differs from an ‘American’ (or an ‘Italian’ or a ‘Russian’ film). In the films discussed in this book, for example, Train of Life is a French, Belgian, Israeli, Dutch, and Romanian co-production; Dark Blue World, essentially a story of Czech pilots during the Battle of Britain, used Czech and British actors and was financed by Czech, British, German, Italian, and Danish producers; while Enemy at the Gates, the story of the most ferocious and decisive battle on the Eastern front, was made by a French director, based on a Russian autobiography, using British and American actors, with the backing of British, German, American, and Irish financing. How does this internationalist approach represent what was essentially a confrontation between the armies of the USSR and the Third Reich? What the full consequences of this international collaborationist approach will be for the Second World War story remain to be seen. These comments apply equally to television where international co-production is now common. For example, the recent German television production from ZDF, Dresden: The Inferno (2006), tells the story of the city’s destruction by the Allied air forces through the eyes of a German nurse and a downed RAF pilot (played by the British actor John Light) – clear evidence that television productions must now play to an international market in the same way as feature films. The films and television series scrutinised here are a representative sample of the many dramas that have been produced since the fiftieth anniversary in 1989, and range widely over the European and American experience of war. The most obvious form of war story, the experience of battle, is examined in essays on Enemy at the Gates and Saving Private Ryan, both set against the background of key events in the history of the war, while the controversies about the war in the air are examined in Tuskegee Airmen and Bomber Harris. The varied experience of life on the home front is explored in Foyle’s War, set during the Blitz on Britain, and in Safe Conduct, which looks at the tensions between resistance, collaboration, and accommodation in Occupied France. The experience of both occupier and occupied of a small Greek island are examined

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in Mediterraneo. Several films analysed here focus on issues of race; not just those films which consider National Socialist racial policy which climaxed with the horror of the Holocaust (Conspiracy, Train of Life, and Life is Beautiful), but also those that focus on American racism which targeted both black and Japanese-Americans and prevented them from playing a major part in the war effort simply on the basis of their race (Tuskegee Airmen and Come See the Paradise). Gender issues are explored in the films Land Girls, set in Britain, and Aimée & Jaguar, set in Germany, while it is also one of the issues tackled in Tea with Mussolini. The last days of Hitler and the fall of the Third Reich are examined in the controversial German production Downfall. What all these films clearly demonstrate is that despite the passage of time, the media still has a great deal to say about the Second World War.

2 ‘Rose-tinted Blighty’: Gender and Genre in Land Girls Wendy Webster

Land Girls (1998) is framed by the narrative voice of Stella (Catherine McCormack): one of the three members of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) – the land girls of the title – whose story the film tells. At the beginning of the film Stella’s voice offers some sketchy information about the wartime setting: ‘we all had to pull together to help win the war, we had to grow more food or starve’. She provides more about her own situation – she has left a comfortable office job to work the land and chosen the Lawrence farm to be near her fiancé, who is a naval officer. The camera focuses on her as her voice provides this little narrative, showing her arriving at the Lawrence farm with Prue and Ag(Anna Friel and Rachel Weisz respectively). Stella’s narrative voice is heard again only at the end of the film in a brief epilogue to its main wartime story signalled by the inter-title ‘After the War’. The emphases of the film that her opening narrative suggests – that it will focus on the private lives of the mobile wartime women at the centre of its story, that romance will play a part in this and that Stella’s story will be the most significant – are by now very apparent. Stella’s closing words reflect on her private life and make no reference to the war. But they also reinforce the nostalgic perspective of the film as she tells us that ‘there are things that will always remain in the heart’ before the final image of the film and the only one in black and white: a wartime photograph of Stella, Ag and Prue. In its focus on women, the home front and stories of private lives, Land Girls is very different from the highly popular cycle of British Second World War films made in the 1950s and 1960s. On Nicholas Pronay’s count, 85 such films were made between 1946 and 1960.1 With the notable exception of comedies of service life, most of these films installed a military hero at the centre of exciting action, showing men 12

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engaged in military conflict or, in POW films, men enacting daring escapes. By the mid-1960s this cycle of films was fading and although combat films continued to be made into the 1970s, ambitious and largebudget projects like Battle of Britain (1969) and A Bridge Too Far (1977) made heavy losses at the box office despite their all-star casts.2 In their focus on martial masculinity, often foregrounding officers, 1950s’ and 1960s’ British Second World War films offered far less inclusive imagery than that developed between 1939 and 1945. Wartime imagery showed a ‘people’s war’ demonstrating unity across differences of class, gender and different national identities within Britishness – most films being careful to show Scottish and Welsh characters as well as English. Wartime imagery also showed a ‘people’s empire’ united across differences of race and ethnicity.3 But once the war was over the working classes, if shown at all, were usually subordinate figures, and care was no longer taken to encompass different national identities within Britishness. The imperial war effort also received little attention and, when shown, focused on the contribution of the white Dominions – Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Very occasionally films offered brief glimpses of Caribbeans, Indians and Africans but otherwise they disappeared from view completely. The home front was a focus of many British films made during the Second World War and, since there was a need to recruit women to the forces and war-work, some feature films foregrounded and celebrated women’s contribution to the war effort, while a short documentary made in 1942 told the story of the WLA under the title Land Girls.4 In the 1950s and 1960s, however, women, like the working classes, were subordinate figures. They were foregrounded in two contexts only – in a cycle of films about the Special Operations Executive (SOE) and in films that portrayed British defeats in empire, which were told as narratives of female strength and courage.5 These themes were reprised in television series in the 1980s – Tenko portraying British defeat in empire through a story of a female group of prisoners-of-war, and Wish Me Luck foregrounding two women recruited to the SOE.6 Land Girls, made over 50 years after the war’s end, was the first film since wartime to focus on women’s war-work on the home front. Through its themes of the home front, female friendships and heterosexual romance that cross differences of class, Land Girls bears more resemblance to British wartime films than to those made in the 1950s. But in its focus on private lives it shares the emphasis of a range of films and television programmes with a Second World War setting made from the 1970s that moved decisively away from narratives of male

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Gender and Genre in Land Girls

heroism. The post-1970 group of films with this setting was quite small and disparate, but television – with an audience that, by this period, far outstripped cinema’s – produced a range of fictional series as well as numerous documentaries.7 As a film made for Channel 4 television, Land Girls was a hybrid product, seen by both cinema and television audiences. Anna Friel was well known through her television role in Brookside, a Channel 4 soap opera, and her casting as Prue in Land Girls attracted considerable publicity for the film. In 1998, John Ramsden commented that ‘there has still been very little discussion of British postwar films about the war of 1939–1945’.8 Since Ramsden’s comment, there has been considerable discussion of post-war films made before the 1970s, but very little on the group of post-1970 films with a Second World War setting and still less on post1970 television programmes.9 Some post-1970 productions, including Land Girls, have been itemised in lists of heritage films, but have been neglected in debates about such films.10 They do not conform to what John Hill identifies as ‘the aristocratic or upper-middle-class emphasis which the heritage film prefers’ nor to Andrew Higson’s characterisation of heritage films as ‘melodramas of everyday bourgeois life in a period setting, projecting, like the National Trust, a country house version of Englishness’.11 On the contrary, they usually tell stories of nonelite groups. In this respect, despite their disparate themes, post-1970 productions generally move away from the earlier post-war narratives of military heroism that foregrounded officers – often public-school -educated, upper-middle-class gentlemen. What is the significance of this abandonment of the elitist and militarist emphases of earlier post-war films – of the move away from narratives of male heroism and military combat foregrounding officers to stories that focus on the everyday experience of non-elite groups? How far does the repicturing of the war in Land Girls draw on inclusive wartime imagery of a ‘people’s war’, and how far does it rework this to produce nostalgic imagery for a late-twentieth-century audience, focusing on the stories of private lives? What is the significance of gender, sexuality, generation and genre within this repicturing of British wartime experiences?

Gender and sexuality The opening credits of Land Girls are shown over shots of Mr Lawrence (Tim Georgeson) feeling a railway track for signs of an approaching train. At first he feels the track with his foot, then he feels it with his

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fingers and finally he kneels down and puts his ear to it. Later in the film, these actions are repeated almost exactly by his son, Joe (Steven Mackintosh). Mr Lawrence, whose farm is the setting for the film, and Joe, who lives and works on the farm, are the two main male characters, and in both cases they are awaiting a train bringing land girls to the station. While Mr Lawrence and Joe are shown on local trips to church and to the station, and in Joe’s case to a local dance and an interview to join the RAF, it is the land girls who travel by train as mobile women. Men’s lack of mobility by comparison with women is reinforced by the outcome of Joe’s interview with the RAF: he is rejected because of a heart condition. Joe’s dream is to fly, but the nearest he comes to this in the film is sitting in the cockpit of a burnt-out German aeroplane that has crashed in one of his father’s fields. In wartime he transports Stella to the station twice to catch a train to Southampton to see her fiancé. On the second occasion – after he has fallen completely in love with her – she does not return. Even in their farm-work Stella is more mobile, ploughing from a tractor while Joe uses a horse-drawn hand-plough. In the ‘After the War’ sequences, Joe has taken over the running of the farm after his father’s death. He tells Stella, on their first meeting since her failure to return by train, that he has still not been up in an aeroplane. In contrast, Stella has become increasingly mobile, flying in the context of a travel business she has opened. Joe has married his wartime fiancé despite his love for Stella, and his wife tells Stella that he has settled down on the farm. Joe’s own dialogue with Stella suggests that he is very far from settled, but certainly immobilised: ‘I waited at that station every day for a week. I’m still there. Waiting.’ The mobile woman was an ambivalent figure in wartime, arousing considerable anxiety and some hostility. The magazine of the Agricultural Workers Union ridiculed the WLA early in the war, suggesting that women were reluctant to join since ‘soil rhymes with toil and hoes have never been as attractive as hose’.12 But, particularly in the context of drives to recruit more women to the war effort, the mobile woman was celebrated in a number of popular wartime feature films. In a context where, as Sonya Rose comments, ‘wartime heroism and masculinity were embodied in the military man’ there was also ambivalence about the civilian man who continued to work in industry or, like Joe, on the land. Older men were often portrayed as comic figures especially through their activities in the Home Guard – a comic rendering that was later taken up in the television series Dad’s Army.13 While wartime films that showed mobile women sometimes celebrated their modernity

16

Gender and Genre in Land Girls

by contrast to older men, they were careful to avoid comparisons that showed the civilian man of working age unfavourably against the mobile woman. In Millions Like Us (1943), a film about women working in an aircraft factory, Charlie (Eric Portman), the factory foreman is characterised by qualities of calmness, levelness and kindliness – exactly the attributes that Rose has argued distinguished the wartime ‘temperate hero’: a figure constructed in opposition to the hyper-masculinity of the goose-stepping Nazi.14 No wartime film would have celebrated the modernity of female mobility against the lesser mobility of a young man, or shown the mobile woman working alongside a young man who is rejected by the air force as unfit. The anxiety and hostility surrounding the mobile wartime woman focused particularly on her sexuality. Women who joined the services and especially the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) were often associated with sexual promiscuity. Members of the WLA, although sometimes seen as displaying healthy femininity as workers in the countryside, also attracted censure of their sexual conduct early in the war. The Agricultural Council of Glamorgan considered the possibility of imposing a curfew on them because of their presence on the streets at night with male soldiers.15 Wartime films, including The Gentle Sex, which focused on the ATS, were careful to show female war-workers and members of the services as sexually respectable with openly sexual femininity, as Antonia Lant notes, shown only through peripheral characters.16 In contrast, Land Girls shows both Prue and Ag proposing sex to Joe who, in both cases, obliges them. A characteristic expression of the developing friendships between the three land girls is their jokes and banter about sex. Such imagery of female friendship would have been unthinkable in wartime. In 1943 the WLA faced charges of operating a colour bar when Amelia King, born in Britain of Caribbean descent, was refused work on a farm.17 Questions on the case were raised in the House of Commons. The home front was overwhelmingly portrayed in wartime as white, and moves to greater racial inclusiveness in imagery of the war effort were generally confined to the effort on battle-fronts, many miles away from home. Land Girls follows wartime films in this respect, but makes its imagery even more exclusive through a focus on Englishness. In home front, wartime films friendships and romances often crossed boundaries between Englishness, Scottishness and Welshness, but in Land Girls they cross only different regional identities within Englishness through the figure of Prue, who is from the North of England.

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Friendship and romance in Land Girls, however, do cross differences of class and, in this respect, the film bears some resemblance to those made in wartime. In place of the recurrent imagery of male camaraderie in 1950s and 1960s Second World War films, Land Girls reclaims the femisocial community portrayed in a number of wartime films. The tensions between women produced by class difference are a prominent theme from the outset and are characteristically evoked through language and accent. Working-class Prue mocks Ag and Stella for their middle-class vocabulary and mimics their accents. But, as in wartime films, these early tensions are resolved in growing attachments between the women. The emphasis on friendship across class difference distinguishes the theme of female friendship from its treatment in Hollywood films of the 1980s and 1990s, and suggests its debt to British sources.18 Romance also crosses class boundaries in Land Girls as love between Stella and Joe becomes an increasing focus of the film. This reprises a plot-line from Millions Like Us, where middle-class Jennifer (Anne Crawford), who works in the aircraft factory, at the centre of the film grows close to Charlie, the working-class foreman. Like Jennifer and Charlie, Stella and Joe’s relationship is initially openly hostile. Early in the film, however, Stella, in a trance-like state, observes Joe rubbing down a farmhorse, his movements rhythmic and graceful, and his muscularity on display through an unbuttoned shirt. Joe is associated with physicality through other aspects of his farm-work, where he, like Stella in her WLA role, spends his time mucking out cows and ploughing fields. This representation of Joe draws on a British filmic tradition, especially evident in documentary, in which cameras often focused on working-class men’s bodies and muscularity. The contrast between Joe and Stella’s naval officer fiancé – Philip (Paul Bettany) – who is characterised by self-restraint and self-control, is developed particularly through their sexuality. When Philip and Stella are about to have sex in a Southampton hotel, Philip stays far away from Stella to take off his trousers, then slowly and carefully folds them and hangs them in a wardrobe. Stella avoids sex with him, pleading menstruation. Joe’s preparations for sex with Ag are intercut with the Southampton hotel sequences to heighten a contrast in which Joe removes his clothes with great speed and energy and no thought of folding them. When Stella eventually acknowledges that she loves Joe, not Philip, the celebration of their contact is embedded in this evocation of class differences between masculinities.

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Gender and Genre in Land Girls

Wartime films were made at a time when the outcome of the war was unknown. Their endings could not provide closure: the war continued. Since the need for the mobile woman also continued, films could provide no easy resolutions to the contradictions between their celebrations of her modernity and their need to allay anxieties about the disruption of gender roles that she represented. The ending of The Gentle Sex (1943) suggests the difficulties of such resolution as Leslie Howard’s voice-over pronounces his verdict on the ATS: ‘Well, there they are, the women. Our sweethearts, sisters, mothers, daughters. Let’s give in at last and admit that we’re really proud of you. You strange, wonderful, incalculable creatures    I give you a toast. The gentle sex!’ Simultaneously, Howard addresses a cinema audience as though it is all-male, defines women in relation to men and by their private roles, and celebrates women’s contribution to the war effort.19 At the end of Land Girls the war is over. The film offers no vision of a better future, and the only reference to such a vision in the film is comic. Ag declares her confidence in social justice being brought about by complete honesty between men and women as she energetically pulls her clothes off to have sex with Joe. To demonstrate such honesty, she confesses to Joe that Ag is short, not for Agatha – an embarrassing-enough name for a young wartime female – but for the even more embarrassing Agapanthus. The focus of Land Girls on private lives deflects attention from any concerns about the social impact of the war, and the ‘After the War’ sequence is mainly concerned with its impact on individuals. The ending of Land Girls is less contradictory and more conservative than the ending of The Gentle Sex. As a film made for a late-twentiethcentury audience the film has no need to address or allay wartime anxieties, portraying young women in wartime as more mobile than young men and emphasising active female sexuality. But the ending of the film curtails the freedom they have found in wartime. Prue, who loses her airman husband in the wartime sequences, remarries an older man and has a baby. Ag has married a Canadian she met at a wartime dance and tells Stella that ‘He’s been posted to Egypt. House-mouse in the Canadian embassy, that’s me.’ Both have moved on to a new life of marriage. Stella stands outside this. Having sacrificed love to duty by giving up Joe to marry her fiancé when he is seriously injured, she has now, she confides to Ag, divorced. Stella has become independent, running her travel business but she has not found happiness. Land Girls ends by reining in the mobile women of its story to fit the requirements of a heterosexual romantic plot.

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Generation and genre Pierre Sorlin, writing about interpretations of the Second World War in post-war European cinema, observes that ‘film-makers working in midcentury had witnessed the war, had usually been mobilized and had gone through terrible experiences’.20 Sorlin’s comment is applicable to the directors and producers of most of the British Second World War films and television series made in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as to many of those who acted in them. For many members of audiences of these films and television productions the memory of war was also very immediate. When BBC television showed a 15-part series on the Second World War using extensive documentary footage – War in the Air – in 1954, one woman wrote in: I was wondering would it be possible to buy a Photo from you showing the Soldiers marching back to the beach at Dunkirk. I saw my only Son marching and he must have seen the Photographer because his face was turned to the camera and he was smiling.    He came back safe but was later killed in Burma, but on your Photo, he just looked as if he was smiling into the room.21 Born after the war was over, most of the audience for Land Girls had no memory of it. David Leland, its director, was born in 1947. The Independent on Sunday described Land Girls as ‘formulaic heritage film-making of the sort that keeps the owners of vintage-cars and steam museums in business’.22 Land Girls does not offer the country house version of Englishness that has often been seen as characteristic of heritage films and as paralleling the version offered by organisations like the National Trust. But it could be seen as paralleling a different version of heritage that was also widely disseminated from the 1970s through the establishment of local museums and theme parks that focused on the everyday experience of workers in industry and agriculture. The development of a new social history from the late 1960s also embarked upon a democratisation of history, turning attention away from elite places and their inhabitants towards what were sometimes called (especially in works of oral history) ‘ordinary people’ and the working classes. Inspired particularly by E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Classes, published in 1963 and dedicated to rescuing their history from what he called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, the new social history focused initially on the working classes. Work on women’s history followed and, in a British context, was often

20

Gender and Genre in Land Girls

shaped by a socialist perspective and an interest in the politics of class as well as gender. The new social history was slow to take up questions of race and ethnicity. Museums developed from the early 1970s and sometimes called ‘people’s museums’ included the display of everyday artefacts of working and domestic life, and often displayed historical costume not only in exhibits but also through local volunteers who dressed up in such costumes. Land Girls displays artefacts from the life of the agricultural worker in the 1940s as well as wartime costumes. There is also considerable emphasis on the steam train, which had increasingly become an object of nostalgia from the 1950s when diesel trains began to replace it and which by the end of the twentieth century was well established as a highly popular heritage object. For members of the audience more interested in everyday domestic objects than agricultural machinery or transport, Land Girls also features a fine example of a knitted tea cosy. Premieres of the film advertised its heritage credentials. The cinema in Exeter, where it was given its gala premiere, briefly doubled as a folk museum, decked out with sandbags and taped-up windows.23 The premiere in London treated guests to pasties and pickled onions washed down with farmhouse cider and served from trestle tables.24 The threshing machine, shown as a heritage object in Land Girls, was the one that attracted fierce criticism from Thomas Hardy in Tess of the d’Urbevilles, published in 1891, as a ‘buzzing red glutton’ from which straw appeared like faeces, and which made threshers who worked it into automata. Although filmed in Devon and Somerset as well as Dorset, Land Girls is ostensibly set in what heritage culture named as Hardy country. In the 1980s and 1990s, heritage cinema produced numerous adaptations of Hardy novels and short stories – two were released the year before Land Girls, while in 1998 a further two, including Tess of the d’Urbevilles, were serialised on television.25 These adaptations, although sometimes itemised in lists of heritage films, have also received scant discussion in literatures about them. Like Land Girls, they do not fit the characterisation of heritage films as offering a country-house version of Englishness, some of them developing themes – however sanitised by comparison with the novels – that show rural poverty, the hard work of the rural labourer and the pernicious and damaging effects of rural hierarchies of class. Land Girls has a far more bland portrayal of rural life with little of this critique, but it does suggest how hard the life is, especially through the figure of Mr Lawrence.

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Land Girls offers English landscapes – ostensibly Dorset landscapes – as a major source of visual pleasure to its audience. Its focus on rural life produces an image of stability that is at odds with most imagery of the Second World War but in keeping with the film’s nostalgic perspective. The horrors of war reach into the farm through people outside its life: the death of Prue’s airman husband and the injuries of Stella’s fiancé. Before Philip’s injury Stella is anxious about his fate in the Southampton blitz, and gets up on two nights to keep vigil, watching the sky glow as Southampton burns. But the blitz is only visible as a patch of red sky in the far distance. Mrs Lawrence (Maureen O’Brien) is a figure of stability, ministering maternally to the land girls and only shown outside the farm on trips to church. The beauty of the landscape is associated particularly with the East Meadow and Mr Lawrence’s refusal to plough it, despite the demands of bureaucrats, because of his strong attachment to its beauty. It is in the East Meadow, in a rare moment of relaxation walking his dog, that Mr Lawrence also points up its enduring tranquillity despite the war. Talking to his dog, he says, ‘Where’s the war now then Jack? Can’t see no war round here.’ It is the treatment of Prue’s story in Land Girls that perhaps demonstrates most clearly how far it is shaped by the conventions of heritage films and their characteristic nostalgic perspective. Prue’s story closely resembles that of Celia (Patricia Roc) in Millions Like Us for, like Celia, she marries an airman – Barry (Nick Mollo), who is killed on a mission shortly after their wedding. In both films, the strength and closeness of female bonding are demonstrated in bereavement. But in Millions Like Us, such female bonding is extended to a vision of the strength and closeness of communal bonding in images invested with all the patriotic meaning and emotion of the ‘people’s war’. In Land Girls, they remain a private moment of intimacy between three women. Land Girls does occasionally extend its theme of closeness between three women to a wider sense of community. The Christmas meal at the Lawrence farm, where Prue announces her engagement to Barry, is a highly convivial occasion, showing an inclusive and united community that crosses differences of gender and class. Middle-class Stella and Ag, eating with the Lawrence family and Prue, are having a ball. The gathering encompasses Barry as well as Joe’s fiancée, Janet (Lucy Akhurst). Prue’s wedding is in the village church, which serves as a symbol of the wartime village community and links the WLA and airmen, just as the setting of Celia’s wedding in Millions Like Us is the factory hostel

22

Gender and Genre in Land Girls

as symbol of the wartime community, linking factory workers and local airmen. Barry’s death in Land Girls, however, signals the end of these communal images. In what is perhaps the most intimate moment in the film, Ag and Stella minister to Prue, tenderly stroking and caressing her. But this is also the last moment until the ‘After the War’ sequence when the three are shown together. Prue tells Ag and Stella that she wants to go home to her mum, and disappears from the film to reappear again only when the war is over. Stella finds Joe mourning separately and joins him. The story is now dominated by the romance between Stella and Joe, shifting away from themes of female friendship and any wider community. Celia’s bereavement in Millions Like Us is invested with a very different meaning. While Prue goes home in Land Girls, Celia goes back to the factory and the final images of the film show a communal sing-song in the factory canteen. Celia’s own sense of loss is painfully apparent as aeroplanes fly over, and her eyes look skywards in a gesture characteristic of women in wartime films demonstrating their anxiety about their airmen husbands or sweethearts, or – as in Celia’s case – their consciousness of bereavement. As the film intercuts documentary footage of a canteen sing-song with the fictional shots of Celia and her friend Gwen, it ends with images of the female bonding that Celia’s bereavement has strengthened and embeds these in images of the wider community of the ‘people’s war’. Gwen gently prompts Celia out of her trancelike absorption in her loss, drawing her into the communal sing-song, and the final image of the film is of the aeroplanes against the sky. The war continues. Celia’s work must continue. Individual loss must be subsumed into the community and its commitment to the war effort. The social meaning and social purpose of the war, deeply embedded in these images, are almost entirely absent from Land Girls. Although reviewers in the Evening Standard and the Observer both compared Land Girls with Millions Like Us, a much more insistent comparison was with the Hollywood production, Saving Private Ryan (1998), which came out in Britain at the same time.26 Land Girls did not fare well in this comparison and was widely regarded as a much slighter film. Its budget was certainly slighter. The need for relatively smallbudget productions was an aspect of British filmmaking more generally, and meant that it could not aspire to make large-scale action combat movies like Saving Private Ryan: one possible factor in the decline of the British Second World War combat movie.

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Saving Private Ryan was acclaimed particularly for the realism of its opening, which showed the massacre of American GIs on Omaha beach during the D-Day landings in 1944. It was widely regarded as innovative in its display of the horror of war showing limbs being blown off and blood spattering against the camera lens. As a combat movie it featured considerable violence but no sex, whereas Land Girls reversed this and was variously identified as a ‘romantic drama’ and ‘romantic comedy’.27 In contrast to Saving Private Ryan as innovative, Land Girls was seen as exploring over-familiar themes or, in a phrase that reviewers could not resist, ‘ploughing a very well-worn furrow’.28 Since countless combat movies were produced after 1945 and Land Girls was the first film since wartime to portray women’s war-work on the home front, this suggests the extent to which it was identified as a romance. By comparison with the virility of the combat movie, both in its focus on martial masculinity and in its realism, Land Girls looked, to the critics at any rate, too feminine: ‘gentle’, ‘soft’ and ‘nostalgic’ by comparison with Saving Private Ryan as ‘trailblazing’ and ‘brutally realistic’.29 Issues of genre also emerged in the context of another common criticism of Land Girls by reviewers: its misrepresentation of the past. Popular heritage pursuits often earned scorn in the broadsheets in the 1980s and 1990s for commodifying, idealising or sanitising the past, but the idea that Land Girls was ‘chocolate boxy’, bathed the war in a ‘nostalgic glow’ and romanticised WLA members, ‘partly belittling their achievement’ featured in reviews in the popular press as well as broadsheets.30 A range of stories – in local as well as national newspapers – were developed around interview material with former WLA women to capture what the experience of working on the home front was really like.31 These stories generally endorsed the Daily Mirror’s view that the film offered a ‘rose-tinted view of life in Blighty during the war’, whereas ‘in reality the vast majority (of the WLA) worked staggeringly hard and had little time for fun’.32 The Daily Mail summarised the verdict of former WLA members on the film: ‘about as accurate as those Hollywood versions of the Old Testament starring John Wayne and Tony Curtis’. If Land Girls lacked the virility of the combat film, it also failed to please most reviewers across broadsheets, the popular national press and many local newspapers because of its particular generic mix. The production of the Second World War as heritage was familiar by 1998, and Second World War films had often featured romantic plots and comedy. Land Girls was found wanting because it produced the Second World War

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Gender and Genre in Land Girls

as heritage, but shifted this too far in the direction of light romantic comedy.

Conclusion The repicturing of the Second World War in a number of British productions of the 1980s and 1990s, including Land Girls, produced the war as heritage. These films did not follow the ‘English country house’ version of Englishness, by which heritage film has often been defined, but paralleled instead the interest in everyday life and ‘ordinary people’ that was a notable feature – from the late 1960s – of both popular heritage pursuits and the new social history. The home front, women and the working classes which had all faded from view in the 1950s and 1960s reappeared in Land Girls. In some respects their reappearance reclaimed ideas of a ‘people’s war’ against the dominant narrative of male heroism in 1950s’ and 1960s’ films through which the Second World War became a symbol of national greatness. In making its main youthful male into an aspiring airman who is rejected by the air force as unfit, Land Girls is very far removed from earlier post-war imagery. But while Land Girls reinstated women and the working classes into Second World War imagery it also reworked the ‘people’s war’ through the conventions of heritage films, while its focus on private lives unyoked its wartime story from the idea of social purpose that was such an important aspect of the projection of a ‘people’s war’ in wartime. The imperial war effort, which also faded from view in the 1950s and 1960s, did not reappear in post-1970s’ productions. Large numbers of people from the British empire arrived in wartime Britain as troops and war-workers including Australians, Canadians, Indians, New Zealanders, South Africans and West Indians. They were rarely shown in post-1970 imagery set in Britain or, like the Canadian Ag meets in Land Girls, were given marginal roles. British–American relations were a more popular theme, explored mainly through romantic plots involving male GIs and female Britons. These films extended plot-lines developed in wartime and the immediate aftermath of war, but no longer carefully avoided sealing the notion of British–American alliance through heterosexual union.33 Although 10 per cent of the one and a half million US troops in Britain in the build-up to the D-Day landings were black, it was not until 1995 that a television drama – The Affair – explored a neglected history, focusing on black GIs in Britain and an interracial sexual relationship between a black GI and a white British woman.34 Themes of cross-national relationships between Britons and other Europeans also

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surfaced, notably in Another Time, Another Place (1983), which portrayed a sexual relationship between an Italian prisoner-of-war and a Scottish woman. However, Jews generally remained as absent from post-1970 productions as they had been both in wartime and in earlier postwar films about the Second World War.35 Perhaps the British director who contributed most not only to the exploration of themes about ethnicity, but also to a filmic version of a neglected history did so in directing a Hollywood production on the wartime internment of Japanese-Americans in the United States.36

3 Policing the People’s War: Foyle’s War and British Television Drama James Chapman

Foyle’s War, a fictional drama series following the wartime experiences of a police detective in the town of Hastings on England’s south coast, has been one of the outstanding successes of recent British television drama.1 It has regularly attracted audiences of 10 million viewers in the competitive Sunday evening primetime slot and has been sold to over 20 countries. Its first series in 2002 won the Lew Grade Audience Award from BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts), and its second series in 2003 was nominated for BAFTA’s Best Television Drama Series Award. At a time when many new drama series fail to make any sort of lasting impression on the popular imagination, the success of Foyle’s War represents a significant achievement. The production discourse of the series attributes its success to the quality of writing, acting, direction and period detail. In the words of executive producer Jill Green, ‘We’re really proud of the way they combine complex and meaty storylines with real historical detail from the war. We’re very grateful to our fantastic cast and crew for the talent, care and attention they bring to the series.’2 This chapter, however, argues that the success of the series should also be understood in relation to the way in which Foyle’s War effectively merges two of the most popular genres of British television drama: the Second World War drama (the paradigmatic example would be A Family at War) and the police/detective series with ‘heritage’ characteristics (paradigmatic example: Inspector Morse). The Second World War drama came to prominence on British television during the 1970s with a cycle of popular series, including A Family at War, Colditz, We’ll Meet Again, Yanks and Secret Army, that established the form and style of the genre. These series were notable for their ‘literate’ qualities with scripts emphasising psychologically realistic 26

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characterisation and for their attention to period detail which lent an air of authenticity to the drama. They represent a transitional phase in the popular representation of the Second World War: still close enough to the events themselves to evoke a sense of nostalgia for the period, but made at sufficient remove that they could offer a more detached perspective than films made during and immediately after the war. Home-front dramas such as Granada’s A Family at War, which ran for three series between 1970 and 1972, and the miniseries Yanks (1979) could address the problems arising from wartime social dislocation and the increased sexual opportunities, for women as well as men, that had only been alluded to in wartime films such as Millions Like Us or The Way to the Stars. Colditz, which ran for three series on BBC1 between 1972 and 1974, while based on the same source material as the 1954 film The Colditz Story, offered a more psychologically accurate account of the experience of incarceration than the schoolboy larks of the film. Secret Army, which also ran for three series on BBC1 between 1977 and 1979, was a suspenseful drama about the activities of a resistance group in Belgium that again emphasised realistic situations and characterisations. The emergence of the Second World War television drama coincided with the demise of the war film in cinemas. The heyday of the British war film had been the 1950s, when the undoubted classics of the genre included The Cruel Sea, The Colditz Story, The Dam Busters, Reach for the Sky, The Battle of the River Plate, Dunkirk and Ice Cold in Alex.3 The traditional British war film – focusing on aspects of the British experience of war and made in the realistic semi-documentary style that had characterised British films of the war years – did not survive into the 1960s, when the trend was towards large-scale international films with all-star casts, including The Guns of Navarone, The Longest Day, The Great Escape, Operation Crossbow, Battle of the Bulge and Battle of Britain. This cycle, in turn, petered out in the 1970s. The shift of war narratives from cinema to television was a consequence of demographic and social change. The cinema-going audience, which had been in decline since the late 1950s, now comprised mostly teenagers and young adults who had no memory of the war and for whom the war film seemed a quaint anachronism reliving past glories. It is significant in this regard that the most successful film of the 1970s was the spaceopera Star Wars, a fantasy adventure that combined simplistic fairy-tale elements with motifs borrowed from westerns and war films. Television, however, which had now surpassed cinema as the dominant massentertainment medium, attracted a wider audience across all age groups

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including, still, the generation who had lived through and experienced the war. Following the heyday of the 1970s, the Second World War drama was less visible on television over the next two decades. In common with a trend in the police series, where two early 1980s dramas responded to the rise of the women’s movement by focusing for the first time on strong female protagonists (BBC1’s Juliet Bravo and London Weekend’s The Gentle Touch), the war drama explored the experiences of wartime women, whether incarcerated in a Japanese internment camp (BBC1’s Tenko) or working as agents for the Special Operations Executive (London Weekend’s Wish We Luck). Tenko, especially, might be seen as an early example of a trend towards generic hybridity in popular television drama as producers sought to maximise their audiences in an increasingly competitive environment. Thus Tenko could be promoted both as a war drama and as a women-in-prison drama – a genre that would later come to prominence in the imported Australian series Prisoner Cell Block H and the home-grown equivalent Bad Girls. Similarly, the epic American miniseries The Winds of War, based on the massive novel by Herman Wouk and which was shown in Britain in a primetime ITV-networked slot on Sunday and Monday evenings, was part war story and part soap opera. The BBC’s only significant war drama of the 1990s, No Bananas, also employed conventions from soap opera in its upper-class/working-class dramatic axis and through the casting of soap queen Stephanie Beacham (Tenko, The Colbys, Dynasty) as ‘rich bitch’ Dorothea. As a hybrid of the war drama and the detective series, Foyle’s War can be located in this trend. On the one hand, the series represents part of a revival of the wartime drama series on British television coinciding with the sixtieth anniversary of the war. Indeed, Foyle’s War was instrumental in starting this cycle: it was followed in successive years by P.O.W. (2003) and Island at War (2004). On the other hand, Foyle’s War was conceived as a replacement for the ITV network’s flagship detective series Inspector Morse, which had run for some 33 featurelength episodes over 13 years between 1987 and 2000. Adapted from a series of cerebral detective novels by Colin Dexter, but also featuring original scripts by writers including Anthony Minghella (later to direct The English Patient, 1996) and Julian Mitchell, Inspector Morse was innovatory in several respects. It combined the intricate plotting of the classical English detective story with the visual style of the ‘heritage’ dramas exemplified by Granada’s Brideshead Revisited (1981) and The Jewel in the Crown (1984). Inspector Morse was a modern-day drama, but its leisurely

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pace and lovingly photographed locations in and around the colleges and dreaming spires of Oxford lent it a nostalgic charm that was redolent of the heritage drama. Producer Kenny McBain’s insistence on shooting the series on film and unfolding each episode over 2 hours differentiated Inspector Morse from other television detectives in allowing greater depth for characterisation and investing the series with a certain ‘cinematic’ quality missing from other examples of the genre. Audiences warmed to the crusty, irritable, beer- and crossword-loving Chief Inspector Morse (played by John Thaw) and his down-to-earth Geordie sidekick Sergeant Lewis (Kevin Whately). Inspector Morse attracted audiences of 15 million and was sold to overseas broadcasters where its high production values and heritage trappings marked it as ‘quality’ drama. Ever since the regular production of Inspector Morse ceased in 1993 (one-off specials appeared thereafter until the character’s eventual demise in ‘The Remorseful Day’ in 2000), the ITV network had been looking for a replacement. The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (starring George Baker as the bucolic Chief Inspector Wexford) and The Midsomer Murders (with John Nettles as Inspector Barnaby residing in a perennially sunny village with a staggeringly high murder rate) both enjoyed long runs without ever quite matching the critical and popular acclaim of Inspector Morse. Foyle’s War was one of many ideas ‘pitched’ to ITV Network Centre. Nick Elliott, ITV’s Controller of Drama, explicitly compared Foyle’s War to Inspector Morse when said that it was ‘definitely not a war series. The war will provide the background colour for the series, in the same way Oxford did for Morse.’4 A pilot episode was commissioned in 2001 from Greenlit Productions, an independent production company set up in 1998 by Jill Green, and scripted by Green’s husband Anthony Horowitz, writer of Midsomer Murders. On the strength of the pilot two series of four feature-length episodes were commissioned, with a third ordered in 2003 following the success of the first run of episodes.5 It is evident that the ITV network placed great faith in Foyle’s War and that the series was seen from the outset as a potential long-running series that would fill the gap left by Inspector Morse. Foyle’s War is adroitly packaged to appeal to both the audience for detective series and the audience for period dramas. The influence of Inspector Morse is evident in the characterisation of Detective Superintendent Christopher Foyle (Michael Kitchen), a lonely widower with a son in the Royal Air Force and a fondness for malt whisky and fly-fishing. Horowitz averred that he named the protagonist after the chairman of

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Foyles bookshop on Charing Cross Road, where he carried out much of his research: I spent so much time looking at books in the history department of Foyles that I had the idea of altering the name of the series from Ransome’s War, as I had originally intended, to Foyle’s War, which straightaway struck me as much better. Not only does ‘Foyle’ have more of a historical resonance, but it fits the character much better, too. On top of that, he foils crime, doesn’t he?6 In common with developments in detective fiction, including the Inspector Morse stories and the Inspector Rebus novels of Scottish writer Ian Rankin, Foyle’s War affords more space to characterisation than ‘golden age’ police detectives such as Freeman Wills Crofts’s Inspector French, Ngaio Marsh’s Inspector Alleyn or Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant, whose characters were so blank as to make them virtual cyphers. (The convention of English crime fiction was, for many years, that only amateur sleuths could be quirky and eccentric characters, while the policeman was almost invariably a dull and methodical, rather than inspirational, detective.) Critics were warm in their praise for Michael Kitchen’s subtle and nuanced performance, described as one of ‘calmly anguished decency’ and ‘undemonstrative yet commanding’.7 The format of Foyle’s War demonstrates an adroit melding of the conventions of the detective series with the wartime context. This is particularly evident in the characterisation of Foyle’s assistants. Every detective requires a sidekick, a Dr Watson or a Sergeant Lewis, in order that the detective can display his superior knowledge. Yet the role of the sidekick is problematic and can all too easily become sidelined in the narrative. Horowitz’s solution to this perennial dramatic problem was to give Foyle two assistants but to make each of them, in different ways, representative of aspects of the wartime experience. Sergeant Paul Milner (Anthony Howell) is a veteran of the ill-fated Norway campaign of April 1940, where he lost a leg. Early episodes examine Milner’s sense of embitterment over the disastrous campaign – in ‘The White Feather’, for example, he is initially attracted to the anti-war views of Fascist sympathiser Guy Spencer (‘He’s got some very original ideas’) – and a recurring theme of the series is the pressure on Milner’s marriage as his wife cannot come to terms with his injury. And Foyle’s driver Samantha ‘Sam’ Stewart (Honeysuckle Weeks), transferred to the police from the Motorised Transport Corps, represents modern, mobile, progressive wartime femininity. Sam is keen to do her ‘bit’ for the war effort, somewhat

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to the chagrin of her father, a vicar who disapproves of the changes brought about by the war. (‘It’s my opinion that any sort of morality has been shot to pieces by this dreadful war.’) The chief ideological import of Foyle’s War is that, 60 years on, it offers a distinctly revisionist interpretation of the historical experience of the Second World War. The dominant popular narrative of the war, disseminated by countless films and television documentaries, is one of national unity and social cohesion: everyone pulling together in the common cause. While this narrative has been nuanced by historians, pre-eminently by Angus Calder and Paul Addison, who have drawn attention to the social and political tensions that arose within the wartime consensus, it nevertheless retains a powerful force and continues to inform popular discourse around ‘the people’s war’.8 The content of Foyle’s War, however, focusing as it does on the investigation of wartime crimes, challenges the rosy and nostalgic view of Britain as a united and cohesive nation. As one commentator observed, What’s interesting about Foyle’s War, though (given that it’s a mainstream ITV1 drama and not a David Hare play), is that it necessarily has to chip away at the national myth of solidarity if its detective is to have any crime to investigate. In most episodes, the drama is about those who aren’t pulling together, but are prepared to do anything to pull ahead, whether it’s looting bombed houses or running black-market frauds. It’s an unusually watchable form of historical revisionism.9 Foyle’s War, therefore, dramatises another side of the people’s war – one characterised by ‘larcency, breaking and entering, civil offences – and murder’.10 Murder seems to have been particularly rife in wartime Hastings, though other crimes featured in the series include the wartime offences of black marketeering and sedition. Foyle’s War, indeed, is replete with incidental references to new criminal offences under the Defence Regulations as well as to the bureaucracy that sustains them. When Foyle complains about ‘twenty-six rewrites to the police war instructions’ (‘Among the Few’) and the shortage of manpower affecting the force (‘The German Woman’), he is expressing grievances felt by the British police force during the war which found itself having to investigate more crime with fewer officers.11 Foyle’s War transposes the conventions of the ‘law-and-order’ narrative – exemplified by television series, both American and British, such as The Untouchables, The FBI, Fabian of the Yard, Gideon’s Way and

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The Sweeney – to a wartime context. The series is not entirely about cerebral detection. It includes staple ingredients of the law-and-order series such as the car chase (‘Among the Few’) and armed robbery (‘The Funk Hole’). It has been suggested that a principal attraction of detective stories is that ‘they make order out of chaos on our behalf; they bring moral certainty to the messiness of life’.12 To an extent this is true; but at the same time Foyle’s War is characterised by an acute awareness of the moral dilemmas that arise from wartime circumstances. What is particularly notable about Foyle’s War is that it uses its wartime setting as a means of ‘adding both moral complexity and dramatic depth’.13 This moral complexity is evident from the very first episode, ‘The German Woman’, in which Foyle investigates the brutal murder of an ‘alien’, Greta Beaumont, for which there is no shortage of suspects. Foyle believes that her nationality is of no consequence, though this is not a view shared by locals, especially after the village pub is hit by a bomb and a girl killed. (‘One more dead German – who gives a damn!?’) Greta Beaumont’s privileged social position (she is the wife of a local magistrate) is contrasted with the plight of another ‘alien’, an elderly music teacher called Krämer, who is interned under the Defence Regulations and whose wife dies in prison. Foyle learns that Beaumont used his influence to ensure that his wife was not interned, despite the fact that her brother is in the Abwehr (German military intelligence) and is therefore more of a threat to security than the Jewish refugee Krämer. He also discovers, moreover, that Assistant Commissioner Summers was chair of the committee that cleared her – the first, though by no means the last, suggestion in the series of corruption and conspiracy in high places. The murderer turns out to be the boyfriend of Beaumont’s daughter, who had been conducting an affair with his future stepmother-in-law. When Foyle confronts him, he argues that his intelligence work at the Admiralty is a matter of such national importance that he should be let off; Foyle arrests him anyway. The revisionist credentials of Foyle’s War are most evident in episodes that question, and to an extent even subvert, the popular narrative of Britain’s ‘Finest Hour’. ‘Fifty Ships’, for example, includes a subplot about a group of auxiliary firemen who loot bombed houses for valuables. This negative representation totally subverts the heroic image of the auxiliary firemen presented in Humphrey Jennings’s celebrated wartime tribute Fires Were Started. In ‘A War of Nerves’ it turns out that an army bomb disposal squad – unsung heroes of the Blitz, whose work was dramatised in the late 1970s television series Danger UXB – have also been helping themselves to loot. In ‘The Funk Hole’

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a policeman traumatised by the death of his children when a bomb hit their school kills the councillor who had forgotten to authorise the school’s evacuation.14 Foyle’s War even dares to suggest that ‘the Few’ were not all unsullied heroes. In ‘Eagle Day’ Foyle investigates the murder of a lecherous Group Captain shot by the father of a Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) who has committed suicide after he had raped her. In ‘Among the Few’ a Battle of Britain pilot kills a girl who is about to expose him as a homosexual; he dies on his next sortie. And in ‘Enemy Fire’ Foyle’s son, Andrew, is among the suspects for the murder of an unpopular member of the groundcrew whose lackadaisical approach to his work has resulted in serious injury to one of Andrew’s friends trapped in his cockpit.15 Horowitz explains the revisionism of Foyle’s War in these terms: ‘We tell true stories of what went on during the war and we are still finding new things to say.’16 While nothing in the series is especially new to historians, some of the incidents that it dramatises represent relatively recent historical knowledge as far as the general public is concerned. In ‘A Lesson in Murder’, for example, Foyle’s investigations lead him to a mysterious warehouse hidden away in the country and guarded by armed troops. It turns out to be full of coffins, prepared secretly in anticipation of the Blitz. As the foreman tells Foyle, ‘They’re preparin’. ‘They know what’s comin’. The Luftwaffe. The most powerful air force in the world. Ay, there’s been a few bombs down in the south east, but that was just a taster. Soon they’ll target London and there’s gonna be more bodies than you can imagine. And they’re gonna need coffins. Someone has to make ’em. Nobody’s to know. They’re worried about morale. And with good reason. You seen enough? The ‘myth’ of the Blitz has become such an accepted part of the popular narrative of the war, from the official propaganda of London Can Take It! (1940) to recent drama-documentaries such as Channel 4’s Blitz: London’s Firestorm (2005), both of which suggest that bombing did not seriously undermine civilian morale and that it is now often overlooked that the British government did in fact expect the damage and casualties to be far worse. The large-scale preparation of coffins is a fact largely written out of most ‘Finest Hour’ histories. ‘The French Drop’ is another example of the revisionist narrative of Foyle’s War, focusing on the early history of the Special Operations Executive (SOE), the organisation set up with the brief ‘to set Europe ablaze’. The standard history of SOE is one of heroic agents, particularly

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women such as Odette Churchill and Violet Szabo, whose stories were celebrated in the 1950s films Odette and Carve Her Name With Pride. There is, however, another, less familiar, history of SOE that reveals it to have been somewhat less than effective: its early days, especially, were plagued by a series of expensive mistakes caused by a combination of bureaucracy, petty institutional rivalries with MI6 (the Secret Intelligence Service) and, it has to be said, downright incompetence.17 In ‘The French Drop’ Foyle investigates the apparent suicide of SOE agent Messenger. He discovers that Messenger was in fact killed due to the incompetence of his superiors – on his first assignment to France he was parachuted into a minefield – and the body (which turns out to another person entirely) is SOE’s attempt to cover up their mistake. SOE is particularly keen to avoid embarrassment because Messenger was the son of Sir Giles Messenger, a senior member of MI6 who regards SOE as ‘a bunch of upstarts and amateurs wasting precious time and resources’. The suggestion that SOE regarded itself as above the law is apparent in an attempt to kill Foyle by locking the wheels of his car. This is carried out by an instructor called Mason, previously known to Foyle as a blackmailer he had sent down before the war. Foyle is faced with the dilemma of whether to reveal the truth of Messenger’s death to Sir Giles. He is persuaded to keep his silence by SOE officer ‘Miss Pierce’: ‘Until now we’ve been fighting the war by conventional methods and we’re losing, Mr Foyle. But I swear to you that one day we will make a difference.’ The revisionism of Foyle’s War is linked to a distinct ideological orientation, which is probably best described as left/liberal. The extent to which this can be attributed to the agency of Horowitz is difficult to say, though as creator and principal writer for the series it seems reasonable to assume that its content reflects his ideas and preoccupations. The textual evidence of a left/liberal orientation, nevertheless, is strong. As the series develops it reveals its politics in its frequently negative representation of corporate capitalism and its sympathy for dissidents and outsiders. Vested interests and officialdom are never to be trusted. In ‘War Games’, for example, Foyle investigates the activities of Empire and European Foods, which has violated the Trading with the Enemy Act by making an agreement, through contacts in neutral Switzerland, to supply Germany with margarine regardless of the outcome of the war. Sir Reginald Walker asserts that ‘business is bigger than war’ and claims that ‘I could tell you a dozen British companies, household names, that are involved in Germany.’ The episode suggests official complicity: Walker evades prosecution by providing the British government with ‘low-grade intelligence material’ about Germany. When it

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is revealed that Walker’s son Simon is a closet Nazi (he has a swastika and other Nazi paraphernalia hidden in the wine cellar), the episode is making a clear equation between capitalism and Fascism. Corporate profiteering also features in ‘A War of Nerves’ where the unscrupulous Talbot brothers, shipward owners, have embezzled money from the government for bogus contracts and have murdered a member of a bomb disposal squad who discovered their secret. Once again, therefore, the villains are corrupt capitalists who twist wartime circumstances to their own advantage. And ‘The Funk Hole’ centres on a country hotel that serves as ‘a hiding place for people with more money than conscience who want to buy their way out of the war’. The suggestion that the rich are able to lead a comfortable and pampered existence thanks to the black market lends a radical tinge to the politics of this particular episode. The representation of dissidents in Foyle’s War is further evidence of its ideological orientation. ‘A Lesson in Murder’ begins with the death in police custody of a conscientious objector who is found hanged in his cell. Foyle soon discovers that the man had been abused by the custody sergeant who turned a hose on the naked victim. Gascoigne, chairman of the committee hearing submissions from conscientious objectors, is taking bribes to let people out of military service. Gascoigne kills an evacuee boy to avoid being found out and is in turn shot dead by his wife when she discovers what he has done. In ‘A War of Nerves’ Foyle is assigned to investigate Raymond Carter, a leading member of the People’s Convention. The People’s Convention was a real organisation that called for friendship with the Soviet Union and that enjoyed some support amongst factory workers. There is a subtle difference between Foyle’s view of the Convention (‘a left-wing group of intellectuals’) and that of Assistant Commissioner Rose (‘a group of communist agitators’) which suggests that Foyle is more sympathetic to their views – or, rather, to their right to hold such views. It turns out that the police, with Rose’s connivance, have planted evidence in Carter’s hotel room in order to be able to arrest him for sedition. Yet again, therefore, Foyle uncovers conspiracy in high places. This sympathy towards dissidents, however, does not extend to Fascists. ‘The White Feather’ focuses on the Friday Club, a society of Fascists and anti-Semites led by charismatic Guy Spencer. Spencer is clearly modelled on Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists who was interned in 1940. Mosley argued that Britain had been dragged into the war against Germany by Jewish interests; Spencer asserts that the war is a Zionist conspiracy ‘to overthrow Christianity

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and conquer the world’. In making Spencer’s supporters members of the establishment – they include an MP and prominent socialites – the episode is referring explicitly to the known existence of pro-German sympathies within the British upper classes. Mosley was married to socialite Diana Mitford, whose sister Unity was a professed admirer of Hitler, while there have long been unsubstantiated rumours that the Duke of Windsor was also Nazi sympathiser. The episode is set in May 1940 at the time of the Dunkirk evacuation: it concludes with Foyle listening to the famous ‘Postscript’ broadcast by J.B. Priestley. In associating Foyle with the voice of ‘friendly socialism’ the episode is at pains to distance him from the views of Spencer/Mosley.18 Nowhere are the politics of Foyle’s War more overt, however, than in ‘Fifty Ships’, which exposes the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States as a marriage of convenience and political necessity rather than a true alliance. Howard Paige is a ruthless, boorish American millionaire who also happens to be a leading pro-Anglophile with political influence. Paige is visiting Britain in September 1940 on a special diplomatic mission for the US government. He comes to Foyle’s attention when he is implicated in the murder of a local drunkard. Richard Hunter is a broken man, a former engineering student cheated out of the royalties of a synchromesh gear exchange that he invented but which Paige patented. When Hunter confronts Paige and asks him for money to send his son to university, Paige shoots him. The only witness to the murder is a German spy who has been put ashore from a U-boat but arrested the following morning whilst trying to buy a pint of beer at nine in the morning. The irony here is that the German, Meyer, proves to be a far more honourable character than Paige, the erstwhile ally. On this occasion, however, a murderer is allowed to go free. As Mr Bishop, Paige’s British minder, explains to Foyle, We need the Americans, Mr Foyle, they’re the best friends we have. If we can’t persuade them to provide us with arms, food, ammunition and all the rest of it, we will not survive    Whatever else he may be, Paige has been a great supporter of this country. The American Allies of England have made a huge difference. They’ve managed to broker a deal that will almost certainly be the start of many more. They’ve created a lifeline that could last the entire war. The particular deal that Paige has brokered is the transfer of 50 US destroyers to the Royal Navy in return for the long-term lease of British naval bases in the Caribbean to the United States. It is an example of how Foyle’s War anchors its plots in the realities of the wartime situation,

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though in fact the destroyer deal was brokered by the British ambassador in Washington, Lord Lothian.19 Although Foyle is adamant that justice has merely been deferred, the smirk on Paige’s face as he leaves suggests that he knows he has, literally, got away with murder. The point of Britain’s dependency on the United States is forcefully made: it is an uneven relationship in which Britain has to accept American help on America’s terms. In summary, then, Foyle’s War offers a new and at times radical narrative of Britain’s war in which consensus is threatened by avarice and vested interests, and where there are alarming abuses of privilege and power. Authority figures (magistrates, government officials, police commisioners) are rarely to be trusted; conventional views of morality have become distorted; and sometimes the matter of solving crime is at odds with the national interest. The question that has to be asked, therefore, is why Foyle’s War has proved to be so popular? It is unusual for such an avowedly revisionist and critical account of the war to go unchallenged. Revisionist narratives, whether history books or television programmes, tend usually to be highly controversial. Major works of revisionist history such as Corelli Barnett’s The Audit of War, John Charmley’s Churchill: The End of Glory and Clive Ponting’s 1940: Myth and Reality all provoked censure both inside and outside the academy.20 In the early 1970s the hostile response to some episodes of Thames Television’s otherwise acclaimed documentary series The World at War demonstrated that any departure from the accepted narrative of the war is unacceptable to the viewing public.21 This response has not dimmed even as the war itself recedes further into the past. In 2004, for example, there were protests about BBC2’s drama-documentary Dunkirk on the grounds that it ‘debunked the myth’ of Dunkirk.22 The most plausible explanation is that the content of Foyle’s War is largely offset by the nostalgia of its heritage trappings. These are evident in several ways. The visual style of Foyle’s War conforms to the ‘look’ of the heritage drama with its rich, highly detailed period miseen-scène (authentic-looking sets, costumes, vehicles) and its ‘cinematic’ photography of locations and landscapes.23 This style did not meet with universal approval. The Guardian’s reviewer, for example, complained that ‘we had to wade through a custard of period-drama clichés’.24 Another strategy that the series employs for asserting its heritage credentials is the casting of actors familiar from heritage cinema or television. These include Charles Dance (The Jewel in the Crown) in ‘The White Feather’, Nicholas Farrell (Chariots of Fire) in ‘The Funk Hole’, Edward Fox (Edward and Mrs Simpson) in ‘The German Woman’, Stella Gonet

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(The House of Elliot) in ‘They Fought in the Fields’, Robert Hardy (All Creatures Great and Small, Churchill: The Wilderness Years) in ‘The German Woman’, Rosamund Pike (Pride and Prejudice) in ‘The German Woman’, Corin Redgrave (Persuasion) in ‘The Funk Hole’ and ‘A War of Nerves’, and James Wilby (A Room With A View, Maurice) in ‘They Fought in the Fields.’ The presence of familiar faces in television drama provides reassurance for viewers and helps to locate the series in a heritage context. Horowitz, for his part, suggests that the series’ success is due to its period nostalgia: ‘Foyle’s War revisits a period that is very much part of all of us and there is a sense of pride in our achievement as a nation and in what we did in the war.’25 So embedded is this pride in British culture that no amount of historical revisionism can shake it. Foyle’s War seems likely to remain in production for the foreseeable future. Horowitz has said that his aim is to see the series through chronologically to the end of the war: ‘My creed would be to take it to 1945, have a VE day story where everyone is celebrating and some poor sod is left in Hastings with a dead body. You can work out who that would be!’26 The popular success of the series demonstrates the extent to which, even after 60 years, the Second World War still holds a fascination for the British public. What it also demonstrates is that as historical knowledge of the war changes, so does its representation in popular culture. There are always new aspects of the wartime experience to be explored and this is what allows it to be revisited and reinterpreted for each generation. Foyle’s War represents a popular view of the war from the perspective of the early twenty-first century. It should be seen not as an isolated example, but as just one stage in a constantly evolving narrative of the British wartime experience.

4 An Autobiographical Allegory: Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea With Mussolini Robert W. Matson

It is not surprising that the approach of the final decade of the twentieth century found Franco Zeffirelli in a reflective frame of mind. His life had been, by almost any measure, eventful. Rising from obscurity to renown, he had experienced danger, had known the famous and the beautiful, and had turned his youthful love of opera and the theatre into a glittering career as a designer, director, and producer. In his mid1960s, he had reached the time of life when successful men and women often think of writing their autobiographies. But he hesitated. Although he discussed the idea on occasion with close friends, it still seemed ‘slightly preposterous’, he thought, ‘to write down my life as though it was finished and complete.’ Deeply suspicious of the motives that prompted others to sum themselves up on the printed page, he was equally unsure of being able to make a good job of it if he attempted it himself. At length, his internal debate bore fruit and, when he began to conceive of the project as the work of ‘a raconteur, rather than a writer’, he knew what to do. He would simply tell his story.1 Much of the world was also then in a mood of retrospection. Zeffirelli: The Autobiography of Franco Zeffirelli appeared in 1986, precisely 50 years after Benito Mussolini’s fateful discussions with Adolf Hitler resulted in an alliance to which Mussolini himself gave the name ‘the Axis.’ Thereafter, fiftieth anniversaries of wartime milestones crowded one after another – commemorations of the attack on Poland, the Dunkirk evacuation, the London Blitz, Pearl Harbour, D-Day, the liberation of the concentration camps, V-E Day, V-J Day – each marked by conferences, speeches, royal visits, and celebrations or lamentations as seemed appropriate. And there were new movies, not only combat films but stories of human drama set against the backdrop of the war. Successful auteur that he was, Zeffirelli knew that his own story rivalled many 39

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of those appearing on the screen. As a child in pre-war Florence, he had witnessed the tactics of the Fascists at first hand, he had avoided conscription by taking to the hills and joining the Partisans and, when the victorious American and British troops arrived, he had used his command of English, acquired under the tutelage of one of the formidable expatriate dowagers known to Florentines as the ‘Scorpioni’, to serve as a translator and guide. As he began to think in cinematic terms about his youthful experiences, the project that became Tea With Mussolini was born.2 Selected passages from his Autobiography and a general concept of the film he would like to make hardly constituted a practicable screenplay, however. After explaining his ideas to several writers, Zeffirelli received a number of treatments, all of which he rejected. Becoming steadily more consumed by his vision of the project and nearing desperation, he finally approached John Mortimer, the barrister-turned-playwright, whom he knew casually. As the creator of the widely popular legal sleuth ‘Horace Rumpole’, Mortimer was clearly accomplished in the art of semifictionalized biography. ‘You are my last and only hope’, Zeffirelli told him in typically florid fashion during a hastily arranged meeting in London in 1996. ‘I ask you to save my life, the life that is precious to me. Only you can do it. I feel that most strongly. Only you in the whole world!’3 Hyperbole aside, the British Mortimer and the Italian Zeffirelli were indeed ideal collaborators for a saga in which the latter’s boyhood was to be dramatized against the backdrop of the difficulties encountered by a group of Britons living in Italy just before and during the Second World War. Though he suspected that Zeffirelli’s recollections had become sanitized and romanticized with the passage of time, Mortimer respected his admonition that the autobiographical material was to be used essentially without alteration and set about devising the additional characters necessary for a fully developed script. The most notable of his creations were Lady Hester Random, the haughty widow of a former British Ambassador to Italy, and Elsa Morganthal StraussArmistan, a brash American whose wealth derived from her skill at marrying rich elderly men and inheriting their estates when they died. With a mystery writer’s ingenuity, Mortimer interwove the main story line with several subplots, but Zeffirelli’s story remained central: the coming of age in pre-war and wartime Florence of a boy illegitimately born to a fabric merchant and a dressmaker, neither of whom was in a position to provide home and family for him. Zeffirelli’s mother had in fact been ruined by the scandal resulting from her out-of-wedlock pregnancy while his father, unwilling to further

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antagonize a wife outraged by the very existence of the child, was not an attentive parent. He did have one aspiration for his son, however: he wanted young Franco to speak fluent English and, accordingly, arranged for him to receive lessons from an English woman he employed to translate business correspondence. This secretary-become-tutor, Mary O’Neill, was a member of Florence’s very visible British colony. Zeffirelli recalled them clearly as a company of ‘ageless ladies who dressed as if nothing had changed since the turn of the century’. They gathered each afternoon at Doney’s Tea Room, creating a particular sensation in the spring and summer ‘with their white lace, cream and lilac colours, parasols and old-fashioned hats’. Drawn to Florence not only for its art and history but because Elizabeth Barrett Browning had lived and was buried there, they had declared it to be their home. ‘Excruciatingly snobbish’, they were as unkind to the Florentines as they were enamoured of their city. Their stinging commentary on local habits and behaviour earned them the sobriquet scorpioni. They focused their admiration on Mussolini, whose efficiency and decisiveness appeared in contrast to the colourless politicians of interwar Britain. Through Mary O’Neill, Zeffirelli came to know these women, to absorb their devotion to art and literature, and to puzzle over them and their way of life in Florence.4 In Mortimer’s treatment, the young boy called Luca is enfolded more completely in the society of the Scorpioni than the real Franco had been, actually moving into his tutor’s home and being instructed and squired about the city by various members of the group. Luca is not on hand, however, to witness the rising level of animosity directed against them during the late 1930s because his quixotic father, having decided that Germany rather than England will be the future hegemon of Europe, ships him off to Austria to study the German language and culture. Meanwhile, Lady Hester, heedless of the advice of His Majesty’s Consul that she and her friends should return to the safety of Britain, concocts the stratagem of discussing her concerns over tea with Il Duce himself. His affirmation that she and her friends would be ‘always under my personal protection’ reassures her though, of course, it counts for little as Italy moves into an ever-closer partnership with Nazi Germany. Fascist roughnecks harass the ladies and, with the outbreak of war between Italy and Britain in June 1940, force them to leave Florence. A teenaged Luca returns from Austria just in time to see this forced removal. He follows the caravan, discovers the place of their internment, and ultimately serves as a liaison between them and his benefactor Elsa, who uses her wealth to rent accommodations for the Britons. Lady Hester, still besotted with Mussolini, erroneously attributes this solicitude to

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him. Elsa’s romantic life forms one of the subplots and eventually leads to a relationship with an unscrupulous lawyer who takes advantage of wartime exigencies to trick her into signing over most of her assets to him. Luca and Lady Hester’s grandson Wilfrid, who in another subplot has struggled to get free of his grandmother’s well-meaning but suffocating protection and has joined the underground fighters, assist Elsa in her flight. In the end, the Scorpioni too put up a valiant resistance. The portrayal of this group of eccentric middle-aged ladies opened several interesting roles for mature actresses. Joan Plowright, then 70, and her late husband Sir Laurence Olivier had been in Zeffirelli’s circle for many years and had often heard him recount his childhood and wartime experiences. Long ago he had told her that, if he ever filmed his autobiography, she must play his tutor. Now that the occasion had come, Plowright found that her character, Mary Wallace, was powerfully scripted as a composite of two significant figures of Zeffirelli’s youth: his mentor Mary O’Neill and his guardian and maternal substitute, his Aunt Lide.5 As casting proceeded early in 1998, agents courted Angela Lansbury and Vannessa Redgrave to play other members of the Scorpioni, but in the end these roles went to Judi Dench and Maggie Smith.6 Both 65, they had known each other, and Plowright, since their early days on the London stage. Despite their age, all three were enjoying ascending careers and together they brought to the filming of Tea With Mussolini not only celebrity and distinction, but a certain efficiency. As Dame Judi put it, ‘you form a kind of shorthand when you know somebody well. It is much more pleasurable working together. There are many things you don’t need to say, since the other person senses what you’re going to say or do.’7 Mortimer’s script also called for some American characters to embody both the uncertain posture of the United States on the world scene and the antipathy between the two groups of English speakers in Florence. Cher was an early choice for the part of Elsa Morganthal and, by some accounts, was somewhat daunted by the prospect of working with the acclaimed British actresses. Her enthusiasm for the partnership, however, overcame the initial trepidation felt by all of them (for the Britons were equally in awe of her fame) and her presence injected an energy that guaranteed the camaraderie between some members of the cast would not degenerate into complacency.8 The flighty and erratic personality of Elsa was balanced by that of Georgie Russell, an earthy, blunt-speaking archaeologist with a kindly soul. Lily Tomlin, who was known to reject roles she did not consider compatible with her personal and political attitudes, accepted this one, evidently finding the

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lesbian and feminist characteristics of Georgie a comfortable fit.9 Elsa and Georgie, perhaps more than the other fictional characters, displayed Mortimer’s deftness, which had evidently been lacking in others who attempted the project, at treading the fine line that delineated biographical fact and Zeffirelli’s emotional colouration. Even though there had been no such actual persons in the director’s youth, they were calculated to appeal to him and to lay to rest any questions about Mortimer’s ability to rise to the challenge of the script. With, as Plowright assessed it, ‘five good parts – to put it politely – for women who have turned 50’, the cast seemed certain to be a major strength.10 She actually understated the situation, for the average age of the five actresses was over 60, a fact that highlighted the existence of a cohort of powerful female film stars in midlife or beyond at a time when many of the leading men were relatively young, some of whom, having begun their careers as child actors, continued to trade on their youthful images. Zeffirelli himself was 75 when shooting began on Tea With Mussolini in June 1998, and his style as a director was well established through long practice. Yet this project, despite its roots in his own recollections, was in some respects a new departure for him. Much of his career effort had been devoted to writing, staging and directing stage plays and operas, and even his work in cinema had been heavily oriented towards the classics, especially Shakespeare and Verdi. With little room for making changes in the characters and dialogue of such productions, his creativity had often found its outlet in the realms of mise-en-scène and cinematography. This time, he was working with fresh fictional material direct from its writer. Not surprisingly, he brought Mortimer to the filming locations and plagued him daily with requests for rewrites. Even so, his traditional style persisted. In his work there was little experimentation with such novelties as hyper-extreme close-ups or the unsteady movements of hand-held cameras then popular with younger directors, many of whom had begun their careers in television or newer media. Zeffirelli was not only of an older generation, but was marked out as an ‘old school’ filmmaker by his background in the theatre. Tea With Mussolini might not be a classic subject, but there was no doubt it would be classic in execution and as sensately stunning as the Italian opera.11 The music enters first, as though it were an overture. Before any image appears on screen, the opening notes of a languid, romantic melody, Mattinata Fiorentina, begin to sound. As the crooning lyrics (in Italian and with a timbre that evokes the 1930s’ phonograph recordings) extol the enchantments of spring, the screen lightens to a black-and-white

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panorama of Florence. A viewer could almost be in the theatre listening to the music as the curtain rises to reveal the still-empty stage and its scenic backdrop. The sense of settling in for a stage play or opera is immediately reinforced by the appearance of text over the scenery. It is ‘Florence, 1935’, viewers are informed. Then come two more frames: The love affair between the artistically-inclined English community and Florence was soon to be overshadowed by the clouds of war and But at the moment the sun is still shining on the squares and statues, and the dictator Mussolini is the gentleman who makes the trains run on time. This tactic may have been required to provide an entrée into a fairly complex historical and social setting, or it may have owed something to a director who was accustomed to audiences that had prepared themselves by the perusal of programme notes before the house lights dimmed. In any case, this thesis having been asserted, the text fades, the panorama changes to colour, and the camera begins to capture shots of a crowd assembling and moving through the streets of the city. Small groups and individuals are highlighted by means of alternating wideangle shots and medium close-ups. Soon it is clear they are all gathering in a cemetery for some special observance. Another title indicates that the date is 29 June 1935. Surely, few viewers would know that this was the anniversary of the death of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, at whose tomb the crowd has assembled, and apart from Italian speakers, few would understand the musical lyrics as they continue to underline the visual and verbal sentiment that, for the moment, all is sunshine and pleasure. Perhaps Zeffirelli only sought authenticity for the establishing shots, since the information itself is not really necessary. The sound of the music and the rich visual setting are effective in themselves. After several minutes, the Italian lyrics give way to the upper-class English voice of Lady Hester Random as she pays homage to Browning for bringing to Italy ‘not only poetry, but a fine example of British motherhood’. As she finishes this statement, Mary Wallace arrives with Luca in tow, their lateness signalling that although they form part of the group, both of them are also separated from the others by the odd situation that has brought them together. Within 5 minutes, all of the important plot elements have been foreshadowed and most of the important characters have been introduced – except for one. But before the American Elsa Morganthal can appear, several scenes must

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review Luca’s history and explain how he came to be in the care of Mary Wallace and under the tutelage of the Scorpioni. Finally, 20 minutes into the action, Elsa arrives, literally driving into the idyllic setting of a countryside picnic. Her ostentation and her boisterous reunion with her archaeologist friend Georgie provoke expressions of disdain from Lady Hester, the mildest of which is that ‘Americans simply don’t understand picnics.’ Lady Hester seems to believe, in fact, that hardly anyone understands things as well as she, an excess of self-confidence that corrodes her grasp of the situation as Britain and Italy draw near to war and the grudging acceptance of the Scorpioni by Florentines gives way to outright hostility. Zeffirelli’s directorial flair, the skilful camera work and editing, the splendid setting, and the capable performances of the actors combine successfully for the first 30 or 40 minutes of footage. But even these qualities are unable to sustain coherence as the conceptual and cinematic difficulties mount thereafter. One challenge is presented by the multiplicity of subplots. As much as Mortimer may have concocted these to supply archetypes as well as dramatic interest, they cannot all be kept in synchronicity or resolved satisfactorily. Luca, as one reviewer aptly observed, ‘becomes a stranger in his own story’ as the Scorpioni tend to monopolize the spotlight.12 Yet in the end, the women too are left dangling and seeming irrelevant to the overall denouement. More seriously, the historical setting becomes increasingly complicated. The wartime realities that frame the plot cannot properly be understood without fairly precise knowledge of such matters as Italian ‘co-belligerency’, a term coined by Mussolini to harmonize official neutrality with support for Germany until June 1940; Italy’s prompt surrender and change of allegiance after the US and British invasions of September 1943; and the grinding conflict that resulted when Hitler ignored the Italian capitulation and dispatched commandoes to rescue Mussolini while German armed forces continued waging war on Italian soil. Dramatic films made for general audiences tend to avoid this kind of historical detail, given the inherent limitations of the medium in conveying substantial information with the required subtlety and nuance. But Zeffirelli found himself trapped by the demands of the particular combination of fiction and reality he had unleashed. He attempted to escape the closing pincers by resorting to montage technique and date captions to provide context, but this semi-documentary method was unsatisfactory because of its dissonance with the ambience of the earlier scenes. Gradually, the narrative loses contact with

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its setting in time and place as the seductive musical score increasingly masks the grimness of the battles occurring outside the frame. But Zeffirell’s story was never about the horrors of war in any case. Tea With Mussolini is something more than an item in the oeuvre of Franco Zeffirelli. It must also be understood as an artefact of the Post– Cold War era during which it was made. Both Mortimer and Zeffirelli were members of the generation that grew to maturity during the Second World War and whose outlook was shaped in good measure by their experiences of that conflict. Their adult lives and careers spanned the decades of the Cold War, during which most of the leaders of the Free World were their contemporaries. Their generation may have been surprised in the late 1980s and early 1990s by the rapid decline of the Soviet Union’s control over its satellite zone in eastern Europe and the disintegration of even the Soviet state itself, but it had little doubt of the meaning of Western victory in the Cold War. The Second World War and the Cold War, when the latter was finally ended, could be seen as one continuous struggle for the same cause. When communism in Europe finally followed fascism and Nazism into oblivion the conclusion seemed obvious: the right values held with conviction, steadfastness even in adversity, and the refusal to give way to tyranny had at length been vindicated. The vigour of the new democracies that rose in the former Soviet satellites, the advance of human rights, and the hopefulness of economic liberalization all gave strength to such a view. Beginning in 1989 with the success of the Solidarity Movement in Poland and the dramatic razing of the Berlin Wall in Germany, the surging tide of democracy appeared set to create what even as prudent a figure as US President George H.W. Bush was willing to call a ‘New World Order’.13 For nearly a dozen years, until the terrorist attacks of September 2001 initiated a new and grimmer epoch, this positive outlook held sway as the self-description of people who were no longer divided and constricted by the all-consuming competition between the Western and the Communist blocs. Tea With Mussolini nicely summarized the spirit of the time, especially as understood by two ageing interpreters. There are great forces in history, they seemed to argue. No person or party commands human affairs, and much that happens is chaotic. But the right can prevail when people who have been foolish or misled come to see reality and those who have been cowardly find their courage. It seems unsurprising now that the vision of Italy was a shining one during those optimistic years. The Italians themselves had once endured and had finally emerged from a tyranny imposed by the very inventor of the term ‘totalitarian’. When he described his governing ideal as

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the stada corporativa totalitaria, Benito Mussolini inadvertently provided a label for the stultifying regimentation of all aspects of life refined in Nazi Germany and perpetuated by the Kremlin rulers until their downfall. As they witnessed the extinction of totalitarianism in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, readers and moviegoers were offered a series of productions that credited Italy with an almost magical ability to move men and women, especially English-speaking ones, towards fulfilment or enlightenment. The effect was undoubtedly intensified by repeated appearances of some of the same performers. In 1986, an interesting foreshadowing of later castings paired Judi Dench and Maggie Smith in the adaptation for screen of E.M. Forster’s novel A Room With a View. ‘I have a theory’, Dench’s character opined in an early scene, ‘that there is something in the Italian landscape which inclines even the most stolid nature to romance.’ The 1992 feature Enchanted April found Joan Plowright portraying such a stolid figure, a domineering matron whose sojourn on the Italian coast finally lightened her outlook and caused her to remark, ‘I’ve been thinking: isn’t it better to feel young somewhere than old everywhere? Time enough to feel old when we have to leave this beautiful place.’ Then in 1996, 2 years before Zeffirelli brought Dench, Plowright, and Smith together on his shoot, the American author Frances Mayes recounted her own experiences in Under the Tuscan Sun, which was adapted for the screen in 2003. In Tea With Mussolini, Judi Dench had the opportunity to reiterate virtually the same sentiment she had stated in A Room With a View when her character Arabella, instructing Luca about art, averred that ‘Italians breathe it in with the air of Florence, not like us cold English.’ But she herself was far from cold, she said, for ‘I have drunk deep of the wine of Firenzi. I have warmed my hands before the fires of Botticelli and Michelangelo.’ The post–Cold War decade of the 1990s was not all warm emotion, however. ‘Globalization’, a new term to describe a reality that was, depending on the commentator, either shining or threatening was coming into vogue. As defined by syndicated columnist Tom Friedman, one of its most articulate expositors, it meant ‘the inexorable integration of markets, transportation systems, and communication systems to a degree never witnessed before – in a way that is enabling corporations, countries, and individuals to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into corporations, countries, and individuals farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before’.14 Hollywood studios, it might be inferred from Friedman’s description, were

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among the enterprises most profoundly affected by these developments. As they became components of enormous multinational entertainment industry conglomerates, the studios were globalized to the extent that the very term ‘Hollywood’ ceased to be a synonym for ‘American-made’. Financing and personnel might come from anywhere and production might occur virtually anywhere. The reach of these huge corporations included all aspects of the media, not merely the cinema, and their size made it possible for them to finance the production of very expensive blockbusters, such as James Cameron’s 1997 Titanic, which many executives believed were the most effective way to lure viewers away from the competing attractions of television, video games, and other new electronic entertainments. At the same time, the widespread economic deregulation characteristic of post–Cold War international affairs gave the products of these companies unprecedented access to markets throughout the world and brought Hollywood, as it was now defined, to a greater level of predominance than ever before.15 The discernible effects of these developments were not immediately obvious in the United States, where the movies for decades had issued from profit-oriented business corporations. Discerning moviegoers might have noticed only the diminishing number of foreign titles on American screens. But the national cinemas of Europe suffered both from Hollywood’s penetration and from the desire of some European filmmakers to emulate the Hollywood product, which they could do only by internationalizing both the content and the production of their work.16 Tea With Mussolini owed its nature and, as it turned out, some of its box-office success to the fact that it was made in this environment. From the start, the responsibilities and costs of production were shared by several companies. Although this tactic had emerged as a means of enabling European filmmakers to match, to some degree, Hollywood’s ability to finance very large, expensive productions, it was becoming routine even when the projected costs were relatively low, as they were here at $12–14 million. One of the first of the co-producers to join the project was Riccardo Tozzi, who had worked with Zeffirelli on Jane Eyre in 1986 and was now setting out on his own after several years as head of production at Mediaset, Italy’s largest commercial broadcaster. Apparently motivated by his lack of interest in the low-budget television fare that Mediaset executives believed the market demanded, Tozzi had that very year established his own company, Cattleya Film, to concentrate on making a modest number of ‘good market-oriented Italian films’ and to work with co-producers on international projects.17 This professional

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move was not as drastic as it might have appeared to foreigners, for in Italy film and television production have long been closely connected. It does, however, illuminate his interest in Tea With Mussolini. Tozzi retained good relations with Mediaset, whose flamboyant creator, Silvio Berlusconi, was the wealthiest individual in the country and was often cited as an exemplar of the new era of politics and business. Although Berlusconi had surrendered operational control of Mediaset in 1994 in order to enter politics, he remained the largest shareholder and the company was still run by members of his family. His new Forza Italia party did very well at the polls and, after a short term as prime minister, he had settled into the role of leader of the parliamentary opposition. The rise of Forza Italia also combined the media and politics in another career by bringing about the political debut of Senator Franco Zeffirelli. Perhaps it was not surprising under the circumstances that Medusa Produzione, another Berlusconi company, assumed responsibility for the Italian distribution and international sales of Tea With Mussolini.18 At the same time, administrative changes at the venerable but financially troubled US studio MGM created an eager overseas partner. A new management team headed by Alex Yemenidjian had decided on an aggressive approach. While other studios were tightening their budgets and, in particular, reducing their contracts with external production companies, MGM sought to expand and diversify. As part of the effort, United Artists, which MGM had owned since 1981, became a specialty division oriented towards acquiring interesting foreign films to exhibit in the United States under the MGM label, while it continued to make a modest number of its own titles. G-2 Films, a London-based unit MGM had set in place a few years earlier with a similar mission, was now renamed United Artists International and integrated more closely into the parent company.19 The replacement of the former corporate structure with this new globalized one must have seemed to some MGM employees almost as extreme as the recent upheavals experienced by Soviet apparatchiks, and one of them borrowed terminology from the US President to describe it as the ‘new world order’.20 In any case, G-2 Films was already a co-producer of Tea With Mussolini, which made it into something of a standard bearer for MGM’s latest renascence. The MGM label was certainly one of the film’s advantages as it opened in the United States in May 1999. Even so, it appeared on fewer than 300 screens, about 10 per cent of the number that were showing current big-budget productions such as Notting Hill and Tarzan. The glittering cast and enthusiastic word-of-mouth recommendations were evidently important factors in producing large attendances. By summer, Tea With

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Mussolini was regularly appearing on Variety’s weekly listing of the ten highest grossing films, MGM’s only product on the list and its only profitable venture of the year.21 Beyond its consonance with the sanguine spirit of the post–Cold War decade, its international production and its undoubted contribution to the rising career trajectory of the team of Dench and Smith, Tea With Mussolini functions as an extended metaphor about illusion and realism. In his autobiography, Zeffirelli asserted that the wartime travails of the Scorpioni were of greater significance than simply a recompense for their own blind stubbornness. The classicist in him saw an allegory. ‘The eccentric spinsters who had so loved Mussolini had paid dearly for their naivety’, he wrote, ‘as would we all in the years ahead.’22 Americans and Europeans – ‘we all’ – in Zeffirelli’s view, needed an object lesson in the danger of harbouring illusions, especially about tyrants. In the cinematic version of this morality play, the obligatory journey from naiveté to realism is personified most effectively by Elsa Morganthal. The resemblance between Cher’s Elsa and Humphrey Bogart’s Rick in Casablanca (1942) is striking. Both are US citizens abroad, neutrals in the midst of belligerents who regard them with condescension. Major Strasser’s dismissal of Rick as ‘just another blundering American’ is in harmony with Elsa’s rhetorical query: ‘What would I know? I’m just a rich vulgar American.’ Elsa and Rick embody a remarkably similar worldview and express nearly identical sentiments. Initially they profess not merely lack of fervor but actual disdain for the conflict raging them and they refuse to take representatives of the warring nations seriously. Rick’s irreverent reply ‘I’m a drunkard’ when asked his nationality by a Gestapo officer is echoed by Elsa when she offers the flippant appraisal of Mussolini: ‘I think his butt’s too big to push around a dance floor.’ She lives a hedonistic life characterized by Lady Hester as ‘flagrantly immoral’, and he responds to the resistance leader Victor Laszlo’s appeal for help with an amoral reply, ‘I’m not interested in politics; the problems of the world are not in my department; I’m a saloon keeper.’ Nor are these traits mere idiosyncrasies, for Rick and Elsa clearly represent the United States and Americans in general. Thus their selfishness and naiveté are more apparent than real, a point underlined by the songs associated with each. ‘As Time Goes By’ in his case and ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’ in hers both speak of the need of finding strength within and remaining constant through change and hardship. Rick and Elsa both demonstrate their ability able to do this as the threat posed by the global conflict becomes clearer. They are forced to ponder more deeply and, with the help of their closest friends, they foreshadow the

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battles ahead. ‘If it’s December 1941 in Casablanca, what time is it in New York?’, Rick asks Sam and continues, ‘I bet they’re sleeping in New York. I bet they’re sleeping all over America.’ When Elsa reacts to talk of the need for personal discretion in wartime, ‘As far as I know, the United States isn’t at war with anybody’, her friend Georgie puts in, ‘Not yet, anyway.’ Gradually, both put away their illusions and become committed to the victory of the right side, revealing in the process that in some ways they have actually been part of the struggle all along. Elsa is not merely American, but Jewish, and is ready to use her wealth and connections to help the victims of persecution. Rick, it turns out, had carried guns to the Ethiopians in 1935 and fought with the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, working against Mussolini’s Italy in both instances. His anti-fascist core is so convincing that, in As Time Goes By: A Novel of Casablanca, published in 1998 just as Mortimer was working on the screenplay for Tea With Mussolini, Michael Walsh created a past for Rick as a Jew who was involved in New York’s underworld and was forced to flee after killing in self-defence, neatly solving Casablanca’s portentous riddle, best articulated on screen by Inspector Reynault: ‘I’ve often speculated on why you don’t return to America. Did you abscond with the church funds? Did you run off with a senator’s wife? I like to think you killed a man; it’s the romantic in me.’ ‘It’s a combination of all three’, Rick answers enigmatically.23 Once these parallels are traced, others also can be seen, including the important role of money in both stories. In Casablanca money buys fake exit visas from shadowy anonymous sellers; in Tea With Mussolini it buys fake artworks from the same types. In the end, Rick is without his saloon and Elsa without her villa, and both must make harrowing escapes. Such remarkable similarities in screenplays created by separate writers 56 years apart are not explained by conscious imitation, still less by mere coincidence, but rather by the outlook of the generation that had survived to witness victory, not just in the Second World War, but also in the Cold War. The soft propaganda of Casablanca and other wartime Hollywood movies became the received wisdom of the post– Cold War period. In both Casablanca and Tea With Mussolini the critical action occurs in the same period of time, the 18 months between the fall of Paris in June 1940 and the Pearl Harbour attack on 7 December 1941. Americans living abroad during that time are ideal characters to personify the country’s transition from neutral to belligerent as well as the necessary personal conversion from selfish individualism to commitment to victory. The two films use the device of a physical journey as the metaphor for an intellectual and spiritual one and, in both cases,

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the travel is stimulated by the same event. The German capture of Paris triggers Rick’s flight to Casablanca and it also brings Italy into the war with the result that the Scorpioni must board the buses that will carry them into internment. In this version of modern history, the greatest heroes are those who, like Winston Churchill, were never taken in by the wiles of the dictators and who always understood the need to oppose them, as Churchill put it, ‘whatever the cost’. Tea With Mussolini makes this point by reprising a scene, common to wartime films, in which people in occupied regions huddle around a radio and find inspiration as they listen to a broadcast by Churchill. The acceptance of this interpretation necessarily involves a degree of righteous disapproval of those who failed to apprehend the danger of complacency in the past. But modern cinemagoers who applauded this sentiment as they watched Tea With Mussolini may not have recognized how widespread the point of view now stigmatized had once been. Admiration for Mussolini was not restricted to prideful misfits, naïfs, and fascist fellow-travellers. To many consequential observers of the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was more to Mussolini than merely the man who could be congratulated for making the trains run on time notwithstanding his other flaws of character and polity. Although the Americans are depicted in Tea With Mussolini as more-or-less immune to the charisma that captivated the expatriate British ladies, the historical reality was otherwise. In fact, Mussolini was more popular with Americans than with any other people except the Italians themselves. This admiration was widespread, found alike among conservatives and progressives, intellectuals and working people. It can be explained to a degree by the fact that the Italian dictator paid careful attention to his image in the United States, directing special radio broadcasts there and assiduously cultivating the American press corps in Rome. And, as historian John P. Diggins pointed out, there was much to recommend Mussolini to Americans when he first came on the scene in the 1920s: A middle-class, property conscious nation, confronted by the towering antithetical figures of Lenin and Mussolini, would naturally turn to the charismatic Italian, who paraded as the saviour of capitalism. A nation of churchgoers, faced with a crisis in moral values, would understandably respond to the image of Mussolini as the redeemer who turned back the tide of materialism and anticlericalism

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in Italy. And a nationalistic people, reacting to Wilsonian internationalism, could readily applaud Mussolini’s scorn for the League of Nations and praise the Fascist virtue of patriotism.24 The adoring gaze Lady Hester directed at Mussolini during their eponymous on-screen tea party could in fact have been seen on the faces of American women, including veteran reporters like Ida M. Tarbell, whose reputation had been made by her ability to withstand the powerful persona of John D. Rockefeller. In 1923, when Mussolini made an appearance at the meeting of the International Suffrage Alliance in Rome, the novelist Frances Parkinson, who was in attendance, confessed to shedding tears of joy. But men were also affected, including the humorist and commentator Will Rogers, who argued that Mussolini was only attempting to do for Italy what Henry Ford had done for the United States.25 Until Franklin D. Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler entered office a few weeks apart in 1933, Benito Mussolini towered above other figures on the international scene. He seemed especially more impressive than the bureaucratic politicians in Europe and America who proved unable to deal effectively with the Great Depression, much less to inspire devotion. Even after the rise of Hitler, Mussolini was able for a time to style himself as the experienced leader who would be able to restrain the excitable German Fuhrer. Mussolini’s standing, then, depended on the context in which he was beheld. To many Americans, his image was one they could understand and use. Some even discovered that they could think of him in much the same way they viewed their own rugged pioneers. ‘By a curious process of human perception, self-projection of native values and journalistic adulation’, Diggins concluded his penetrating analysis, ‘Americans re-made Benito Mussolini into the image and likeness of their own domestic heroes.’26 Of course, when Italian military aggressions, beginning in 1935, and Italy’s later alliance with Nazi Germany sullied the reputation of the fascist leader, many Americans found themselves embarrassed by their earlier infatuation, just as a decade later, in much the same way, those who had inclined towards communism rather than Italian fascism had similar cause to regret the associations of their youth. The breadth of Mussolini’s appeal in the late 1920s and early 1930s was essentially unknown to both the viewers of Tea With Mussolini and its maker. That was the view of an even earlier generation than Zeffirelli’s, and he chose to particularize it to a small group, the Scorpioni in Florence, though he saw their naiveté as symptomatic of a wider

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lack of resolve among those who should have opposed fascism sooner and more vigorously. In his saga, Lady Hester and her ilk received the same kind of scorn she directed towards the Americans and others who declined to court her favour. But like Lady Hester, Zeffirelli created a Mussolini he could use and, in so doing, encapsulated the views of a considerable segment of three generations in Western Europe and America. Benito Mussolini, who thought himself to be a creature of destiny, might well be surprised if he could know how accurate he was in that estimate. The future will no doubt reconstruct him yet again, a task not likely to be eschewed given his dramatic appeal, but one cannot now know what he will signify to interpreters whose perspective will include the era of Al-Qaeda and the ‘global war against terrorism’. Perhaps Italy’s experience in Somalia will take on more importance; perhaps Mussolini’s name will join that of Saddam Hussein in the listing of overthrown tyrants; or perhaps his failure to grasp the real relationship between himself and Hitler will come to symbolize the naiveté Zeffirelli attributed to only a few of Il Duce’s admirers.

5 Soccer with the Dead: Mediterraneo, the Legacy of Neorealismo, and the Myth of Italiani Brava Gente Saverio Giovacchini

You have turned on your TV and have happened on an Italian film. A bunch of Italian guys are playing soccer on a beautiful Mediterranean beach. They argue – imagine that! – about a penalty. Longhaired and handsome, they sport ragtag clothes and decent tans. Around the field, local, beautiful, women look on, pleased. Overall, they could be a bunch of Italian thirtysomethings enjoying their ‘ferie’ in an exotic location. Wait a minute, though, not so fast. An old military plane suddenly appears behind the goal and lands precariously on the football field. The ensuing dialogue between the pilot and the players situates the film not in the present, but during World War II. The players are part of an occupying force of Italian soldiers who had been deployed to this conquered Greek island in June 1941. Their radio destroyed, they have been unable to follow the evolution of the war: they know nothing of the Anzio landing, of the 8th September armistice, and they have no clue of Mussolini’s fall or the onset of the Italian ‘civil war.’ These Italian soldiers are oblivious to the war they themselves helped to start. In their ambiguous relation to the drama of World War II, these Italian soldiers playing soccer on the beach in the film Mediterraneo (1991), directed by Gabriele Salvatores and written by Enzo Monteleone, represent all too well their compatriots back home. Italians overall have taken little responsibility for begetting the catastrophe of the war, preferring to see themselves either as its victims or as Resistance fighters, but rarely as its initiators. The image of the Italian as the victim of World War II had its roots in the military rhetoric produced during the conflict itself when Allied propaganda had stressed both the difference between Italians and Germans, and the unfairness of equating the Italian people with their Fascist leaders. While the Germans had wanted the war, Italians had been dragged unwilling into it by Mussolini and had soon 55

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become its victims. The Italians were ‘brava gente’ (‘nice folks’) who hated Mussolini, while the Germans loved Hitler and were condemned en bloc as ‘hideous Teutons.’ Historians now suggest that the idea of the quintessentially goodhearted Italian, the ‘italiani brava gente’ (henceforth brava gente), was a mythology fashioned for historical, political, and diplomatic reasons between the armistice of 8 September 1943 and the fairly benevolent peace treaty Italy signed with the Allies in September 1947. The transformation of the Italian as brava gente victimized by the war was, as Filippo Focardi has suggested, the result first and foremost of the ‘fundamental and legitimate effort by the anti-Fascist governing class    to avoid a punitive peace treaty against its own country.’1 In this mythology the bad guy was exclusively the German soldier or the occasional, gung-ho Fascist. As the counterpart of bad Germans, the nice Italian soldiers were the ‘good Samaritans who, plunged into a crazy war against their will, fraternized with the peoples of the countries invaded by Mussolini, aided these people in time of hunger and misery and, above all, protected them from the violence of the Germans, thus saving many lives, including thousands of Jews.’2 The brava gente myth was embraced by Italians and accepted by the Allies who saw no concrete advantage in the pursuit of justice and the further destabilization of an ally they feared might change sides. The brava gente idea was contested by many former victims of Italian colonialism and aggression. Libyans, Ethiopians, Albanians, Greeks, and Yugoslavians all demanded trials against Italian troops and their commanders, but to no avail. The final outcome ultimately frustrated all the former nations victimized by the Italian military. Historian Marco Battini remarks that ‘none of the 1,200 Italians accused of war crimes faced justice.’3 As a result of this bizarre reordering of things past and present, the Axum obelisk, pilfered by Italian Fascists from Ethiopia and taken to Rome in 1937, remained exhibited in the Italian capital until April 2005, despite a 1947 UN ruling that ordered its prompt return to the former colony. Thanks to the work of a new generation of historians, the contours of the actions of Italian soldiers during World War II are becoming clearer. Yet the way the brava gente myth was articulated in the Italian and, I would suggest, global, public sphere is still unclear. Just like the permanence of the Axum Obelisk in Rome, this peculiar memorialization of World War II has lasted a long time and gone spectacularly unquestioned as the success of Mediterraneo demonstrates. The explanation of the Italian ‘selective memory’ vis a vis the behavior of her soldiers until

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the armistice does point to what colonial historian Nicola Labanca has called the ‘triple silence’ of politicians, historians, and public opinion.4 This thunderous silence of both experts and ordinary people, which the popularity of the nice Italians of Mediterraneo echoes, ultimately implicates cinema. Most people do not learn history from history books but from other forms of public and private articulation of memories of past events. In activating and sustaining this process of forgetting that led to the rather uncritical inscription of the Italian soldier during World War II as either a hero or a victim, the role of Italian cinema has been pivotal. I maintain, in fact, that Mediterraneo both continues and reshapes a mythology that has been in place since neorealismo and Italian cinema of the immediate postwar. The link between the film and neorealismo has been noted by others. ‘Buried in Mediterraneo,’ film critic Millicent Marcus has suggested, is a ‘history of postwar Italian cinema, with allusions to neorealismo and commedia all’italiana.’5 But neorealismo, I contend, was an esthetics loaded with a selective memory of the war. Neorealist cinema was also about the brava gente mythology that Mediterraneo reenacts. This should not surprise us as this film esthetics, or ethics according to the provocative suggestion of Lino Micciché, was also about rebuilding a new sense of Italian-ness (‘italianità’) after the fascist debacle.6 When, after the war, Italian intellectuals, and among them filmmakers, launched a second founding of Italian national identity, they envisioned cinema as having a key role in this process. Until then, Italian intellectuals had been afflicted by their ‘isolation’ (‘separatezza’) from the masses.7 The tragic 1922 collapse of the Liberal state that had emerged from national reunification (the Risorgimento) and the catastrophic rise of Fascism demonstrated the fragility of national identity based on nineteenth-century ideals and culture. Italians needed a new, progressive, ethos that could unite them from north to south on more democratic principles. In the creation of this new progressive national culture directed to both elites and masses, the popular, democratic, and accessible seventh art was to play a key role. ‘Until today,’ director Alberto Lattuada wrote in 1954, ‘intellectuals had no loudspeaker; cinema has given them that,    [cinema] really offers the means to meld and fuse the masses and the intellectuals.’8 An attempt to recreate a progressive national and popular cinema that could engage the masses and the reality of the new nation, neorealismo wanted to participate in the construction of a new Italy via the establishment of a truer and more inclusive image of a nation that would go beyond the sugarcoated, or manipulated, images of Fascist

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cinema. Realism, wrote Lattuada, was the key to engage the people by offering them an image of ‘themselves with their problems and the issues that deeply engage them.’9 While not particularly popular at the box office, neorealist films were enormously influential in Italy. And not only there; neorealismo was soon to become one of the pivotal film styles of global postwar cinema, the most successful Italian cultural export of the early postwar period. For 6 consecutive years, from 1946 to 1951, Italian neorealist films won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Foreign Film. ‘Italian cinema has constituted the most important artistic phenomenon of the post World War Two world,’ affirmed Giuseppe De Santis, the most popular of the neorealist directors, in Filmcritica.10 It was a rambunctious statement, but almost entirely true. As a matter of fact, Open City was more successful in New York, where the film remained on the program for a year and a half, than in Milan, where it remained on the ‘cartellone’ for a mere 15 days. While distancing itself from what critic Guido Aristarco called the ‘rhetoric of the flag’ and the Italian films that tried to uncritically celebrate Italian military heroism, neorealismo did not challenge the blossoming brava gente mythology. The new quality films coming out of Italy produced an image of the Italian as Resistance fighter or as famished, rural or urban, proletarian. Partisans abound in Giuseppe De Santis’s Caccia Tragica (1945), Carlo Lizzani’s Achtung! Banditi (1951), or Roberto Rossellini’s Open City (1945) and Paisà (1946), though there are no German Resistance fighters in Rossellini’s third installment of his war triptych, Germany, Year Zero (1947), where the German population is seen as steeped in material and moral decay. It was in many cases a programmatic choice, the attempt to make the Resistance the founding narrative of the Republic. In an unpublished lecture he gave in the late 1980s at Purdue University, neorealist director and communist intellectual Giuseppe De Santis argued that neorealismo had no fathers but only ‘a great mother, the Resistance.’11 In much of neorealist cinema the image of the Resistance was not just connected to the image of the ordinary Italian as anti-Mussolini fighter but to the downplaying of its antithesis, the ordinary Italian as Fascist. Fascism was depicted as a regime supported only by a socially defined minority. Thus, De Santis wrote, neorealismo wanted to represent ‘the streets of Italy filled with the partisans, the veterans, the homeless, the unemployed, the workers struggling for their future, and [  ] the widows and all those who suffered the most.’12 The partisan, the famished Italian, and the war veteran were thus placed on the same continuum of nonparticipation with the regime.

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De Santis’s long list encompasses some of the staple characters of neorealist films: from the people who took arms against Fascism (the partisan) to those who had, at some point, taken arms to uphold its goals (the veteran). The victimization of Italians was often obtained by blurring this meaningful difference hidden in a recent past. Neorealist films are frequently inhabited by victims without a past insofar as they are children (The Bicycle Thief, Shoeshine), or adult males without either memory or a history referred to in the movie. We are not told what Umberto D did during the ‘Ventennio’; or what Ernesto (Amadeo Nazzari), the veteran of Lattuada’s Il bandito, did in the Italian army before 1943; nor does The Bicycle Thief tell us if Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) had ever applauded the Duce in Piazza Venezia. Mediterraneo is in direct conversation with the great Italian films informed by the neorealist project. Millicent Marcus has correctly seen Mediterraneo as a sort of ‘rewriting of Paisà.’13 Hollywood studios recognized this linkage and, after Mediterraneo received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Salvatores was immediately offered the remake of a neorealist classic, Miracle in Milan (1951) by Vittorio De Sica.14 Mediterraneo’s visual repertory of Italian soldiers as external to the history and actions of Italian Fascism is part of the lesson of neorealismo as much as the film’s focus on ordinary soldiers and its explicit contraposition of the nice Italians to the cruel Germans. As well, the film’s conspicuous international success is due in part to the legacy of neorealismo. By establishing the brava gente myth as part of an international cinematic mythology, neorealismo made it possible for the past of Mediterraneo’s soccer players to remain unquestioned in not only the national, but also the international, arena, where the film garnered an impressive box office and prestigious awards. The Italian soldiers lost at sea were, so to speak, old acquaintances, a staple of world cinema.

Permanent tourists: The cinema of brava gente and Gabriele Salvatores’s Mediterraneo (1991) Watching Mediterraneo means immersing oneself in an exotic place peopled by beautiful, engaging, characters. The beauty of the film’s early 1990s location in the Greek island of Kastelorizo (a.k.a. Meghisti) both conceals and reveals the scenery of hunger and devastation that would have characterized the place in the early 1940s. Bathed in the light of the luminous Greek sun and reflected in the turquoise Mediterranean, the landscape seems heavenly. Look closer, though, and the deep focus of the shot reveals a background of ruins that dates to Axis bombings

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during the war. Beginning in 1941 with disastrous results for the Italian Army, the occupation of Greece was finally completed through the intervention of the Germans, who propelled the Axis into complete control of the peninsula in April 1941. Greece was then divided into three zones under the respective control of Germans, Bulgarians, and Italians. There is no evidence that the Italians were particularly humane occupiers. Instead, in the aftermath of the conflict all Greek factions gathered in the Hellenic National Office for War Criminals were ready to point out that the burning of villages, the shooting of civilians, the rapes, and the execution of andartes (Greek partisans) were a common feature of the 29-month-long Italian occupation of two-thirds of the nation. In addition, Italians promoted the coercive Italianization of the Ionian islands, created a concentration camp at Larissa, and encouraged ethnic war by enrolling ethnic Albanians, Slavs, and Valachians in special antipartisan units under the command of Italian officers. The partisans’ struggle was widespread and effective, its repression brutal. Interrogation techniques often employed torture and enormous cruelty. For example, once apprehended by the Italians, the Greek partisan Commander Sinanoglou was viciously tortured for 7 days before execution.15 In the words of historian Luisa Santarelli, the result was that ‘thousands and thousands of pages would be needed to describe the grave infractions of international humanitarian law for which the [Italian] Royal army was responsible from 1941 to 1943.’16 Little of this violence transpires in Mediterraneo. In the introduction to the published version of his screenplay, Enzo Monteleone writes that in preparing to write the treatment for the film, he drew inspiration from Renzo Biasion’s 1949 autobiographical collection of novellas Sagapò, an empathic portrayal of the Italian troops in Greece. The screenwriter was also aware of ‘L’armata s’agapò,’ critic and filmmaker Renzo Renzi’s suggestion for a film on the Italian campaign in Greece that became a cause celèbre in postwar Italian culture.17 Renzi, a former officer of the Italian army in Greece, proposed the film in an essay he wrote in February 1953 for the left-leaning magazine Cinema nuovo. The idea of the film was a criticism of the current wave of pictures celebrating Italian military valor, an endorsement of neorealismo, and an attempt to introduce a degree of historical veracity in the representation of the Army. Renzi argued that the premises of the patriotic films à la Carica eroica (1952) by Francesco De Robertis about the Italian invasion of Russia in 1941 were untenable. Carica eroica depicted the heroism of Italian cavalry in the Russian campaign and thus missed the opportunity to tell the story of a ‘useless sacrifice for the wrong cause.’ Renzi tried to confirm

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the neorealist brava gente myth of the Italian soldiers as victims of Fascist upper echelons, while attenuating some of its premises. Overall, Italian soldiers were poor fellows caught in the vagaries of a history they could not control or resist. Yet not all military deaths are equally heroic, he wrote, lest we come to embrace a ‘mythology of military heroism    as an action good per se, in all situations, regardless of the idea it serves, be that even an imperialist tyranny.’18 His idea for a script also maintained that Italian soldiers retained some degree of responsibility and accountability for the deeds. The title of the proposed movie takes its drift from the British propaganda that had disparagingly depicted the Italian army in Greece as ridiculous, inefficient, and less interested in war than in mercenary sex with the local women (in Greek agapein means to make love). This said, it is fair to add that Renzi’s criticism of the Italian military was rather moderate. In his A Foreign Affair (1948), Billy Wilder had already suggested that the same-sex-based trade occurred between American GIs and Berlin women. Few years later, in 1960, another Hollywood refugee, Gottfried Reinhardt, would show other members of the ‘greatest generation’ as rapists in his underappreciated Town without Pity (1961). Yet ‘S’agapò’ would have been a step in the direction of showing the Italian army in realistic terms, outside the nationalist rhetoric. If realized, the film would have been ‘a condemnation of war and a fraternal act toward the Greeks, to whom we are very indebted.’ It would have shown ill-trained and ill-equipped Italian soldiers who traded bread for bed and did not shy away from shooting andartes.19 The year 1953 was not, however, a propitious one even for this kind of argument. The brava gente mythology had already been set in place and had resulted in Italy’s exemption from war trials for crimes committed against civilian populations in Ethiopia and the Balkans. Not surprisingly, not only did the proposal of Renzi fall flat, but he and the editor of Cinema Nuovo, communist film critic Guido Aristarco, were also tried and sentenced respectively to 7 and 6 months in a military jail. The suspended prison sentence meted out to Renzi and Aristarco was protested by many Italian intellectuals. Even those who did not agree with Renzi’s premises rightly saw it as a direct attack on the freedom of expression and as evidence of Italian military’s excessive power. Yet the idea for a film on Italian misbehavior was not picked up again even when it could have been much less risky to pursue. When Italian soldiers resurfaced in postwar Italian cinema, they were not likely to shoot hostages or rape women. More than anything else, Italian soldiers were nice and slightly confused fellows like Alberto Sordi and Serge Reggiani

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in Luigi Comencini’s Tutti a casa (1960). Neorealismo never came close to offering even the moderate criticism of Italy’s war that Renzi had proposed. Censorship may have had something to do with it but we should not unduly overemphasize it. It is telling that when in 1956 neorealist critics Massimo Mida and Gianni Vento listed the unrealized films that, if made, would have ‘enriched the genre of neorealismo,’ ‘S’agapò’ is not mentioned, and the ones that deal with the Italian military are L’eroe di Palidoro, a treatment by Renato Castelani about the martyrdom of the anti-Fascist carabineer Salvo D’Acquisto, and La strage di Cefalonia, the treatment by Alfredo Giannetti and Salvatore Laurani about the massacre of the Acqui Division on the Greek island of Cephallonia at the hands of the Wehrmacht after the 1943 armistice. According to Mida and Vento the treatment about Cephallonia was an example of how ‘to show the true face of the war and the true heroism of the Italian soldier’ and was almost made by a Hollywood studio.20 Symptomatically, one of the clearest enunciations of the brava gente mythology can be found in a film of one of the stalwart neorealist directors, Giuseppe De Santis, who directed Attack and Retreat in 1965. The film is in part a retelling of Carica Eroica, though told from the point of view of the lowly infantrymen rather than that of elite cavalry officers. This time around, the director, a member of Italian Communist Party’s Cultural Commission, was able to secure the financial help of both the Americans (who supplied capital and some of the key actors) and the Soviets (who provided locations, logistical support, and thousands of extras). The film tells again the story of the invasion of Soviet Russia that Mussolini ordered in 1941 along with Hitler. The brava gente myth is here cast as tragedy rather than comedy. The Italian soldiers, among whom we can spot a very young and effective Peter Falk as an Italian doctor who cures a wounded Soviet partisan, all die in the end, most of them professing their love for humanity, Italy, and the Russians. In the early 1990s when Enzo Monteleone set about writing the script, he had, then, several options. He could go further in the direction of Renzi’s essay, debunk the mythology of the brava gente, and realistically portray the Italian troops. Or, he could continue in the direction taken by Italian cinema since neorealismo and portray Italians as innocent victims of a war they did not understand. Monteleone’s original treatment not only contains some of the elements of the brava gente mythology, but also points in the direction of a more realistic portrayal of the Greek campaign. Indeed, the treatment is notably more indebted than the movie to Renzi’s proposal. More a tragedy than a comedy, like Renzi’s idea for a film, the treatment does not begin in

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Greece but during the Italian invasion of Albania in 1940. The soldiers are special Alpine troops, ill-fed and ill-equipped in the midst of a winter snowstorm. Ordered to attack a monastery, they refuse to shoot at the unarmed Albanian refugees who run out of the building. The sequence is constructed on the division between ordinary soldiers and fanatic, Fascist blackshirts. ‘Shoot! Shoot!’ the blackshirts call out, but the Alpines let children and refugees escape to safety. The treatment then cuts to June 1941 when a platoon of these same Alpines are aboard an Italian destroyer taking them to a Greek island from where they are supposed to ‘observe and report enemy movements.’ The brava gente dichotomy is hinted at, this time to make the Alpines different from the Germans. We are told that the island has known the brunt of German occupation before the Italians arrive. In return for the killing of two soldiers, the Germans have killed twenty locals. Yet in the treatment not all Italian soldiers are nice. Among them is Sergeant Maffei, ‘an all-around soldier, a true Fascist who believes in the war and who hopes to make a career out of it, a little too exuberant though, and thus not fit for front line combat.’21 Had he reached the screen, Maffei would have been a departure from the classic brava gente narrative. A soldier, not a Fascist blackshirt or a Hun, Maffei is a monster who would have taken the film squarely into the arena of tragedy rather than comedy. When in June 1945 the Hellenic National Office for War Criminals began gathering material about the crimes perpetrated by the Axis occupants from April 1941 to October 1944, they documented numerous instances of violence against civilians, including the burning of villages, the shooting of hostages, and the rape of local women by Italian regular troops.22 Monteleone’s treatment does not completely ignore this historical record. The Italian army is run through violent disciplinary measures. When one of the Italian soldiers accidentally destroys the radio, Sergeant Maffei punishes him by tying him to a post under the hot, scalding, summer sun. More importantly, at this stage of the film’s production, Sergeant Maffei is a rapist. His crime – the rape of the 12-year-old daughter of a local prostitute – is the centerpiece of the treatment and shown in uncompromising terms, though somewhat neutralized by the prompt reaction of the Italian commanding officer who swiftly shoots and kills him.23 Rejecting the ‘bad German/nice Italian’ dichotomy, the initial blueprint for the film also included the image of a German U-Boat arriving on the Greek island at the end of the war. Like the Italians, the Germans are tired of the war and prefer soccer to fighting. At the end, an American cruiser takes home both the Italians

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and the Germans. Rather than a mythological, essentialist, insurmountable ‘cultural diversity’ – to use Homi Bhabha’s terminology – between the two peoples, the treatment prefers to enforce history, as the Germans are considered POWs and kept in the holds of the ship while the Italian troops, cobelligerents after the armistice, are allowed to remain on the deck.24 Interestingly, however, none of this makes it to the final cut of Mediterraneo, which is, instead, completely centered on the brava gente and the nice Italian/bad German myth. Interviewed a decade after the release of the film, Salvatores went on record mixing Italians and Greeks, aggressors and victims, in a vaguely Braudelian landscape untouched by the World War: ‘What happened was everyday life: that is, Italian fishermen and peasants met Greek fishermen and peasants and they recognized themselves as being the same: the flavors were the same, the way of life was the same. It is not by chance that the film is titled Mediterraneo.’25 The most radical change concerns Sergeant Maffei. The brute is turned into Sergeant Lorusso, a jovial, if bearish, veteran of the Italian campaign in Ethiopia, who rather than being a Fascist is actually a ‘compagno’ (a ‘comrade’), a Communist Party militant who is unwilling to go ‘against the will of the majority,’ and may even wind up in a gay romantic liaison with one of the other soldiers. The positive role of the character is made explicit by casting Diego Abbatantuono, one of the most popular actors of his generation and the star of most films by Salvatores, as the sergeant. His character fits in with the rest of the group. There are no gung-ho, willing executioners here. The soldiers of the film are a ‘platoon of conscripted’ whose past, like the past of many of the characters of neorealismo, is only hinted at and no longer known. With the reference to the Albanian campaign deleted, the film begins on the Aegean Sea, where the off-screen voice of the gracious, brainy, commanding officer Montini (Claudio Bigagli) describes his platoon as ‘a group of men taken from everywhere, survivors of lost battles, and the remnants of dismantled regiments.’ The Italians are now a good-natured set of people happily mingling with the locals. Gone is the rape, erased and/or transformed into something else. Gender and nationalist biases intermingle here. Two of the soldiers of the film, the brothers Libero and Felice Munaron (Memo Dini and Vasco Mirandola), initiate a threesome with a very willing, good-looking, and unnamed shepherdess (Irene Grazioli, ‘pastorella’ in the credits). Another soldier (Corrado Noventa) initiates a liaison with a local married woman who, heartbroken, tenderly embraces him as the soldier leaves the island and her Greek husband returns.

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Rephrasing the function of the rape from the treatment, the film inverts its roles and its meaning. At the 1953 military trial against Renzi and Aristarco, the lawyer for the army, General Mario Solinas, rejected Renzi’s accusation of Italian soldiers’ exchanging bread for sex with local women. General Solinas argued that this could not be. Greek women were sluts and their promiscuous ways, he argued, derived not from poverty but loose morals: ‘not poverty, but habit and natural inclination toward vice persuaded many Greek women to give themselves [to Italian soldiers].’26 Renzi had apparently ignored the evidence, hidden in plain view, of Greek women’s recklessness. The theme of Greek excessive sensuality was common in the Italian memoirs of the campaign in Greece, even the one closest to neorealist circles. Renzo Biasion, a realist painter and the author of the autobiographical novel about Italian soldiers in Greece that inspired Monteleone, gives a portrait of Greek women as prostitutes by calling rather than necessity. In Biasion’s Sagapò, the beautiful prostitute Ketty is ‘tormented by continuous, frenzied lust, and gave herself passionately to the soldiers who attracted her, and they all attracted her in turn.’ When alone with the young pageboy in the brothel’s employ, Ketty hardly ever speaks to him, but ‘when lust came over her and there were no men in the house she would pull him to her and fondle him; afterwards she would push him off with a grimace.’27 Salvatores’s film reintroduced the ‘Ketty’ motif that Renzi had pointedly downplayed. One morning Lorusso is surprised by the visit of a beautiful Greek woman, Vassilissa (Vanna Barba), who asks him for his permission to practice the oldest profession for her own benefit and that of the Italian troops. Lorusso accepts and Vassilissa is immediately in business. In Mediterraneo, it is, symptomatically, the Italian man who comes close to being raped by the Greek woman. Amidst the hilarity of the platoon, the ‘diminutive Farina’ (Giuseppe Cederna), a short, shy, romantic, Italian soldier, confesses his desire to lose his virginity only to a woman who really loves him. Once he has fallen for Vassilissa, Farina refuses to make use of her services as she would be doing it only for money. Eventually, his reticence is overcome by the woman’s enthusiasm. She openly courts him, and even exhibits herself to him during a soccer game. Then she initiates Farina to sex by abruptly kissing him. Rather than the victim of rape, the Greek woman thus becomes the temptress of the timid Italian soldier. An entire history of sexual crimes committed against the Greek civilian population by Italian troops becomes romantic consensual sex. Vassilissa invites sexual violation. It is she who entices the innocent soldier. The warrior is not the rapist

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but the reformer of the Greek woman’s loose morals. With a gun, he protects her from the advances of the other soldiers; finally, after falling for the kind Farina, Vassilissa willingly mends her ways and becomes an innkeeper. As the Italians become better and closer to the brava gente model, the humanized Germans of the original treatment disappear. The treatment had curiously made Italians and Germans equivalent by having them both in the island and by representing them both as war weary, happy to finally play some soccer. The film, however, reestablishes the central tenet of the brava gente dichotomy. The German U-boat disappears, and Germany is only present in the film as a horrible memory, the counterpoint of the Italians’ peaceful and loving conquest of the island. Upon its release, Mediterraneo was well received by critics from opposite political fronts and won the ‘Italian Oscar,’ the Donatello Award for Best Picture, in 1991. Oftentimes, reviewers cast the film as a metaphor of the conditions of modern-day Italy in the dusky hours of the First Republic.28 To a degree this was appropriate. As Rosalind Galt has noted, the film tells its story from the perspective of the extreme disillusionment that accompanied the bribery scandals (the ‘Tangentopoli’) of the late 1980s.29 The film opens with a citation from Henry Laborit’s Éloge de la fuite (1976) praising the act of escaping as ‘the only way to remain alive and continue to dream.’ Many commented on Farina’s decision not to go back to Italy to remain close to Vassilissa and saw the character’s choice as a rejection of Italian postwar corruption. And yet the escape the film’s authors practiced and that its critics condoned was not from Italy but, rather, from Italian historical responsibilities. Projected onto the Italian present, Italian and Greek history during the war was once again denied recognition. Ordinary Italian moviegoers seemed not to mind. The Centro Culturale San Fedele, a cinéclub in Milan, polled the audience at the projection of the film. A famous Jesuit film club with a progressive leaning, San Fedele attracts both a moderate and a progressive audience with an above-average education. Many spectators seemed to enjoy the ‘presentist’ reading of the film as a polemic against the flaws of the Italian First Republic and the contemporary first Iraqi war. Spectator Mario Piatti noted, for example, the ‘obvious references to the most recent events.’ Grazia Schiavoni remarked that it was a ‘war film where (at least there, for godsake) nobody is fighting any war.’ Lidia Ranzini, a teacher, confessed her own desire to abandon Italy ‘that demands so much and gives back so little.’ San Fedele’s spectators also saw the film as a meditation on Italian national identity as reflected in history.

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A CEO, Ugo Pedaci, remarked on the film’s ability to define exhaustively italianità, ‘the art of coping, the absence of organization and of means, the regionalism, the humanism, the attitude toward food, woman, and soccer   ’ Many noted that the film soothed and confirmed their own memories of the war or the tales of those in their family who participated in it. Homemaker Tina Lazzaroni saw the film as vindicating the memory of the war passed on to her by her father, and Carlo Costadoni saw in the film a confirmation of his brother’s retelling of his own experience as a medic in the Greek campaign, where the ‘Italian army was made overall by anti-heroes    convinced that the Axis was bound to lose the war anyway.’ If anything was wrong with the portrait of the Italian army it was the film’s excessive emphasis on the Italian soldiers’ lack of skills, as noted by Mariateresa Scarlini, one of the few spectators to judge the film only ‘average.’30 The almost universal approval of Mediterraneo is one more sign of the film’s linkage to neorealismo – a film movement made up of progressives that, after the initial opposition of conservative and Catholic critics, was welcomed by most Italian intelligentsia and ordinary citizens. Like Neorealist films, Mediterraneo also did extremely well in the United States. Mediterraneo was chosen as the Italian official entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, which it won, beating Yimou Zhang’s Raise the Red Lantern (1991), and recorded the best box office ever for an Italian film. The victory raised some eyebrows especially because of what many critics saw as the obviously superior quality of Yimou’s somber masterpiece. The Washington Post called the film a ‘schmaltzy island fantasy,’31 and Film Journal considered the film a ‘clichéd number’ and noted that the Oscar nod was one more example that Academy members liked ‘foreigners who act cute and talk funny.’32 Yet many American critics praised the film. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby called it ‘cannily constructed.’ ‘Endearingly good natured film,’ chimed in the New York Post.33 Like Film Journal, the most cunning of critics noted that the film continued an established tradition of Italian film and of representation of Italians as cute, fundamentally innocent, buffoons. Christian Science Monitor directly connected Mediterraneo with neorealismo. The film was evidence that ‘the neorealist spirit has never quite vanished,’ the Monitor argued. ‘What links Mediterraneo with the neorealist tradition is its keen interest in the most ordinary people, and its willingness to spin an uncomplicated yarn that stresses character over action.’34 Possibly the connections with neorealismo are even deeper than motifs, characters, and historical settings, and center on the film’s rephrasing

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of the brava gente myth. Like neorealist films, Mediterraneo is about the process of using the experience of the war to reestablish Italian identity. Neorealismo tried to resituate italianità on the Resistance after ultimately discarding the Risorgimento. Like its neorealist ‘cinematic fathers,’ Salvatores’s film is aware of the impossibility of going back to the Risorgimento as the foundational myth of Italian-ness. As Millicent Marcus has remarked, the film makes this rejection conspicuous by naming the beloved donkey of Strazzabosco (Luigi Alberti), Garibaldi, the hero of national unification.35 If Risorgimento is a donkey, on which ideals can we refound Italy? Neorealists thought that the Resistance would be the new, democratic, and popular Risorgimento. Mediterraneo has no such hope: the film’s epitaph, ‘to those Italians who are on their way to escape,’ indicates that that project also failed. The new Italy born out of the Resistance has been unable to accomplish anything: ‘They let us change nothing,’ Lorusso tells Montini in the last scene of the film, when the veterans, now old men, meet again on the island they are revisiting as tourists. Critics have suggested that the new identity the film proposes is postnational, ‘pan-Mediterranean.’ It is a provocative thesis, but I am afraid that the film is not as courageous. This supposedly panMediterranean identity curiously winds up excluding non-European, Mediterranean nations. Mediterraneo depicts Aziz, a Turkish trader, as a weasel who salutes the Italians invoking just this pan-Mediterranean identity (‘Italians and Turks: one face, one race’) only to rob the soldiers of all their possessions. More importantly, the invocation of an alleged commonality between Italians and Greeks in the historical context of the Italian World War II invasion smacks of a desire for exoneration rather than association. The real history that the film ignores would highlight that the associates of the Italians in Greece were not Greeks, but Nazis. The myth on which the film wants to reestablish italianità is not a vaguely defined and curiously incomplete pan-Mediterraneanism, but that of the ahistorical innocence of Italians, the brava gente mythology. Shorn of the neorealist characters of the partisan and the evil Fascist that with all their limitations pointed to the urgent necessity for change and transformation, the film leaves us with that of the unable-to-do-evil Italian. And it is just this essentialized characteristic that explains the possibility that the film posits for Italians to escape, to travel the world – a central theme of Salvatores’s cinema. Ultimately these good-hearted Italian soldiers are vacationers, just as the scene with which I began this chapter suggests. And, appropriately enough, the film ends with Lt Montini coming back to the island as a tourist. A good

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man never invades a country: he just visits it. Victims of circumstances, be it the war or the historically unexplained flaws of the Italian First Republic, Italians can either accept these circumstances (after all, not all of the former soldiers go back to Greece), or dodge them by becoming permanent travelers – in the case of Mediterraneo – in those very places they helped to ravage. After all, everybody loves Italians.

6 Safe Conduct: A Tribute to The French Film Industry During the Second World War Diane Afoumado

Safe Conduct (Laissez-passer), dedicated to all those who lived through the occupation, opens with an RAF bombing raid on Boulogne, where Jean Devaivre and his wife, Simone, are rushing to a nursery to collect their son. It is 3 March 1942 and Tavernier sets this opening within the French context: occupied by the Germans and bombed by the British. The film is based on the memoirs of Jean Devaivre1 (played in the film by Jacques Gamblin) and on the book by Jean Aurenche (Denis Podalydes).2 Tavernier’s movie is a chronicle of the French film industry during the German Occupation of France, and Tavernier depicts the slow but inevitable fall of the French movie industry into the German net and the everyday consequences for French filmmakers. This ambitious film features two main historical characters, Jean Devaivre and Jean Aurenche, who in real life never met. After the war, Jean Aurenche was Tavernier’s long-time collaborator, and this is probably why Tavernier decided to tell his story in parallel with Jean Devaivre’s. The movie’s central question deals with the struggle against the German Occupier in order to maintain French identity framed within the context of Resistance. Through the involvement of these two men, Tavernier raises the question of several possible facets of Resistance, passive resistance represented by Jean Aurenche versus the discrete, but active, involvement of Jean Devaivre who, while he never fights with the gun, chooses to resist in his own way. Tavernier’s challenge is to raise the central question of ideology and choice during the Occupation. The two characters are very different but they both try to survive the War. Tavernier describes the accommodations of the French film industry and considers these actions as part of the resistance to the Germans. Through short scenes, Tavernier pays tribute to the industry he venerates for having been able to continue through the war years 70

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and for having created some of the masterpieces of French cinema. Throughout the film, the characters are confronted with choices, choices which appear as the third character of the movie. In the first section of this chapter we frame the context of filmmaking under the Occupation and the delicate question of Collaboration at several levels. In the second section, we explore the opposition of the two aspects of Resistance described by Tavernier through his main characters and the central question of choice, and in the last section, we analyse Tavernier’s movie in the larger context of movie history in order to show that this film could not have been made at any previous time.

The collaboration landscape The German control on French movie industry The Propaganda Abteilung in France was officially created on 18 July 1940. A German decree dated 9 September 1940 declared that no film could be presented without the agreement of the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich.3 Control of French movie industry also took the form of economic colonization as the Germans imposed their own film format (16 mm) instead of the French 9,5 mm and 17,5 mm formats;4 in October 1940, further legislation forbade the distribution of AngloAmerican movies as well as some French productions, and filmmaking almost ceased. However, the Germans wanted Paris to be a city that embodied collaboration, and the movie industry was intended to be part of this plan. Under the auspices of the Propaganda Abteilung and the Referat Film led by Dr Dietrich,5 the Germans took control of the entire French movie world. The Propaganda Abteilung was part of the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich, which was itself a branch of the Ministry of Information and Propaganda. In other words, through this complex but efficient organization Joseph Goebbels now had control of the French film industry,6 but they never intended to use it to develop Nazi propaganda.7 Nevertheless, one of the first goals of the Germans was to ‘purify’ French films and to liquidate French movie heritage in order to make room for German movie productions.8 In November 1940, a special evening was organized at Le Paris which gathered the most famous names of French cinema9 together with key German personnel – Drs Dietrich and Hoffleger of the Propaganda Abteilung; the director of Continental, Alfred Greven (played in the film by Christian Berkel); Ehrt, director of UFA, and Haller and Langescheit,

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directors of the German distribution company in France, Tobis-Film.10 Little by little, the movie industry was falling into German hands without French audiences apparently realizing it. After the Armistice, the French had gradually found their way back to the movie theatres as if nothing had changed. For most, cinema was, like other entertainments, a way of forgetting daily life11 – the lack of food, the bombings, fuel shortages for heating and cooking, and the continual presence of the Occupier. In winter, the movie theatre was a place where one could at least feel warm if only for an hour or two. If, for most French men and women, cinema had not apparently changed, behind the scenes the industry was in fact controlled by the Germans. In December 1940, the Vichy Government created the Centre d’organisation de l’industrie cinématographique (COIC), whose purpose was to attempt to slow German control. This body, however, depended on the Referat Film, so in reality actually contributed to German control of the movie industry through a French structure.12 Only French actors, producers, filmmakers, screenwriters and distributors were aware of this and this is what Tavernier shows in Safe Conduct. In this new architecture, the role of Continental-Film was central. Contrary to popular belief, it was a French company, employing French people, but like several other companies13 was financed by German capital. This situation meant that Continental did not depend on the Vichy authorities, but on Joseph Goebbels. Created on 3 October 1940, it finally located at 104 Avenue des Champs-Elysées.14 Continental’s capital quickly rose from a million francs to 2 billion by 1 December 1941,15 but Continental produced only 30 films, less than one-seventh of French wartime production.16 Working for Continental meant that it was, in some ways, possible to send messages as long as they were not obviously anti-German. Because it was impossible to openly resist by criticizing the political and military situation in France, some screenwriters choose to criticize the regime and the Occupation by making historical films and transposing their oppositional point of view into the past. This course of action clearly appears in Tavernier’s movie. Lara, Bost, and Aurenche make this choice. During the Second World War, many films dealt with historical topics in order to send a political message to the audience as a way of avoiding censorship.17 In a scene which takes place at a lunch, Jean Aurenche supports the idea of continuing to make films, and above all, historical films, through which screenwriters could send messages of resistance which would have been censured in any other genre. In fact, historical films made during this time are anything but neutral, although

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they cannot truly be considered as acts of resistance. All the questions raised in Tavernier’s movie reside in the fact that he sometimes confuses resistance and opposition. Opposition to Occupation did not necessarily mean resisting it. Even if some screenwriters did send messages to mark their opposition to the German presence, contrary to what Tavernier intends to suggest, this is at a less important level than an act of resistance.18 Nevertheless, from this moment, the dilemma for people in the movie industry would be to choose between working for the Germans, trying to resist in different ways, or leaving France. This question is the frame of Tavernier’s movie. The collaboration of the movie world The actions of some famous actors during the Second World War are also part of the central question of choice in Safe Conduct. How should actors have behaved during the 5 years of Occupation? Should they have decided not to work? Work for Continental under German control? Should they leave France and live in exile waiting for better times?19 Many actors and others who worked in the industry before the war did not find work after Liberation because they had chosen to work for the Germans. In this regard, the propaganda trip organized in March 1942 by Carl Froelich, president of the Reichsfilmkammer, which brought famous French actors to Germany, was to be a real disaster in terms of the image of French cinema.20 This example illustrates the limit between active collaboration and surviving the Occupation. The French Police as an illustration of Collaboration Tavernier sometimes deals with polemical issues such as the role of the police during the war. When a police officer discovers two leaflets carried by Devaivre’s brother-in-law, Jacques Dubuis (Olivier Braun), and gives them to the German soldier, this shows obvious collaboration with the Occupier, but the question of choice is central in this scene. The officer could have pretended he had not seen anything and let Dubuis go. But this moment clearly shows the choice made by some French police representatives to collaborate with the Germans and, even for some of them, to be zealous in that collaboration.21 At this very moment, the story of Jacques Dubuis seems to be anecdotal, but it reveals all its power when we eventually learn that Devraivre’s brother-in-law later died in a German prison. The only remaining trace of him is a small role in a film directed by Devaivre himself. In his memoir, Devaivre writes that ‘he had lost so much weight he was nicknamed “string” ’.22 After this short scene, we forget about

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Jacques Dubuis and he is not longer present onscreen. It is as if we, like people at that time, have left this brief moment and then skip to something else because life continues with all its daily difficulties. But Tavernier brings back Devraivre’s brother-in-law to our memory, including the shot of Jean Dubuis in his movie which shows that the short life of the activist was even shorter in the film industry. The symbol is quite powerful because without this scene, no picture of Jean Dubuis would have ever existed.

How to resist? The passive resistance of Jean Aurenche In Safe Conduct, Tavernier offers many ways to oppose and to resist the Occupier. Basically, however, his film presents two different choices made by the two main characters. Tavernier shows active involvement symbolized by Devaivre versus the passive behaviour of Aurenche, who simply does not want to have anything to do with the Germans. Jean Aurenche firmly refuses to work for Continental, ‘Seeing Paris occupied hurt me, but I did not engage in the Resistance. Maybe because of a lack of courage   ’.23 His main purpose is to avoid working for the Germans, rather than to get involved with the Underground. On several occasions in Safe Conduct, he has the possibility – if not the economic necessity – of working for Continental, but he does everything possible to refuse. While having lunch with Greven, he lies, saying he cannot work for Continental because he has signed other contracts that have engaged him until 1943. He would do everything to avoid working for the Germans despite threats such as the prison at Fresnes or, worse, Berlin. Aurenche represents what we can call passive resistance. Although he recognizes himself as a coward, he loves freedom and is ready to accept living a mediocre life as long as he is free. Aurenche lives under the fear of being sent to Germany as a forced labourer. In Safe Conduct, ‘[  ] Bertrand Tavernier, [  ] shows how our hero, thanks to lies, originality or impulsive inspirations smoothly succeeds in discouraging Dr. Greven, absolute master of French movie industry during the Occupation, who constantly harasses him in order to force him to work for Continental’.24 Compared to Devaivre, Jean Aurenche was not a lover of the film industry. He writes that he probably went to the theatre once or twice in Paris with his parents, who disliked cinema.25 Aurenche is a writer who is not ready to fight for any cause. He is not exactly an opportunist, nor a careerist. In Tavernier’s movie, Denis Podalydès portrays well the

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attitude of Aurenche who lived almost all his life in hotel rooms with his Soutine painting, a few books, and his tooth brush.26 Aurenche is a figure on the margins. He lives between several women, carrying his whole life in his two suitcases. Later on, he would write the famous La Traversée de Paris in which suitcases are central since they are used to carry blackmarket goods across the city. He is not the kind of person who is able to accept the system no matter what it is. Moreover, when this system means Occupation, Aurenche overreacts as if his need for freedom is endangered. He settles himself into a category which is far away from both resistance and bystanders. He is a freethinker who cannot live with strong rules. His reaction towards the Occupation has nothing to do with political Resistance. He simply does not want to work for anyone who symbolizes and personifies Occupation and a system of dictatorship. He also does not like order. In Safe Conduct, he uses a metaphor describing the disorder in the papers he is writing to say that ‘mess is sometimes preferable to order’. Despite some daring statements, Aurenche is everything but courageous. His position of refusal leads him to get into verbal battles with war profiteers during a lunch. He fights with one of the influential collaborators around the table by daring to say that he does not care to know if Max Ernst is Jewish. But at this very moment, he is drunk and his ‘courage’ is more due to alcohol than any real commitment. Active resistance without being part of the underground ( Jean Devaivre) Jean Devaivre had been a kind of Resistant since the very first hours of the war. He hid two grenades while the Armistice was being signed between France and Germany in June 1940. In a dramatic scene, Tavernier shows Devaivre taking photos of German documents. His act was not premeditated. He was in the right place at the right time and took the opportunity without asking himself any questions. Devaivre did not plan his reaction; he did not enter this German office with any idea of resistance. This scene is central in Safe Conduct because it offers proof that Devaivre was a spontaneous person who never thought about his involvement in the French Resistance. Answering the question why he did this, he simply replies, ‘if nobody does anything   ’. He appears to be a part of the Resistance without really deciding to be involved. Later on, he would write about this dangerous episode in the SD’s (Sicherheitsdienst) office: ‘I didn’t really understand what I had done. In the metro, I said to myself that I was crazy.’27 But the most incredible thing is that Devaivre never knows if these documents would have been of some use to French

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Resistance. In the movie, it seems that his only motivation lays in the hope of finding helpful information about his brother-in-law’s arrest. But above all, this non-thinking reaction is proof that Devaivre often acts spontaneously and is far from being engaged in ideological resistance. In order to reinforce this, Tavernier, using a technique from the historical movies of the 1940s, sometimes puts very short sentences into the mouths of his main characters. These sentences are more important and significant than long explanations or scenes. For example, to clearly explain that Jean Devaivre is a decidedly non-ideological opponent of Nazi Occupation, Tavernier makes him say about the Occupiers, ‘I just don’t like them here.’ Many times in Safe Conduct it is clear that Devaivre’s commitment is not ideological, nor is it premeditated. In reality, Jean Devaivre became involved in the Resistance through JeanPaul Le Chanois, who was both Jewish and a Communist. Jean Devaivre met Jean-Paul Dreyfus (who became Jean-Paul Le Chanois during the Second World War) for the first time in 1931 in the Pathé-Joinville laboratories.28 In Safe Conduct, Le Chanois asks Devaivre to carry propaganda leaflets. In his book, Devaivre underlines that resisting was definitely not a political issue for him. It was more a question of pushing the Germans out of the French territory. By carrying leaflets, he became a de facto resistant just like so many others who would never take up arms. Another difference between Aurenche and Devaivre is that the latter is married and has a baby. The family situation of the two main characters illustrates the fact that, somehow, being married and raising a child did not stop people being themselves and getting involved in dangerous actions. Logically, we would expect more direct involvement from Jean Aurenche, who is a bachelor and has no responsibilities. But Tavernier surprises the audience by opposing Aurenche’s cowardice to Devaivre’s risky choices. A situation of compromise Aurenche is determined not to work for the German firm Continental, while Devaivre accepts without signing any contract in order to avoid an official involvement with the Occupiers and without really deciding becomes a resistant who steals German documents he does not even understand. In the movie, Tavernier insists several times on the fact that Jean Devaivre avoided signing a contract with Continental. In reality, Marcel Bryau, the studio director under Bauemeister, did give a contract to Jean Devaivre. But the ink on the paper was so transparent that it was difficult to read the terms. Marcel Bryau said he would give him a better one later, but he never did, which was convenient for Devaivre’s

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desire for no official commitment with Continental.29 But this situation inspires the following sentence to Devaivre in Safe Conduct: ‘If one has to be in the wolf’s mouth, it’s better to be in between the teeth!’30 Again, this kind of short sentence is more important and significant in terms of ideology than long dialogues. They are parables. Devaivre is optimistic; he is not an idealistic person. In Safe Conduct, he says, ‘the wind will change its course one day’. For Devaivre, being patient could mean accepting work from the Germans without playing their game completely and being involved in small resistance actions. In Tavernier’s movie, Devaivre symbolizes many French people who, for several reasons, were not armed members of the Resistance, but who, in their daily life, tried to keep their dignity by not being too deeply involved in the situation. Compared to the Resistance, these reactions can be characterized more as a question of refusal than active opposition. Tavernier emphasizes that the concept of Resistance includes many options. From the glorious armed Resistance and sabotage, to discrete opposition, a simple refusal to get involved in the Occupier’s demands, all these facets are components of THE RESISTANCE. The borderline between active resistance and passive resistance was not that clear and was above all fluid. Another form of spiritual refusal/resistance is emphasized in Safe Conduct. The screenwriters were ‘storytellers’ and could send messages of opposition through dialogue. This kind of resistance was possible from inside. Compromise was the middle way chosen by the majority in order to live with the situation. But this compromise could also mean dealing for the rest of your life with a guilty conscience. As an example of this, Aurenche introduces a friend of his to Greven because he does not have a job and has to make a living. But before this scene, Aurenche insists that this means working for Continental. Tavernier avoids any kind of judgement towards people who in fact worked for the enemy. The choice of imagination as a way to resist Another form of resistance is emphasized by Tavernier: the imagination of the cinema and its ability to create in a difficult context a way of refusing the restrictions imposed by the Germans.31 This topic is constantly present in Safe Conduct thanks to several scenes showing the studio workers idling on the set and imagining every possible way of making movies. This must be seen as a tribute by Tavernier to these people who, according to him, resisted in their own way, making the French audience dream as the outside world became less and less bearable.

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Tavernier shows the set during the filming of La Main du Diable. In one scene, we see a table set with chicken and meat which are supposed to be real. But in this time of rationing, the food is made from painted rutabagas! Bertrand Tavernier asks, ‘is this imagination a beginning of resistance?’32 For him, the resourcefulness of the crew symbolizes a form of refusal to the shortages decided by Continental. Tavernier wants to prove that confronted with a lack of material, the crew resisted by creating a high-quality set for La Main du Diable. This reaction is interpreted by Tavernier as a form of resistance. Meanwhile, the topic of La Main itself is interesting because it features a notary who sells his soul to the devil. Isn’t the main subject of that movie a metaphor for what is happening under German Occupation?33 But being a Continental worker also means working for the Occupier, for the one who inflicts a racist ideology. The real dilemma lays in this very question. Safe conduct papers are distributed to most of the Continental workers. Many of them must arrive on time every day at the studios and a lot of them would be arrested when shooting went on into the night and they broke the curfew laws.34 But getting a safe conduct pass could have many advantages. One could travel safely, as does Jean Devaivre in the movie. Working for Continental and above all for Greven could therefore be an efficient cover to avoid the worst. We have again the case of Jean-Paul Le Chasnoy, who was employed by Continental. The Gestapo were after him and Greven was well aware of his case. The vision that Tavernier shares with the audience is quite particular in the landscape of today’s filmmakers.

Safe Conduct: A new kind of cinema Tavernier’s moderate vision of Collaboration The Liberation of France was a time for ‘gangland killing’. It was difficult to make a real and definite distinction between who did in fact collaborate, who did not, who was a bystander, and who was a real Resistant. This immediate post-war period was an open time for criticisms and sometimes even violent attacks, especially against Continental and those who worked for the company. Continental and the people who were part of it were first the targets of violent verbal assaults. Despite the fact that this firm never used its privileged position to promote propaganda films, people after the War wanted to get rid of the shameful past of Collaboration with the Occupiers. No matter what the level of involvement of screenwriters and actors inside this enterprise, this inglorious page of

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French history had to be turned. In Safe Conduct, Tavernier obviously wants to present a moderate point of view by paying tribute to those who did agree to work for the Germans but who, according to Tavernier, did not collaborate with them. Tavernier firmly insists that working for the Occupier did not necessarily mean collaborating. In Safe Conduct, through portrayals of the making of some of the best French movies, he suggests that most Continental workers did their jobs and nothing more. They did not do it in order to defend their ideology, nor to support German propaganda; they simply did their job as they had before 1939. Tavernier’s purpose in his movie is to rehabilitate these men and women who, while they were not heroes, were not collaborators. But, suggesting that in some ways the desperate desire that ‘the show must go on’, no matter what, and then even emphasizing a sort of internalised resistance from inside because they were inventive, while at the same time, in real life, people were dying. Safe Conduct can be problematic. Surviving does not mean resisting. Sometimes, Tavernier seems to intentionally mix both concepts. Even if it is more than obvious that all these people working for Continental cannot be considered as collaborators, they were not members of the Resistance simply because they created sets out of nothing or because they survived in difficult conditions – like most French people – nor because they cheated the Germans by daring to put words into the mouths of actors. All these people certainly had a strong desire to do everything to let the show go on. If Continental did not use French films to spread German propaganda and allowed the French movie industry to produce some of the best films ever made, the situation was much more complex than Tavernier wants to describe. People involved in the movie industry and defended by Tavernier are sometimes the illustration of a complex reality. There was no black and white, but more grey during these times. The second filming presented in Safe Conduct, Le marriage de chiffon is an example of this. This movie was directed by Claude Autant-Lara in 1942 and the screenplay was written by Jean Aurenche. Although Tavernier does not provide any clue to understanding this movie, an explanation is worthwhile. First of all, the subject of this film plays a huge role both in Tavernier’s movie and in 1942 as well. The central theme of Le marriage de chiffon deals with the Army through the story of a soldier in the Dragoon Regiment. This simple fact returns the French Army to its glory days compared to the defeat of 1940. Choosing to adapt this novel to the screen can be understood as the desire to erase the poor image of the French Army and to remind the audience that it was once powerful. Heroism is not absent from this film, but Tavernier does not insist on this. In choosing the

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example of Le marriage de chiffon, Tavernier is emphasising that it was possible to send some messages to the audience through strong symbols such as this once glorious French Army. He also suggests that acting this way was a form of resistance to the Occupier although Greven’s role as a censor was far from radical or severe in the context of French film production during that time. The other interesting element of Le marriage de chiffon is that it involves Claude Autant-Lara, who, at that time, made great films. Tavernier pays tribute to several writers in Safe Conduct, among them Claude Autant-Lara. But Autant-Lara himself is a problematic choice in Tavernier’s movie since he was known for his anti-Semitic position. Tavernier’s tribute To understand Tavernier’s position, we need to recall that he was born in 1941 and that his father, René Tavernier, was a member of the Resistance in Lyon. The purpose of Safe Conduct is certainly not to judge the wartime period. Tavernier does not want to award prizes or to distribute bad marks to anyone who worked under German Occupation;35 it is obvious that he wants to look back by studying this dark period in a new light. With Safe Conduct, he tends to analyse the topic of Resistance without seeking to strike a balance between good and evil. His characters are not that simple. The portraits painted by Tavernier are full of dignity and respect.36 Tavernier never judges any of his characters. He seems to do justice to all the men and women who agreed to work for Continental because whatever people said after the war, it is a fact that this firm never used its dominant position to impose either Nazi ideology or the Vichy point of view. Who would argue today that it was quite unexpected that Continental would produce Le Corbeau? From this point of view, Tavernier’s movie transforms the vision we had of film industry workers under the Occupation.37 His main purpose here seems to be to offer a tribute to all the famous films made during the Occupation of France. A possible new vision of the Second World War Through personal and professional reasons, Tavernier is familiar with the wartime period used as a landscape for his movies. But this time he adds another dimension which is the controversial: the question of collaboration/resistance. ‘Safe Conduct offered to the new century a vision without guilt that eventually gave back to the previous century a new honour.’38 Tavernier deals with the Occupation through ‘respectful nostalgia’.39 Before the emergence of this new kind of cinema, which removes guilt from the wartime period, audiences had become used

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to watching heroic Resistance fighters, train drivers, manual workers, and priests, but never those wearing the costume of screenwriters and moviemakers.40 This film would not have been possible immediately after the war. Collaboration was a taboo subject and French audiences needed more optimistic topics in order to help reconstruct the country. Collaborators were still alive and most of them kept the same jobs they had during the war. De Gaulle chose not to divide France. The movie industry could not go against these trends. But Safe Conduct opened a new era in film. During François Mitterrand’s presidency it was not easy to treat the delicate topic of Collaboration and one can look at the history of French cinema since the end of the war to confirm this. Mitterrand embodied too many questions about Resistance and Collaboration. He was at the crux of many troubling questions and his presence at the head of the State was too heavy for the national psyche. At the same time, it generated great interest in the Occupation period.41 The death of Mitterrand marked the end of an era. Unlike Mitterrand, President Jacques Chirac was too young to be personally involved in the war. He had no past related to that period to protect, if not to hide. In 1995, his commemoration of the round-up of the Vel d’Hiv of July 1942 clearly recognized the responsibility of the Vichy Government in the deportation of Jews in France.42 This symbolic statement opened new possibilities for every creative field. A new mood of recognition, peace, and analysis was eventually possible.43

Conclusion According to Tavernier, Safe Conduct is a movie about friendships born during the Second World War which survived the War through collaboration on several films. At the end of Safe Conduct, a voice-over says that Jean Devaivre made La Dame de onze heures in 1947, written by Le Chasnoy, who had been arrested because he was Jewish, but who survived the war, while Jean Aurenche remained close friends with Bost. Tavernier’s round-trip through wartime ends with these details. Strong friendships emerged from hard times and remained strong after the war. At the end of the movie, while Aurenche talks about survival and the lack of commitment, he raises the question of life over every other commitment and every cause. To him, life is above everything and must not be lost for anything. After all, he says, we are not more, not less, than story makers. This short statement from Aurenche’s lips may imply forgiveness for a low level of collaboration within the movie industry. But Tavernier does not make any judgement. He prefers to cast a tender

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eye upon those workers who, if they did not take up arms in order to liberate France, maintained French morale during the Occupation. They helped the French endure until better times, thanks to dreams, laughter, love affairs, and stories from another time which allowed audiences to temporarily escape reality. One of the criticisms that might be raised about Safe Conduct is that this film is inaccessible to most people for whom names such as Louis Née (cameraman) or Armand Thirard (chief operator) mean nothing. There are too many allusions for a popular audience. Frequent references to French movies of this period which today belong to the ‘classic movie’ category somehow make Safe Conduct inaccessible to an audience unfamiliar with the source films themselves. But obviously, this was not among Tavernier’s concerns. Instead, one of the messages sent by Tavernier in his movie is that people must never give up. There is always a way out.

7 Aimée, Jaguar and Sophie Scholl: Women on the German Home Front Helen Jones

This chapter focuses on Aimée & Jaguar (1999), a film adaptation of the best-selling book by Erica Fischer.1 Both the book and the film deal with the intimate relationship between Lilly Wust, a German wife and mother, and Felice Schragenheim, a young Jewish woman living illegally in Berlin during the final years of the Second World War. Aimée and Jaguar are the names the two women called themselves, respectively, in their intimate conversations and letters. In the film, they get to know each other after a chance encounter at a concert when it emerges that Lilly’s household help, Ilse Ploog, is also Felice’s lover and friend. Felice becomes a regular visitor at Lilly’s apartment and a surrogate parent to the four children. Lilly’s husband Günther, in the meantime, makes the occasional appearance when he is on leave from the front. Felice works for a newspaper and uses her position to leak secret documents to the international community. She only discloses her Jewish identity to Lilly later in the film when Lilly confronts her about her mysterious disappearances. The two women are able to remain together until Felice’s arrest. In the scene of the arrest, they return to the apartment from swimming at a local lake to find the Gestapo waiting for them. Felice manages to run out of the apartment but is dragged away after an abortive attempt by neighbours to hide her. The film has a narrative frame: at its beginning we see an older Lilly moving from the apartment to a home where she is reunited with Ilse, who, on recognising Lilly, recounts the events of the narrative past. The chapter also discusses Sophie Scholl (2005), a film that dramatises the arrest and subsequent interrogation of this key figure in the White Rose resistance group. The film is based on the Gestapo transcripts of Scholl’s interrogation which only became accessible after the collapse of former East Germany.2 The relocation of the transcripts 83

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to the Bundesarchiv (Federal Archive) is part of wider developments in the retrieval, preservation and evaluation of archive material from the former Soviet Bloc countries since 1989 and it helps to explain the timing of the film’s production. However, it is not the only reason, and nor does it explain why German film productions continue to emerge that look back at the Third Reich. This chapter will suggest factors that continue to generate an interest in making and watching films that portray the war years. Aimée & Jaguar and Sophie Scholl portray a cinematically lessdocumented experience of the Second World War: civilian life on the German home front. In the sixty or so years since the war ended the range of wartime experiences as represented in popular cultural form has expanded. The reworking of past experience in contemporary film has, however, proven controversial and has been, so suggest voices in the academic community, naïve at best. One difficulty in relation to the two films analysed here is that they focus on the experience of actual individuals, rather than on fictional characters, systems or groups. The two individuals were young victims of Nazi Germany: Sophie Scholl was beheaded at the age of 21, while Felice Schragenheim was a Holocaust victim at the approximate age of 22. In other words the complexities of recalling any personal histories are magnified, insomuch as the stories of these women have to be recounted by others. Furthermore, the two films are directed by men; this in itself would not be an issue except that to focus on the representation of women’s experiences of war implies that their experiences are distinctive from the experiences of men. In other words, there is a danger that a form of cultural colonisation is taking place, both by German survivors who give expression to the experiences of the German-Jewish dead and by younger filmmakers who depict a war they never witnessed. The chapter therefore briefly examines statements made by participants in the filmmaking process to provide a contemporary context to each film. After all, the actresses, film crew, scriptwriters and directors, while not drawing on personal experiences of the war, are drawing on their knowledge as mediated by post-1945 print and audio-visual culture. An immediate dilemma in assessing representations of women’s war experiences in Germany lies in defining what films are about war, what war is being portrayed, who gets to tell war stories and how the stories are told. In her study of Arab women’s writing, Women and the War Story, Miriam Cooke draws on John Keegan to contest the ‘War Story’ paradigm, which makes sense of chaos by using binary frames of reference: ‘war and peace, front and home front, combatant and civilian,

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victory and defeat’.3 In the War Story, men and women are separated and the men occupy spaces of power; men fight on the battlefield, while women are civilians who stay at home and are defended. The Second World War had many of the attributes of conventional war as states formed alliances that led to a redrawing of the Central European map. Until 1989 too, the Cold War was represented in binary terms that helped nations and individuals understand a difficult world. Films, photographs, written prose and poetry have all contributed to the shaping of the War Story, and even in less conventional war films the binary frames of reference are maintained. An interesting example is Bernhard Wicki’s 1959 feature film The Bridge (Die Brücke). It begins in a small town towards the end of the war that is populated by mothers and sons; many of the fathers are absent. But then the war draws closer and the boys are conscripted. In an attempt to save them, a commanding officer assigns them the task of guarding a bridge that he expects to remain clear of the fighting front. Instead the front comes to them and they die saving a bridge that was due to be demolished anyway. With each death, a link is created to their former civilian life: one boy avenges a father’s hurtful comment by shooting an American soldier; another is consumed by guilt for punching his now dead friend in an earlier scene. The film’s anti-war message is underscored by a bitter irony: the boys’ futile fight to defend the bridge takes place within close proximity to their families. At the beginning of the final battle scene one boy’s mother sits with other civilians; a baby cries in the background. She asks a soldier who is waiting to blow up the bridge: ‘do you think he is also already at the front?’ What she does not know is that he has already been shot by an overflying aircraft and lies dead on the bridge just outside. In the cases of Aimée & Jaguar and Sophie Scholl it is interesting to see how a chaotic phase of history has been organised into a coherent story. It is 1943 in both films, the battlefront and the home front have therefore essentially become one and the same and the central characters are locked into a less conventional war against their own state. However, the War Story paradigm is present and, of the two films, Sophie Scholl arguably adheres more closely to it to create an anti-Nazi, anti-war message. Sophie Scholl defines herself as a combatant in the courtroom scene when she declares that ‘we fight with words’. Her sentence best sums up not just the student group’s activities, which involved drafting and sending out thousands of anti-war leaflets in Germany, but also the ‘war with words’ with her interrogator that forms a significant part of the film. When she is first taken down to the cells, it is to the sound,

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on the radio, of Propaganda Minister Goebbels’s speech of 18 February 1943 when he famously rallied the German people with the words ‘do you want total war?’. In the courtroom she and her brother suggest that far from yes, the people’s answer to Goebbels’s question is no, they want the blood letting to cease. The courtroom is predominantly occupied by men in military uniform who squirm in response to Hans Scholl’s accounts of massacres on the East Front, and Judge Freisler’s blatant denial of Scholl’s eyewitness account. Interestingly, the film also operates in a melodramatic mode. Several press reviews see an analogy between the film’s depiction of Sophie Scholl’s final days and the figure of Joan of Arc as represented in audiovisual form. A recurring motif in the film is a low-angle, restricted shot of blue sky (seen from Sophie’s point of view), for example above a narrow court yard (when she is moved from her cell to the courtroom) and again through the bars of her cell; there is also a focus on the skylight at the university and later in the courtroom building. The sky is a source of hope, of freedom beyond the young woman’s imprisonment; it represents both actual potential salvation from a death sentence in the form of air raids by the Allies, and spiritual redemption from the God of Sophie’s faith. In her introduction to The Historical Film, Marcia Landy notes, with reference to Peter Brooks’s work on melodrama, ‘[f]orms of religiosity and legality are also central to melodrama; they play key roles in attempts to expose the criminality often at the heart of the historical event’.4 In a key scene, interrogator Mohr offers Sophie a cup of coffee, a seemingly conciliatory gesture. He then takes the statute book in one hand and a pack of index cards in the other, places one over the other, and declares that it is his job to ensure that the people and the law coincide. But Sophie challenges the law, stating that her conscience (she is a Protestant) is her true measure and the real judge of her actions. Then, in a reminder to the audience that she is a trained children’s nurse, she recalls an eyewitness account of vulnerable children being loaded onto trucks for extermination. Sophie may be guilty of crimes by Nazi definition, but her conviction and the light that falls from the window depict her as innocent. As a film, Aimée & Jaguar is more interested in exceptional love lives than in war. As John Davidson observes, Färberböck has directed the camera so that ‘the space of intimacy becomes also the space of danger’.5 Generally in the film the women occupy indoor spaces such as the home and the hotel. The street is a real site of danger and is dramatised as such when one of the friends becomes detached from the others and is stopped; she is shot when she cannot produce identity papers and

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attempts to run away. However, the war effectively infiltrates all places that the women occupy. In one scene, for example, Günther discusses an episode of infidelity with his wife Lilly after a New Year’s Eve party. Husband and wife sit in the kitchen over coffee; in the background we can clearly hear the sound of marching boots. Later Günther and Lilly are in the backyard: he smashes a car window as she asks for a divorce; in the background the sounds of aircraft, tanks and again marching boots can be heard. Berlin itself is portrayed on the brink of collapse: medium shots show the Brandenburg Gate, a tram or buildings against a blazing red sky; we see charred bodies in the streets in an early scene, and the Hotel am Zoo is surrounded by rubble. Indoors, uniformed men take a short respite from the war, at one point offering wine to Felice and her three nervous companions; outdoors, in front of the hotel, Lilly’s children play in a burnt-out car. One problem in relation to the study of Aimée & Jaguar is how we categorise the film in relation to the sheer number of films produced in Germany and elsewhere, for film and television, that depict the era. If we use Cooke’s gendered contestation of the War Story paradigm to support a broader definition of war representations, then what history is being re-enacted in popular form here? Aimée & Jaguar conforms to the paradigm in its depiction of civilians under fire; and yet also, by having one character who is Jewish, it touches on a significantly more complex war that defies any adequate attempt to portray it: the Holocaust. Unlike Sophie Scholl, the Holocaust is central to Aimée & Jaguar and to the war as Hitler’s expansionist policies were part of an integrated strategy to change the face of Europe with a central policy of exclusion and extermination. Aimée & Jaguar was released at around the same time as a small group of films that have a 1930s theme: Comedian Harmonists (1997), Gloomy Sunday (1999) and Jew-Boy Levi (1999). Lutz Koepnick groups these films and Aimée & Jaguar under the term ‘heritage cinema’;6 a review of Gloomy Sunday in the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung speaks of a trend in which, to paraphrase the German, a ‘duty to remember is being made palatable by a cinema of expressive emotion and grand set design’.7 This could explain the discomfort that Katrin Sieg voices over the dressswapping scenes in Aimée & Jaguar.8 Sieg sees a misunderstanding, even homophobia, in the film. As a consequence of Nazi policy, she explains, the lesbian support network in Berlin collapsed, and Felice is documented as latching onto its remnants, which expressed itself in the acting out of butch and femme roles. In the film, the dress swapping becomes vacuous, without the sexual identity roles attached. This could arguably be a consequence of a ‘colonised’ view of the women’s lives

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here, a misunderstanding of how the women responded in a situation of war. However, it could also justify the charge made that the film treats history as little more than a glamourised backdrop. Yet the reception of the film comes at an interesting time. The German representation of everyday life in the Third Reich is fraught with difficulties because Lilly Wust is essentially a fellow traveller, an ‘ordinary’ German. In Lilly’s case, she only acted in opposition to the values of the regime when she chose to maintain the relationship with Felice in full knowledge of her status. The re-evaluation of the ‘ordinary’ German is critical in a post-1989 context where there is an ongoing imperative for Germans to rework a past shared by the former East and West. This situation coincides with another phenomenon: the people who are of a sufficient maturity to have participated in school and work life, domestic duties, friendships and intimate relationships in the Third Reich are aging and dying. When, in the mid-to-late 1980s, Alison Owings interviewed women about their Third Reich experiences she interviewed no one who had been born after 1927. She recalls that she was reluctant to interview one of them at first, thinking that she would have been too young to have been responsible for her moral choices, a view she then revised.9 The physical marks of the German past are also disappearing or have been erased from the landscape. Before 1989 and even into the early 1990s the walls of central East Berlin buildings were still pock-marked with bullet holes, and the former hub of Berlin, the Potsdamer Platz, was still a wasteland. The Berlin of the new millennium, by contrast, has been renovated, and the war wounds are only visible in the shape of preserved monuments such as the Gedächtniskirche, a church deliberately left in ruins at the heart of Berlin’s shopping district as a memorial to the past. Berlin’s restoration as the capital of a unified Germany is referenced at the beginning of Aimée & Jaguar: in the present narrative that frames the film Lilly Wust is shown moving out of her apartment to go to a home for the elderly. We hear an agent saying that the apartment sits in the ‘centre of the centre’, at the heart of Berlin and at the heart of a new Europe. She also locates the apartment for a post-1989 generation when she says that the ‘government quarter’ is so close that a prospective owner could have breakfast with the federal chancellor. One of the interesting aspects of the film is this placement of the love story in the context of a new Germany: Sophie Scholl does not have any comparable narrative strategy. Instead, in the accompanying book to the film, director Marc Rothemund and scriptwriter and co-producer Fred Breinersdorfer explain how costume and make-up were chosen to give

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Sophie Scholl as modern a feel as possible to give the film a contemporary resonance.10 Max Färberböck’s ending to Aimée & Jaguar, by contrast, threatens to bring closure to the past: he evokes an image of a changed Berlin in the present day in which its survivors reconcile their differences before joining their fellow retired citizens for dinner. In the penultimate scene, Lilly is gripped by a sense of guilt that she may have caused Felice’s death by trying to visit her at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Ilse is dismissive of Lilly’s ongoing desire to mark herself as victim and has come to terms with the past. She encourages Lilly to do the same. Both walk away into the distance, under leafy trees, Ilse still jibing Lilly as they do so. Ilse is not condemned for her stance because in the final scene we see Felice expressing an enthusiasm for a lifestyle that celebrates the moment, not some nebulous ‘forever’ that reverberates in the lyrics of an accompanying gramophone record. One striking feature of both Sophie Scholl and Aimée & Jaguar is that the filmmakers concerned are young or relatively new to featurefilmmaking. Max Färberbock is more established; born in 1950, he had a career in television before he made Aimée & Jaguar as his first feature film. The director of Sophie Scholl, Marc Rothemund, is younger, born in 1968. His co-producer Fred Breinersdorfer is a trained lawyer who translated the Gestapo transcripts into dialogue and is of the same generation as Färberböck. Rothemund made two less successful features before Sophie Scholl. We should add Oliver Hirschbiegel, the director of Downfall (2004), who has also come into filmmaking after a career in television and who had made only one other feature, The Experiment, prior to Downfall, in 2001. What has motivated these ‘new’ film directors has, it would seem, less to do with making an historical film than with capturing human emotion in extreme circumstances. Färberböck, for example, was attracted to the story of Lilly and Felice because of their hunger for life in an ‘acid test’ situation.11 Rothemund told the audience in a post-screening discussion at the Manchester Cornerhouse on 20 October 2005 of how he remembered being questioned, at a young age, after fishing illegally; he lied throughout the interrogation, even though it was obvious what he had done because he smelt of fish. This is how he pictured Sophie Scholl for the film: she lied and lied for hours to get out of trouble, initially with some success. The film then takes a dramatic turn as she is almost released, then returned to the interrogation room to be confronted with physical evidence from her brother’s desk. Interestingly, the interviews with the actresses of the two films reveal a comparable curiosity for a history that was not personally experienced. Julia Jentsch, who plays Scholl, states, for example, that she learnt at

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school about the White Rose, but the history lesson was reduced to the ‘facts’. She was interested, she says, in performing the role to feel the situation.12 Likewise, the women who played Lilly and Felice, Maria Schrader and Juliana Köhler, respectively, reveal a ‘next-generation’ fascination for a past that came alive for them through their participation in the film project. Maria, for example, recounts how she struggled when she discovered that Lilly Wust was present at the first day of shooting of the film. In an extract of an interview in the DVD extras, she also mentions how she was fascinated by finding, among the film props, a 1943 telephone directory that lists Lilly Wust. Muriel Cormican accuses the actresses of naïvety, ‘heavily romanticizing [Lilly’s and Felice’s] love and Felice’s life, and paying little or no attention to the historical canvas against which the love story is played out’.13 While it is easy to dismiss the actresses’ comments as simply part of the films’ marketing, they none the less suggest a taste for exploring the past, however inaccurately, through emotional identification. In both Aimée & Jaguar and Sophie Scholl the male directors place a female experience of war at centre stage. We therefore need to ask ourselves whether the directors have found an interesting means of recounting the lives of real women, or whether they have simply given the characters a symbolic function to depict history by other means. A brief look at developments in East and West German film representations of war prior to 1989 reveal other examples of war representations from the perspective of women. Kurt Maetzig in former East Germany and Werner Rainer Fassbinder in the Federal Republic are two examples of filmmakers who have placed women at central stage of their films. Marital miscommunication is one of the focal points of Fassbinder’s film The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), which depicts the dehumanising effects of the 1950s economic miracle in Germany. Maria and Hermann Braun only have a night together after a hasty registry office wedding in the midst of a bomb attack at the end of the war. Husbands and wives, such as Maria’s sister Bettie and her husband Willi, are reunited in the film, only to remain isolated in their own pain. In Kurt Maetzig’s Marriage in the Shadows (1947), marital strain provides a vehicle for displaying the consequences for a couple who decide not to flee Nazi Germany, even though the woman is Jewish. She is an actress who is increasingly incarcerated in her own home, without even the radio to act as a companion, after she loses her job and is excluded from public life. The husband suffers too: we are not encouraged to see events from just one person’s perspective as both man and wife are portrayed as victims of Third Reich policy towards ‘racially mixed’ marriages and their own

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inability to see that the law is no longer on their side. Towards the end of the film they attend a premiere at the cinema but she is spotted and is about to be deported. The husband, in an act of love, poisons them both. Interestingly, the basis of Maetzig’s film was the story of Joachim Gottschalk, a male actor who was driven to suicide with his family in 1941, but the filmmaker portrays the ‘collective fate’ of Holocaust victims through the story of a female actress and her husband instead. This follows a longer tradition of theatrical melodrama, of which film is a descendent: ‘Virtue is almost inevitably represented by a young heroine.’14 Fassbinder also uses the lives of women to portray contemporary social ills, although in his case it is to attack the failure of his parents’ generation to interrogate the past and to attack patriarchy and its institutions. An oft-cited example of a woman’s perspective of the Second World War is Helma Sanders-Brahms’s film Germany, Pale Mother (1980). Sander-Brahms took her own story, or rather the story of herself and her mother, and employed her own child to play the daughter. A couple get married and, as the war begins, the father is conscripted. The mother, Leni, waits for his return but whenever he comes back from the front they struggle with intimacy. Both are affected by atrocities: he participates in the murder of civilians, but refuses to commit rape and his comrades consequentially taunt him with condoms; she watches men drag a Jewish woman away at night but shuts out the incident by drawing the blinds; later she is raped by two American soldiers, a scene not shown as the camera focuses on the child watching as the rape takes place. Several scenes show Leni in the home, where the war is constantly present; the radio brings the outside world into the private sphere. Later the man returns home and a different, domestic war breaks out. Man and wife both remain battle-scarred: she with air raids, single motherhood and the repressed rape; he with the horrors of the front and the killing and raping of civilian populations, the experiences of which he does not share with her. Academic sources suggest that Sanders-Brahms has struggled to find a way to interpret her personal story ‘in a larger context’.15 Daniela Berghahn, for example, suggests that ‘allegorical constructions of women’, such as to be found in Sanders-Brahms, ‘are more commonly adopted by male filmmakers’ because ‘the use of woman as allegory of national history’, and here she cites Anton Kaes, ‘works counter to the autobiographical attempt to present the characters in a differentiated, “realistic” – that is, contradictory – way in the work of female filmmakers’.16 Aimée & Jaguar and Sophie Scholl are not attempts at

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resolving the difficulty of representing gendered experiences; they are not films that operate in relation to any feminist project, East German anti-fascist legacy or the critical legacy of West German filmmaking. Instead, the films are designed to have popular appeal and to engage mainstream audiences, a trend that has been welcomed by at least some in the German audio-visual industry. Aimée & Jaguar, for example, adopts a love triangle that is central to the plot and the narration. Near the beginning of the film, when Lilly Wust tries to leave the home for the elderly, the camera pans across a row of faces looking down on her from the staircase. One is the face of Ilse. The later scene at the concert then makes it quite clear that rivalry in love will generate part of the film’s suspense: Lilly is with a soldier, Felice is with Ilse. As the air raid warning sounds, Lilly loses her spectacles, and Felice, who finds them, hands them to her. This is the first point of contact. This is rapidly followed by a moment of suspense: a man calls out Felice’s real name, having recognised her as a respected doctor’s daughter. He turns her collar to check for the Star of David, which she is no longer wearing, and he tells her to look after herself. The moment of danger passes: he is not an informer. The film therefore establishes early on that sexual conflicts will take place in the context of a war of at least two fronts – Allied attack and a regime of terror from within. Ilse, as John Davidson points out, is ‘a composite of several historical people’,17 and, as a comparison to Catrine Clay’s documentary film Love Story (1997) reveals, not only the choice of a love triangle, but also other significant decisions have been made to dramatise the story. Lilly and Felice met in a café in 1942, when Berlin was still functioning as a city, but in the film it is already collapsing. As the documentary recounts, the grandmother was transported and then Felice tore off the Star of David to go underground. In Färberböck’s film, Felice is already underground but the grandmother is still in her apartment; the arrest of the grandmother then becomes one of the dramatic moments that show Felice fleeing to avert arrest. Actual extracts from letters between Lilly and Felice have also been used in the film to dramatise fictional scenes. For example, in one scene, Felice is shown writing a poem for Lilly in the cellars of the newspaper editorial office (she needs a refuge and so she pretends to her employer that she has been bombed out). At this point she is no longer framed in medium shot, as in earlier scenes when we see her surreptitiously writing in the office; instead, she is captured in long shot, framed in a sparse, functional space that reveals her isolation at this given moment. The film then cuts to Günther having sex with Lilly as she lies passively under him. Felice’s poem with the words ‘alone, alone,

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alone’ effectively becomes a voice-over that interprets Lilly’s isolation in a simultaneous moment.18 In Sophie Scholl much of the action is situated in a highly restricted space that is a potential challenge to creating an ongoing sense of drama. Much of the action takes place in the cell or in the interrogation room. The film builds Sophie’s character through relationships that allow us to care for her more as the action moves closer towards her execution. The opening sequence shows her singing along to Billie Holliday’s Sugar on the radio with Gisela Schertling; this was the kind of music that was only played on the BBC. Sophie is therefore instantly portrayed as a young vivacious woman who takes risks. She then develops a relationship with her cellmate, and a form of rebellious daughter, a chastising father relationship emerges between her and interrogator Robert Mohr. Later he is depicted as coming to visit her in Stadelheim prison, where she tells him that she has just said farewell to her parents, the words taken from an actual statement made by Mohr.19 It is only in this way that we can feel with her – an overt intention of the film’s strategy. In sum, the films analysed here have immense popular appeal but do little justice to the realities of women’s war experiences. Likewise this chapter does little justice to the necessary, complex and extensive work that still needs to be done on the history of the Holocaust. However, the films at least make visible the existence of women who, as Alison Owings observes, were witnesses of the Third Reich at war. Women who felt the full consequences of Nazi warmongering: the rationing, the indoctrination of the children by youth organisations and the disappearance of Jewish neighbours. Women listened to the radio, read newspapers, stood in queues and travelled in trams. Their experience was distinctive: ‘[a] German soldier is home on leave, sirens signal incoming bombs, his wife, as usual, prepares to head for the shelter with the children, and finds her terrified husband cowering in a corner. The front, he says, had not been this close.’20 A demarcation line was drawn between the sexes particularly in Germany by a National Socialist policy that required women to be ‘warriors on the battlefield of childbirth’.21 Aimée & Jaguar may not escape the pitfalls of popular cinematic storytelling, but it is an intriguing example of a film that portrays an otherwise hidden history. Sophie Scholl is also interesting for its potent message to a new generation in the 21st century, one that is about personal choice in times of conflict, even when the war may not involve a traditional, clearly demarcated battlefront.

8 ‘This Film is based on a True Story’: The Tuskegee Airmen S.P. Mackenzie

The Tuskegee Airmen has had an influence out of all proportion to its relatively modest origins. It was made by a cable TV network (Home Box Office) whose programming at the time drew only between 3 and 7 per cent of the US television audience, but generated what was, by televisionmovie standards, extensive coverage in the national press around the time it first appeared in the mid-1990s and went on to become perhaps the prime means through which ordinary Americans came to understand a hitherto relatively unknown facet of the ‘Good War’.1 Prior to The Tuskegee Airmen there had been comparatively little coverage, either in print or more especially on screen, of the AfricanAmerican aviators who had fought in segregated squadrons over the skies of North Africa and Europe in the Second World War. Hundreds of books were published and dozens of Hollywood features were made from the 1940s onwards that dealt with various aspects of the US combat experience; but aside from a few generally academic books, a couple of articles, and a handful of mostly official documentaries, the story of the black pilots who had trained in segregated facilities at Tuskegee, Alabama, and fought in the all-black 99th Fighter Squadron and 332nd Fighter Group (the Red Tails) was left untold.2 After The Tuskegee Airmen came out in 1995, the situation rapidly began to change. Over the following 10 years, 3 new documentaries were made, a stage play was produced, biographies and memoirs began to appear, several mass-market histories were published, an oral history project was undertaken and a national museum and archive established. Not all of this, of course, was the direct result of the HBO film: but it is telling that the Park Service oral history interviews were shaped around the story arc of The Tuskegee Airmen, that the film has often been shown in conjunction with speaker visits by veterans of the 332nd Fighter Group to universities 94

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and schools, and that it has even been employed in school and college courses. As a National Guard reporter put it in 1991, ‘until the Home Box Office movie “Tuskegee Airmen” starring Lawrence Fishburn hit the airwaves [sic] in 1995, most Americans had never heard of the 99th Fighter Squadron or the 332nd Fighter Group or the African-American men who refused to yield to that era’s racist ways’.3 Given the general popularity of Hollywood war movies in the postwar decades, including a significant number of dramas involving the USAAF in the Second World War, as well as the eventual impact of the HBO film, one might ask why it took half a century for a dramatisation of the Tuskegee flyers’ experiences to make its way to the screen. ‘I wrote a manuscript in 1953’, Robert W. Williams, a former Tuskegee fighter pilot turned small-part actor, explained over 30 years later, ‘and have tried since then to see something done.’ No studio, however, would ever commit to the project. In 1977 Henry Fonda and Billy Dee Williams were due to star in a Hollywood film version of the story, but the deal fell apart because of financing problems. In 1980 veteran TV producer Stan Margulies, having spoken with a number of Tuskegee veterans, persuaded writer Ernest Kinoy, with whom he had worked on the immensely successful TV miniseries Roots, to work on a multi-part script that focused on the trials and tribulations of five very different aspiring black pilots. As Kinoy saw it, ‘the Tuskegee piece was straightforward popular entertainment’. However, like the Hollywood studios the CBS network decided against developing the project. Approximately 10 years later George Lucas of Star Wars fame announced that his next movie project, entitled Red Tails, would be based on a script about the Tuskegee airmen that he had commissioned from black actor-writer-director Kevin R. Sullivan. Lucas claimed that ‘I’m one of the few people that can get this film made’, but in the end and in spite of his status in Hollywood – or indeed that of Steven Spielberg, who had previously toyed with the subject – no studio would agree to spend the $25–30 million that would be necessary.4 The primary reason for this general lack of enthusiasm undoubtedly had to do with race, though not racism as such. The number of black characters seen on both the big and the small screen was on the increase from the Civil Rights Era onwards. Studio and network executives, however, remained leery of projects in which the cast would be primarily African American, simply because it was thought that if completed, such films would only appeal to a minority of the movie or television audience – African Americans – and that this would in turn produce low box office and ratings figures.5

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Another attempt to bring a story about coloured troops in the Second World War to the screen had faced similar difficulties to those faced by Tuskegee enthusiasts. In the early 1980s Sidney Poitier had tried to interest Hollywood studios in a film version of A Soldier’s Play by Charlie Fuller to no avail, and despite a string of prior hits director Norman Jewison was also turned down until he offered to forgo his salary and agreed to a demand by Columbia that the budget for A Soldier’s Story not exceed a very modest $5 million. ‘Since World War II, the visibility of African Americans in motion pictures has increased significantly’, scholars David E. Wilt and Michael Schull argued a few years ago, adding that ‘Hollywood is still reluctant – with very few exceptions – to produce big-budget films with predominantly black casts’, something which they saw as ‘a function of the (perceived or real) limited audience for such movies, rather than a decision based on racist motives’.6 In the light of this ongoing problem how did The Tuskegee Airmen finally come to be made? Much had to do with the way in which HBO worked. As a cable operation drawing its money primarily from subscription rather than on-air advertising, Home Box Office could afford to develop some programmes that might not appeal to a mass audience. HBO would in fact make a string of period films with predominantly black casts, including The Affair (1995) and Miss Evers’ Boys (1997). At the same time HBO saw itself as a purveyor of challenging quality programming, which meant that its films would be of higher standard than the average made-for-TV movie. ‘Their idea is that we make little movies here’, as writer Tom Cook, who worked on the script of The Tuskegee Airmen later explained: ‘We don’t make TV movies.’7 Movie producer and executive Frank Price had come across the Robert Williams script in 1984, and had tried without success to get it into production while heading Universal Pictures and then Columbia Studios. In 1993, however, the president of HBO Worldwide Pictures, Robert Cooper, approached Price with an invitation to produce a film for the cable network. HBO could not provide a budget fit for a Hollywood epic – a comparatively meagre $8.5 million was allocated to the project – but the aura of quality productions and a perceived willingness to take on risky subjects meant that Home Box Office was able to draw together an impressive cast at relatively modest cost. Lawrence Fishburn, for example, who would play the lead character and was already an established star, passed on the larger salary cheques offered by Hollywood studios in order to work in The Tuskegee Airmen.8 A film of this sort would naturally require period aircraft, and Aviation Location Services was employed to help round up from various private

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collectors a single B-17, a Messerschmitt 109, a pair of PT-17 Stearman biplanes, a couple of AT-6 Harvards, and a grand total of four airworthy P-51D Mustangs for the production. It was these machines, rather than the actors, that absorbed the largest single chunk of the film budget. ‘They were difficult to come by, expensive to operate and available for only very brief periods of time’, as cinematographer Ron Orieux put it.9 Producer Bill Carro and director Robert Markowitz did however save money on aerial photography by incorporating chunks of aerial footage from other films as well as on sets and locations by requesting and being allowed to shoot key scenes of The Tuskegee Airmen at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, courtesy of the Department of Defense (DoD) in February and March 1995. Official support, however, was not entirely free of charge. DoD insisted that various scenes of the script be changed or omitted in order to tone down the amount of white-on-black racism shown as existing within the wartime army air forces. A civilian senator (played by John Lithgow) rather than an army general (played by Ed Lauter) became the senior exponent of white racist sentiment, while a scene in which black and white baseball teams were depicted as brawling was axed. ‘The film would have been darker and closer to what really happened’, director Markowitz later argued, if Fort Chaffee had not been used.10 The DoD interventions were not the only factors involved in the lengthening the time taken to develop a final shooting script for The Tuskegee Airmen. Tom Cook was brought in first to work on the original Williams script, followed by screenwriters Ron Hutchinson, Trey Ellis, and finally Paris Qualles. ‘I was the last one’, Qualles explained in an interview. ‘I guess it was just    my father being one [of the Tuskegee airmen] so there really wasn’t a lot of research I needed to do. I knew the history, the structure of the military, and had a passion for the story and flying.’ Executive producer Frank Price saw the film as ‘both high adventure and the story of an incredible group of men who were able to overcome walls of prejudice and accomplish great things’. Qualles himself later reflected that what he had written about ‘the state of race in America fifty years ago’ still had ‘parallels today’.11 One of the first things audiences see when watching this movie, even before the credits begin to roll, are the words ‘This Film is Based on a True Story.’ The veracity of The Tuskegee Airmen, however, has sometimes been questioned: ‘Typical Hollywood’, for instance, was the dismissive opinion of one real-life Tuskegee airman.12 In what ways did HBO mix fiction with fact?

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Some historical inaccuracies in The Tuskegee Airmen, to be sure, were simply due to the restricted budget and tight shooting schedule. Overseas location work was out, and there was only so much that could be done to make sections of Arkansas and Oklahoma in February–March appear as reasonable facsimiles of wartime Alabama, North Africa, and Italy in various seasons. Aircraft could be obtained, but only in small numbers and not reflecting the full variety of types flown by the Tuskegee airmen both in training and in combat.13 Many of the differences between the ‘reel’ and the ‘real’, though, were due to the need on the part of the filmmakers to recast reality in a form seen as acceptable entertainment, as was true of almost all Hollywoodstyle representations of history. In order for the audience to follow the story in a 106-minute film, a great many details and episodes would have to be excluded and a clear plot arc – beginning with exposition, the introducing of complications, and then the story coming to clear resolution – developed. The number of characters also would have to be limited, and their roles as heroes or villains spelled out in order to minimise ambiguity and avoid possible confusion.14 Thus the somewhat convoluted history of the establishment and development of flight training at Tuskegee – including black-on-black hazing and the presence of black primary flight instructors15 – was largely omitted, the time frame heavily altered in order to allow the main characters to move fairly expeditiously from training to combat, and the multiple moves and aircraft changes of the 99th Fighter Squadron and other units of what became the 332nd Fighter Group in the Mediterranean Theatre whittled down to two moves. Truncation and simplification, however, were not the only ways in which the medium-driven needs of the filmmakers trumped historical reality. For The Tuskegee Airmen to work as a screen drama, events would have to be reshaped to a lesser or greater degree, which in turn might make it necessary to deploy fictional characters or, perhaps more accurately, individual heroes and villains whose dialogue and directions reflected the words and actions of more than one real-life individual at a particular time. ‘Generally we didn’t use real names in this [film]’, Williams explained in an interview, ‘because if we tried to name everyone who accomplished everything, we’d have a cast of hundreds’.16 The main players, with the notable exception of Colonel Davis (played with an appropriate hint of iron-in-the-soul by Andre Braugher17 ), were given names, nicknames, and characteristics that approximated those of more than one real-life individual as well as fictional attributes. The central figure, Hannibal ‘Iowa’ Lee, as played by Lawrence Fishburn, for instance, was based

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on Robert Williams himself as well as, among others, classmate Robert Dacatur. The second lead role, Billy ‘Train’ Roberts (assigned to Cuba Gooding Jr), was in name, character, and actions an amalgam of several other real-life Tuskegee pilots, including Charles ‘A-Train’ Dryden and Bert Wilson. Even the character of Colonel Noel Rogers, the sympathetic white Tuskegee base commander played by Daniel Hugh Kelly, was only an approximation in manner and speech of the real-life Colonel Noel Parrish.18 This blurring of the distinction between the real and the fictional among the major characters allowed the filmmakers to assert a degree of verisimilitude while at the same time granting them considerable latitude in rearranging real events as well as a chance to introduce under cover, so to speak, figures and episodes that bore little or no resemblance to historical reality. A ‘True Story’ did exist, but The Tuskegee Airmen was, for the reasons mentioned above, only ‘Based On’ that story. In some cases, to be sure, scenes reflected both Williams’ own experiences and those of many other Tuskegee airmen as well. The point near the start of the film when Iowa, Train, and Walter ‘Stick’ Peoples (played by Allen Payne) are rudely ejected from their seats on the way to Tuskegee in what has become a ‘whites only’ railway carriage at Hillsboro in order to make way for a German prisoner of war, for example, was based on something that Williams himself had experienced (‘[t]hat was a real slap in the face’, he remembered), while being made to sit in a ‘coloreds only’ coach when heading South was something that virtually every Tuskegee-bound young African American had experienced.19 Other scenes simply involved rearrangements of personnel. One example occurs in a scene in which cadet Leroy Cappy (Malcolm-Jamal Warner), accompanied by Iowa, makes an emergency landing on an Alabama country road after his engine malfunctions. A nearby black chain-gang and its white guards watch this happen and see the two pilots, their faces entirely covered by helmet, oxygen mask, and darkened goggles, climb out of their cockpits. Only when Cappy and Iowa remove their masks and goggles does it become apparent that they are black, much to the horror of the whites (‘Son of a bitch, they’re niggers!’20 ) and amazed delight of the prisoners (‘They’re colored flyers!’). Though one rather than two pilots were involved in the actual event, this scene was based on a wartime incident in which Robert Decatur was forced to make a forced landing in Griffin, Georgia.21 Later on in the film, to take another case, Iowa and Train are shown sinking an enemy destroyer in a scene representing a real-life triumph for

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several Tuskegee pilots other than Williams, Wilson, Decatur, Dryden, or Archer.22 In other instances rather more extensive reworking took place. Towards the end of the first half of the film Mrs Roosevelt is shown taking a trip aloft with Iowa while Roosevelt and other trained fighter pilots are waiting to go overseas in 1943. In fact the First Lady took a ride with a black civilian instructor in 1941 before the arrival of the first cadets at Tuskegee.23 When Iowa, Train, and Cappy are deployed to North Africa, to take a more striking example, it is suggested in the film that white pilots with the 33rd Fighter Group secretly put forward the time of their first morning mission briefing in order to embarrass the black pilots (‘a dollar short and a day late’). This was only an approximation of a real incident in which the pilots of the 99th Fighter Group appear to have been given the wrong time, arrived late, and were dismissed by the prejudiced commander of the 33rd Fighter Group with the words ‘you boys keep up’.24 The reshaping of events is even more apparent in the recreation of the 1943 Washington encounter at which the commander of the 332nd Fighter Group, Colonel Benjamin Davis Jr, was forced to defend the combat record of the 99th Fighter Group. Alterations were made partly in order to appease DoD but largely to generate the necessary dramatic effect. Though the positions adopted by the main speakers in this climactic and confrontational gathering on screen bear some resemblance to the basic positions taken by those seeking to defend or attack the Tuskegee ‘experiment’, the meeting was in reality a gathering of the War Department advisory committee on Negro troop policies rather than a Senate hearing, a lot of (admittedly convoluted) background was ignored in the scene, and the (admittedly powerful) screen oratory did not really correspond to what the historical record indicates was said by the colonel.25 Yet such scenes in The Tuskegee Airmen, while involving fictional and well as semi-fictional characters engaging in actions and conversations that were reworked or made up by the writers, might nevertheless at least sometimes truthfully represent the more general experience of black pilots. Heavily fictionalised incidents, in other words, sometimes reflected broader historical truths. This might be said of the episodes mentioned above. The same is true of a sequence towards the end of the film when a bigoted Texan captain of a damaged B-17 that had been shepherded to safety by Iowa and Train is at first reluctant to credit his saviours but eventually asks that the 332nd Fighter Group escort his bomber group to Berlin. Though Captain Butler (played by Ned Vaughn)

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and his crewmates are fictional characters interacting with fictionalised characters, it is worth bearing in mind that there were indeed some racists among the white crews and that the Red Tails did indeed under the direction of Colonel Davis build up a well-deserved reputation among bomber groups in Italy for warding off enemy fighters on escort missions and providing cover for damaged aircraft. Moreover, though bomber groups generally had to accept whatever fighter groups were assigned to them for a particular mission, one black pilot, Woodrow W. Crockett, recalled that the ‘B-24 and B-17 guys used to request that we escort them.’26 However, there remain episodes in the Tuskegee Airmen that have rather less of a connection with specific historical reality. Perhaps the chief instance of this higher degree of historical manipulation involves cadet Walter Peoples, who after being washed out at Tuskegee subsequent to being observed buzzing the field takes up an AT-6 trainer and commits suicide by crashing it into the ground. A real Lieutenant Francis B. Peoples did die on a training mission when his P-40 dove into the ground in April 1944, though this was not suicide; another black pilot had in truth been dismissed from the service for buzzing a southern town in a P-39 a few weeks earlier; and a third, Mac Ross, may in fact have committed suicide overseas in July by deliberately crashing his P-51. However, none of the three (or indeed any other pilot) buzzed the field at Tuskegee as a cadet and then went on to deliberately crash their aircraft into the ground. Though according to Charles ‘Chief’ Anderson, the leading black instructor at Tuskegee, there were indeed some suicides on the ground and daredevil accidents in the air, the death of Stick drew more from the conventions of melodrama than it did from the historical record.27 The most significant departure from historical reality on the part of the writers, however, was the insertion of two important but also highly fictional characters in the first half of the film. Each helps convey a point the filmmakers were trying to make in terms of message, but at the cost of manipulating history perhaps beyond the point where even a general historical truth was being projected. Major Joy, played by Chris McDonald, is an openly racist white flying instructor who does everything in his power to prevent the Tuskegee experiment from succeeding. He was clearly meant by the writers to stand in for the many much more senior white officers in the military hierarchy who in reality dragged their feet and put obstacles in the path of the development of black military aviation. Yet while cadets were washed out in higher-than-usual numbers at Tuskegee because of the

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limited number of units to which black pilots could be sent in an air force that was still segregated, in point of fact black veterans considered the white instructors who actually volunteered to serve at Tuskegee to have been rigorous but fair in their treatment of black cadets. ‘Bigotry, hatred, and racism at the instructor level, that just did not happen’, as Harry Sheppard observed.28 Equally fictitious is Lieutenant Jeffrey Glenn, a by-the-book black ‘liaison officer’ played by Courtney Vance who eventually serves as an inspirational role model for the cadets. It turns out that Glenn, before transferring into the USAAF, had joined the Royal Canadian Air Force and fought in the skies over England and France. ‘Out of 150 US Army officers on this base’, he reveals to a suitably awestruck class of cadets, ‘you are looking at the only one with actual combat experience. I have three 109 kills, and I’ve had a Spitfire and a Hurricane shot out from under me, both times behind enemy lines, and both times I escaped.’ Like the character that makes it this claim is, alas, a complete fabrication. Though a few blacks do appear to have gone north to join the RCAF and American pilot volunteers did transfer into the USAAF after Pearl Harbour, there is no record of anyone like Glenn serving at Tuskegee or indeed existing.29 The Tuskegee Airmen, in short, was a mixture of fact, fiction, and ‘faction’. Not surprisingly, the greater and lesser historical manipulations and omissions present in the film have irritated some veterans and historians. Vernon Hopson, a veteran, thought the writers took ‘way too much license’, while James Warren, a former navigator, complained about omissions such as the hazing that went on at Tuskegee and any mention of the all-black 477th Bombardment Group. Stanley Sandler, the author of an academic study of the all-black squadrons argued in pages of the American Historical Review that ‘this film is no substitute for a sober presentation of the historical facts, which on their own are inspiring enough’.30 In view of the changes that had been made during pre-production, though, the USAF Chief of Staff at the time, General Ronald R. Fogleman, went on record before the premiere in favour of The Tuskegee Airmen (‘a wonderful film’), while most of those Tuskegee veterans present at the special Atlanta premiere in August 1995 were evidently as prone to willing suspension of disbelief as anyone else in a darkened theatre. ‘They stood and applauded’, Qualles later related of what happened when the lights came up, ‘literally in tears.’31 Not all television critics, to be sure, felt anywhere so positively about what they had seen; though since none knew the real story, negative criticism was based on perceived artistic rather than historical flaws.

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Walter Goodman in the pages of the New York Times remarked on a ‘cliché-bound script’ full of ‘posturing and speechifying’, while Tom Shales in the Washington Post labelled The Tuskegee Airmen ‘lacklustre’ and ‘not very inspired’. The regional press could also be harsh, Joyce Millman informing readers of the San Francisco Examiner that the film suffered from ‘a simple, unimaginative structure’ totally lacking in ‘originality or style’, sentiments echoed by Curt Schleier in the Detroit News (‘surprisingly lifeless’).32 Another group of critics took the position that despite major flaws The Tuskegee Airmen still worked. In the mass-market USA Today, Matt Roush admitted that the dialogue was often trite and that the characters were ‘stock and sentimentalized’, yet went on to argue that ‘their struggles resonate’. In the popular People magazine David Hiltbrand conceded that The Tuskegee Airmen was ‘plodding’ but added that it contained ‘fine period evocation and solid performances’. John Leonard in New York magazine wrote that it was ‘a so-so, feel-good Guy movie’ but then argued that ‘you’ll find yourself cheering’ at the end. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Steve Johnson noted that ‘cliches fly about the screen like bullets in a dogfight’ and explained that a lot of the scenes were ‘hokey’. Indeed he argued that this ‘movie leaves no chord unstruck in its efforts to be inspirational’; but then conceded that despite ‘that considerable handicap, it is’.33 What was more, there were also reviewers who thought there were no flaws worth mentioning. The black press was very favourably inclined towards The Tuskegee Airmen, the New York Amsterdam-News calling it ‘one of the best films, bar none, ever made for the screen or television on the African-American experience’. There were also a significant number of critics who gave it unstinting praise in the mainstream national and regional press. TV Guide critic Dianne Zoccola pronounced it ‘excellent’ and ‘engaging’, Vern E. Smith of Newsweek thought it evoked ‘a romantic heroism rarely seen in TV movies – or theatrical ones – about the black experience’, Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times found it ‘stirring’, and Tammy C. Carter of the New Orleans Times-Picayune thought it ‘worth the wait’. The Tuskegee Airmen went on garnering a variety of television awards, including a Peabody, an Emmy (for sound), and a best-actor Golden Globe for Lawrence Fishburn.34 As history, and indeed in many respects as drama, The Tuskegee Airmen is a problematic film. More than a decade after it was made, however, it can still be easily purchased on DVD, continues to generate a great deal of comment in cyberspace, and remains the most accessible means through which young Americans learn about its subject. Symptomatic

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of the movie’s educational function is the way in which actor Terence Howard, who played a black pilot in the 2002 POW drama Hart’s War, used it as a reference source: the HBO film ‘helped a lot because I didn’t know anything about Tuskegee airmen until I saw the movie’.35 Though George Lucas has made noises about reviving his Red Tails project, it seems that, flaws and all, The Tuskegee Airmen will remain for the foreseeable future, for good or ill, the single most influential presentation on screen of the black cadet and fighter pilot experience in the Second World War.36

9 ‘What Happened was Wrong’: Come See the Paradise and the Japanese-American Experience in the Second World War Michael Paris Alan Parker’s Come See the Paradise, released in January 1991, was the first Hollywood feature film to deal with Japanese-Americans on the home front in the Second World War for over 45 years, and the first to examine their wartime experience with sympathy and understanding. The film focuses on the relationship between Lily Kawamura (Tamlyn Tomita), an American citizen of Japanese descent, and Jack McGurn (Dennis Quaid), an Irish-American union activist. Their story, told by Lily in a series of flashbacks, follows their initial meeting in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, in 1936, their subsequent marriage, and the disastrous consequences for Lily, her family and the Japanese-American community on the West Coast in the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbour. Promoted as an ‘interracial romance’, Parker’s film is actually a detailed historical examination of a still controversial episode of the Second World War – an event which the American film industry has clearly found problematic and uncomfortable to deal with. After America became involved in the Second World War in December 1941, Hollywood made a determined effort to produce films that would help minimise the divisions that existed within American society. Conscious that only a united and consensual nation could successfully wage ‘total war’, movies along with other forms of propaganda sought to show that Blacks, Hispanics, Jews and other ethnic minorities were essentially little different from their white fellow-citizens and were shoulder to shoulder in the fight against fascism and militarism. Even those citizens whose ethnic origins were in the now enemy nations – Germany and Italy – were soon welcomed into the fold as loyal Americans. But there was one group conspicuously absent from these social inclusion movies: the 120,000 Japanese-Americans, many American citizens by birth and settled along the Pacific Coast. Why 105

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citizens of Japanese descent were not only excluded from the American ‘family’ but demonised as agents of the Rising Sun had much to do with long-standing anti-Japanese attitudes, especially in California, and with the special circumstances in which America had been drawn into the war. The American reaction to the Japanese attack on their naval base at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 was, in the words of Gordon Prange, ‘a mind staggering mixture of surprise, awe, mystification, grief, humiliation, and above all, cataclysmic fury’.1 What created such trauma for Americans was not so much the material damage to their navy and air force, but rather that the onslaught had come without a declaration of hostilities. Even more treacherous was the fact that, given the distance from Japan to Hawaii, the Japanese fleet must have actually been on its way to attack even as the Emperor’s special envoys were discussing Japan’s ‘peaceful intentions’ in Washington. Not until 11 September 2001, when terrorists destroyed Manhattan’s World Trade Centre, would Americans experience the same sense of moral outrage and violation. In 1941 the trouncing of the American armed forces by what most Americans considered a racially inferior people added fuel to the fire and resulted in a wave of hatred so intense that many Americans would have been happy to see the extermination of the entire Japanese race. ‘Before we’re through with them’, said Admiral William ‘Bull’ Halsey the day after Pearl Harbour, ‘the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell’.2 This devastating blow to American pride was, as Ralph Donald has argued, dismissed with the argument that this ‘savage, uncivilized Asian enemy did not “play fair” ’.3 This allowed America to seize the moral high ground, and the war was played out as an uncomplicated scenario in which ‘innocent’ America was forced into a life-and-death struggle against a deceitful enemy who was increasingly demonised in American propaganda. Among the many myths current in the aftermath of Pearl Harbour was the widely held belief that the majority of the substantial Japanese community in Hawaii had been agents of the Emperor, deeply embedded in Hawaiian society, and just awaiting orders to assist the attack. In the early hours of 7th December it was believed they had destroyed communications, attacked military installations, and generally created as much confusion as possible in order to help the attackers. The same stories were later circulated about the Japanese invasions of the Philippines, and Wake Island, and were most vividly dramatised in Howard Hawk’s 1943 film Air Force. The moral, which most Americans took from these endlessly repeated stories, was that anyone of Japanese descent was

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almost certainly a spy or saboteur. The government were well aware that these rumours were without foundation but did nothing to refute them. Thus, as far as the American public were concerned, in the Pacific, apparently harmless Japanese immigrants had been revealed as implacable and deadly enemies. Why would the Japanese communities on America’s own West Coast, in California, Oregon and Washington, behave differently? Had they not also been deliberately planted long ago in anticipation of this moment? And such fears reinforced the deeply entrenched anti-Japanese attitudes of many Americans. By the beginning of the twentieth century, many white Americans had come to believe that Japanese immigrants would breed faster than the indigenous people and eventually outnumber them, even though the Japanese never exceeded more than 3 per cent of the population. At the same time it was widely held that their culture was so alien, they could never be assimilated, and in 1924 immigration from Japan was banned. In California, the original Japanese immigrants (Issei), subjected to racial abuse and occasional violence from their white neighbours, were not allowed to own land, to become citizens or to marry white Americans, although their children, born in the United States were citizens by birth (Nisei). Right-wing political interest groups such as the California Grange and the American Legion made anti-Japanese rhetoric a part of their platform and played upon the public’s fear of the ‘yellow peril’. By the late 1930s, however, three quarters of the Japanese on the West Coast were Nisei, US citizens, who considered themselves Americans first and foremost, but who were still regarded as aliens by most whites. By early 1942 the American military position was precarious, the Japanese advance across the Pacific seemed unstoppable and an attack on the West Coast was believed to be imminent. Given the panic and hysteria after Pearl Harbour, many Americans believed that those of Japanese descent posed a direct threat to national security. Arthur Caylor, a well-known San Francisco columnist, for example, suggested the ultimate white American nightmare when he told his readers that he had evidence that Japanese agents were making overtures to the ‘Negro’ population with a view to joint action to bring about the collapse of white America.4 Fear exacerbated the antipathy directed at the JapaneseAmerican community, and abuse and violence escalated. In Come See the Paradise Parker neatly captures the tension and petty nastiness directed at Japanese-Americans at this time. When Lily returns to her parents’ home just after Pearl Harbour, the house is being searched by the FBI, not because they have evidence of wrongdoing, but simply because

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the Kawamuras are Japanese. Later, on Christmas Eve, Jack takes his daughter Mina to see Santa Claus in a local store. When Mina’s turn comes to tell Santa what she wants for Christmas, the indignant Santa tells Jack, ‘Scoot, pal. I ain’t sitting no Japanese kid on my lap, for Christ’s sake    anyway she’s a Buddhist.’ Jack, fuming at the distress this abuse causes his daughter, whispers threateningly to this bigoted Santa, This little girl ain’t no Buddhist, Pal! As a matter of fact she’s a Christian and believes in Santa Claus. Now ‘either you’re going to sit her on your lap and let her tell you what she wants for Christmas or I’m going to stuff this fucking beard down your fucking throat, fatso!’ Jack and Mina are thrown out of the store as troublemakers.5 Parker based these episodes on real-life experiences, but they were to prove to be only irritations for Japanese-Americans in the light of what was to follow. On 19 February 1942, under pressure from a scare-mongering press, racist politicians and the military, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorised the detention of all those of Japanese descent on the West Coast – even those who were American citizens. The decision was met with almost universal approval by many Americans, particularly the xenophobic elements in Congress like the odious Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, while only a handful of Churchmen, academics and politicians argued that such drastic measures were unnecessary and unconstitutional.6 Even among the more liberal minded a ‘better safe than sorry’ attitude prevailed. In Parker’s film this attitude is summarised by a farmer, a seemingly decent and hard-working man, who gives Jack a ride to the internment camp so he can visit his family. The farmer is sympathetic to Jack’s position and tells him, Real good people some of them Japs    had a couple working for me    Real hard workers. Trouble is you don’t know which ones to trust, which ones will shoot you in the back. Hard problem    Beats me! Beginning in March 1942, some 120,000 Japanese Americans were evacuated to hastily constructed internment camps in Northern California, Arizona and elsewhere. The Canadian government, under Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, quickly followed the American example and in summer 1942 22,000 Japanese-Canadians living along the Pacific coast were interned in similar circumstances.7 The detention

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of the Issei was justified on the grounds that they ‘might’ constitute a danger to American security, while the apparently loyal Nisei were interned for their own protection against a rising tide of mob violence. Parker deals with this in a scene where Jack, now serving in the army, complains to his commanding officer that his wife is Japanese but an American citizen and that the camps are wrong. While the officer is inclined to agree with Jack he does point out that There are a lot of apple pie Americans out there who wouldn’t hate a soul before all of this, who’ve got kids being slaughtered by the Japanese Army. Everyday they hear about another Japanese unit going Banzai and bayoneting women and kids. Maybe locking your people away is the best place for them. Late in 1942 Mitsye Endo, a young Nisei woman, along with several other internees, challenged the legality of their detention, but only in December 1944 did the Supreme Court finally rule in her favour. Yet despite this precedent most Japanese-Americans remained behind barbed wire until the camps were finally closed in late 1945.8 A dark episode in American history which historian John M. Blum has called the ‘most blatant mass violation of civil liberties in American history’.9 In 1943 the government released a short documentary film, Japanese Relocation, produced by the War Activities Committee to justify the internment. This explains that after the outbreak of war it became necessary to ‘transfer’ several thousand Japanese residents from the Pacific Coast to areas inland and that the film is an ‘historical record of the operation carried out by the Army and War Relocation Authority’. The narrator was Milton S. Eisenhower, the first director of the War Relocation Authority, who adopts a suitable ‘this hurts us too’ approach, This picture tells how the mass migration was accomplished. Neither the army nor the War Relocation Authority relished the idea taking men, women and children from their homes, their shops and their farms, so the military and civil agencies alike determined to do the job as a democracy should – with real consideration for the people involved. To be fair, Eisenhower was concerned by the internment, and in a memo to Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard, dated 1 April 1942, wrote, ‘I feel most strongly that when the war is over    we as Americans are going to regret the avoidable injustices that may have been done.’10 Japanese Relocation makes a determined effort to explain why such drastic action was necessary by showing how docks, military and naval

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bases and aircraft factories were all close to areas where those of Japanese descent had settled, and which offered tempting targets for potential saboteurs. As the commentary points out, ‘Uncertainty over what would happen to these people in case of a Japanese invasion’ led to the army suggesting evacuation inland away from these areas of strategic importance. It goes on to show how the Japanese-American population were registered, moved to transit camps and eventually moved on to the permanent camps in the interior. Over documentary footage of the evacuation, the narrator tells us ‘the many loyal [Nisei] among them felt that this was a sacrifice they could make on behalf of America’s war effort’. But just how this would help the war effort was not explained. The film tells us that the permanent camps were built on land that was ‘raw, untamed, but full of opportunity’. Here the evacuees would ‘build schools, educate their children and reclaim the desert’, suggesting that like the original pioneers, this contact with the frontier would advance the Americanisation of these immigrants in a bizarre perversion of Turner’s Frontier Thesis. Japanese Relocation goes to great lengths to show how well the internees were treated, well-cared for and with opportunities to work for the war effort making camouflage or raising guayule to supplement the nation’s rubber supply. Viewed today, the overriding impression is that the film was a self-indulgent pat on the back for America’s humane treatment of those who might be potentially dangerous to American security. It ends by reminding its audience that this film is only a Prologue of a story yet to be told    It will be fully told only when circumstances once again permit loyal Americans to once again enjoy the freedom we in this country cherish, and when the disloyal have left this country for good.    We are protecting ourselves without violating the principles of Christian decency. But the telling of that story, in film at least, was to be shelved for the next 50 years. Wartime propaganda movies, gripped in a ‘Beast from the East’ mindset, continually reinforced the negative image of Japanese-Americans. Only weeks after the interment had begun, Twentieth Century Fox began work on Little Tokyo USA (directed by Otto Brower), a hastily made B movie that sought to profit from current public interest in the round-up of the Japanese in ‘Little Tokyo’. The film clearly suggests that all those of Japanese descent were potential, if not actual, traitors, by focusing on the villainous Ho Takamura, the American-born head

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of a vast espionage network committed to ending the white man’s domination of the Pacific. Long domiciled in America, his agents await the Emperor’s signal to begin their work, but a tough LA detective, Mike Steele, is on their trail. Steele’s girlfriend, a radio reporter, is the voice of misguided liberalism who, only when confronted by the extent of Japanese treachery, realises she has been naïve and accepts that internment is necessary. In the final scene we see her broadcasting to white America    And so, in the interests of national safety all Japanese, whether citizens or not, are being evacuated from strategic military zones on the Pacific Coast. Unfortunately, in time of war, the loyal must suffer inconvenience with the disloyal.    Be vigilant, America! Using actuality footage of the evacuation, a documentary style and stating in its prologue that this is a ‘film document’, Little Tokyo gave audiences the impression that it was a true story and powerfully reinforced the distrust and anger that Americans directed at JapaneseAmericans. As Koppes and Black have pointed out, the Office of War Information (OWI) viewed Little Tokyo as an ‘invitation to the Witch Hunt that would open the floodgates of prejudice    and render the post-war re-absorption of Japanese-Americans an almost insuperable problem’.11 Despite the criticism, the studio refused to make more than minor changes to the film, but the episode did persuade the OWI that if they were to curb such propaganda excesses, they must become more involved in advising the film industry. Nevertheless, they could not prevent Columbia from releasing Batman, a 15-episode serial for younger audiences, the following year. Here, the comic book Superhero, in his first-cinematic representation, is enlisted to track down the evil Dr Daka and his Japanese-American spy ring. Even in 1945, with Japan defeated, RKO was still attacking Americans of Japanese descent. The documentary-style feature Betrayal from the East, set just before Pearl Harbour, suggests that Japanese agents in America had long been preparing for the war. Introduced by the journalist Drew Pearson, the film adopts a ‘now it can be told’ approach and reinforces the idea that the internment had been justified. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this low-budget mishmash is the epilogue in which the pompous Pearson lectures the audience and chillingly points to the Cold War future and the belief in the enemy within, ‘The war against underground enemies never begins and never ends. We must not relax again. It cannot happen here again    .’

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Wartime films naturally made no attempt to see events from the perspective of loyal Japanese-American citizens, but Parker’s film offers a useful corrective. Many Issei, denied the opportunity to become American citizens, clung to Japanese customs and culture and often intended to return to Japan having made their fortunes in America. Their children, however, regarded themselves as Americans and rejected the old-fashioned ways of their parents. Mr Kawamura, Lily’s father, is Issei, deeply attached to Japanese traditions. His six children, however, are all Nisei, American citizens both by birth and by preference. They have never visited Japan, hardly speak the language and regard themselves as completely American. Their father complains that while he imports Japanese films with big stars all the young people are interested in is tap-dancing and ‘Fred Gable and Jinji Rogers.’ Harry, his eldest son, is a jazz singer who has played bit parts in the movies; Charlie, his second son, is mad about baseball and deplores his father’s desire to cling to the old ways; while the girls Lily, Dulcie and Joyce are thoroughly modern American teenagers. It is Lily’s refusal to accept her father’s wish for an arranged marriage to an elderly but successful Japanese business man that clearly shows the conflict between the older generation and their Americanised offspring. Later, when Kawamura refuses to allow her to marry Jack, a non-Japanese, Lily asserts her independence and the couple run away to Oregon, where interracial marriage is legal. Thus, for Lily the war and the subsequent alienation of Japanese-Americans is a denial of everything she has always believed in. As she explains, ‘For us the war was so far away.    We were Americans. But people looked at our faces and we weren’t Americans anymore. We were the enemy.’ When the family are forcibly evacuated, the young Kawamuras solemnly smash their father’s collection of traditional Japanese records in a symbolic rejection of the culture that has ruined their lives. The dreary years of internment brought to the fore divisions between the generations and created considerable bitterness among the Nisei, which was further fuelled by the primitive conditions in the camps. When in 1943 the army decide to recruit Nisei for the war in Europe, opinion among the young Japanese was divided. In the film, Harry and Charlie, Lily’s brothers, argue bitterly. Harry wants to take the oath of allegiance and volunteer but Charlie is vehemently opposed. ‘But we’re Americans’, Harry tells him. ‘We stopped being Americans the moment they put up the wire’, Charlie replies. Harry does eventually join the army but Charlie becomes increasingly bitter and gradually adopts Japanese customs. Harry is later killed in action in Italy, and Charlie, believing his family has been betrayed by America, decides to apply for

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repatriation to Japan, even though he can hardly speak the language. Charlie is typical of the many Nisei who, resentful of their treatment by the American government, elected to return to Japan rather than stay in a country that seemed to regard them as traitors. With the internment legislation overturned, the internees were free to return home, but most families had lost everything, homes, businesses and savings. The surviving Kawamuras, homeless and penniless, are dependent on the charity of a distant aunt who offers them a temporary home.12 In post-war America, the internment of Japanese-Americans was a painful subject best forgotten; most Japanese-Americans, shamed by the experience, rarely spoke of it13 – which certainly appears to have been Hollywood’s preferred position. The glut of combat movies that emerged in the late 1940s continued to portray the Japanese military as bestial,14 and only in the mid-1950s, as the Cold War became increasingly tense, did America attempt to restore normal relations with Japan. Hollywood certainly played its part here with films such as Teahouse of the August Moon (1956) and Sayonara (1957), both of which suggested that the Japanese were not so alien after all. In fact the latter even condoned an interracial sexual relationship by allowing an American pilot to fall for a Japanese woman. By the later 1960s even the war was being represented with less overt racial bias. In films such as Frank Sinatra’s None but the Brave (1965) and John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific (1969) it was even suggested that some Japanese soldiers were not very different from Americans. Interestingly, both films put their protagonists into situations where the survival of both Japanese and Americans could only be achieved by mutual cooperation. Both films were American-Japanese co-productions as was Tora! Tora! Tora! (1971), a detailed examination of the attack on Pearl Harbour, but told with remarkable fairness. The film suggests that in 1941 the Japanese government felt it had little choice but to attack America in order to ensure their own survival. Tora! Tora! Tora! attempted to undermine the odium in which the Japanese were still held by suggesting that the war was nothing more than a bad mistake based upon misperception and error. But while these films were intended to heal old wounds, Hollywood was remarkably reluctant to revisit the case of the Japanese-American internment. Only one film, the low-budget Go for Broke (1951) focused on those Nisei who had volunteered to serve in the armed forces. The film, written and directed by Robert Pirosh, was a tribute to the 442nd Infantry Regiment which served in the Italian campaign. The film uses Roosevelt’s remark that Americanism is a matter of the ‘heart and mind’ and not of ‘race or ancestry’, as its preface which, for anyone familiar

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with what happened to the Nisei in 1942, must surely have been greeted with a certain cynicism. The film, however, does use real veterans of the regiment to play the main characters. The storyline is somewhat less original and centres on the young Lieutenant Graham (Van Johnson), a Texan who, appointed to command a platoon of the 442nd, is horrified to find he is to soldier with ‘Japs’. The film is essentially about how he comes to trust, even admire, the courage and commitment of his Japanese-American troops in combat. The Regiment apparently won more citations for bravery than any other combat unit. Although some individuals in the platoon occasionally refer to their families in the relocation camps, the film is solidly focused on how these Nisei soldiers proved themselves to be loyal Americans. Only one film, Fred Zinnerman’s Bad Day at Black Rock (1955), provided audiences with some insight into the hatred that had been levelled at Japanese-Americans during the war years. It is against this cinematic background that Alan Parker’s Come See the Paradise must be set; the first mainstream Hollywood film to examine the home-front experience of Japanese-Americans through the experience of one family, and one which shows them as victims of an intolerant and racist society. But Parker’s sympathetic and remarkably restrained film should be seen as one element of a wider movement to recover the ‘lost history’ of Japanese-Americans during the war, a movement which began to emerge as the fiftieth anniversary of the war approached. After 1945, even many of those who had been instrumental in devising government policy expressed regret at the part they had played in the internment programme. Tom Clarke, the Coordinator of Alien Enemy Control, for example, wrote soon after his retirement from public life in 1966, I have made a lot of mistakes in my life.    One is my part in the evacuation of all the Japanese from California in 1942.    We picked them up and put them in concentration camps. That’s the truth of the matter.    Although at the time I argued the case – I am amazed that the Supreme Court ever approved it.15 This controversial episode, then, which so detracted from the lustre of ‘The Good War’ was largely ignored by historians and commentators after 1945 and virtually disappeared from the popular memory of white America. The move to recover Japanese-American wartime history first emerged in the 1970s when several academic studies, mostly oral histories, were

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published. But by the early 1980s the surviving veterans of Nisei combat units were anxious that their contribution to the final victory should be more widely known. This eventually resulted in the opening of the Japanese-American National Museum in Los Angeles in 1992, the creation of the Japanese-American Historical Society of San Diego in the same year and the Japanese-American Historical Project at the University of Washington. In 1986 Steven Okazaki’s critically praised documentary about the internment, Unfinished Business, was released, which in turn inspired the more widely seen television documentary film A Family Gathering (1989), part of the highly acclaimed ‘American Experience’ series from PBS/WGBH. Produced by Lisa Yasui, A Family Gathering told the story of her own family interned for over 3 years at Manzanar, the most notorious of the camps. Thus by the time Come See the Paradise went into production in August 1989, a number of attempts to make the Japanese-American story more widely known had already been made. Yet interestingly Come See the Paradise was the only one of these projects to emerge from outside the Japanese-American community. Parker, although British-born, had worked in Hollywood for some time and had already enjoyed considerable commercial success with such diverse films as Bugsy Malone (1976), Midnight Express (1978) and Mississippi Burning (1988). He came to the project through his interest in Dorothea Lange’s celebrated photographs of the evacuation of the Japanese community from West Coast and their subsequent internment. After completing Mississippi Burning in 1988, Parker had been considering a love story involving a left-wing activist in 1930s’ America. In discussion with the producer Robert Colesberry, who shared Parker’s fascination with Lange’s photographs and what they represented, the project began to evolve. ‘Suddenly’, wrote Parker, ‘the threads of the story came together’, an interracial romance involving a political activist and a Japanese woman against the background of Pearl Harbour and the internment.16 His aim was to tell a story that most Americans were at best only dimly aware of – even the Americans in his production crew knew almost nothing about the episode. ‘The film is simple from the moral point of view’, he later wrote, ‘What happened was wrong. The film shows it’s wrong   ’.17 Parker has explained that one of the reasons he chose this project was the criticism levelled at his previous film Mississippi Burning, which also dealt with American racism. ‘I felt that I had some Unfinished Business with regard to commenting upon racism in America    I felt there was more to tell   ’. But mindful of the reception of Mississippi Burning, he was anxious that Come See the Paradise should be as historically accurate as possible.18

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Although Parker’s characters are fictional he went to considerable lengths to ensure that the film would capture the real experiences of Japanese-Americans. Historical research was supplemented by interviews with those who had been interned; many of the older actors in the cast had themselves been ‘relocated’ as children and had vivid memories of the camps. Sab Shimono (Mr Kawamura), for example, spent 3 years in the camp at Tule Lake and based his character in the film on his own father, while Cynthia Aso was at Manzanar and actually remembered Dorothea Lange photographing her family. Parker made use of their experiences and when possible incorporated them into the script. Locations were to prove difficult; much of LA’s Little Tokyo had been redeveloped, but in Portland, Oregon, Parker found a district virtually untouched and which, with a little work, could double for Little Tokyo in the late 1930s. As Parker admitted, it would have been easier to recreate the sets on a sound stage but he was anxious to find a location that had the ‘right atmosphere’ in order to get closer to the reality of the past.19 The camp to which the Kawamura family are sent was built at Palmdale in the Mohave Desert, using old photographs to ensure accuracy. Parker’s diligence paid dividends for critics were generous in their praise for his re-creation of the period. Come See the Paradise was released in January 1991 but without the expensive publicity campaign that Parker’s previous films had received. Film critics generally welcomed the attempt to bring the story of the Japanese-American relocation to the screen, and only one, Rita Kempley of the Washington Post, seemingly took offence that it had been made by a non-American, referring to Parker as a ‘British director forever poking his nose into our affairs.’20 The evocative visual re-creation of the period and the acting were singled out for praise. Some thought that Jack’s story was unnecessary and unfinished. Parker does actually leave the viewer in some confusion here for we see Jack being questioned by the FBI about his pre-war activities in late 1942, but from then until he returns to his family in 1948, we are told nothing. But as the reunion takes place 3 years after the war has ended, we can only assume he has been in prison. Actually, of course, this really doesn’t matter for Jack’s experience is incidental to Parker’s main focus, the Kawamura family. Only Chris Hicks of the Desert News thought the film ‘contrived’, the dialogue ‘clunky’ and, on the whole, ‘disappointingly bland’ for such a dramatic event,21 a view echoed by Frank Maloney, who was surprised at the lack of anger in the film and felt that Parker had glossed over some of the worst aspects of the camps, the appalling desert climate and the internal divisions between those who felt betrayed by their government and

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those anxious to demonstrate their loyalty to the United States.22 While Parker does give a sense of these issues, the Kawamuras are essentially shown as hapless victims in a hostile environment. With its limited release, Come See the Paradise slipped through the net as far as some film-goers were concerned. Vince Deehan, for example, only became aware of the film in 1996, 6 years after its initial release.23 The reviewer for the Edinburgh University Film Society wondered why the story of the Japanese internment remained so little known and felt the film deserved to be more widely known.24 The most critical reviews, however, came from British publications. Farrah Anwar, writing in the Monthly Film Bulletin, argued that Jack’s story was an unnecessary distraction from the real story of the internment, while the love story was a ‘prosaic version of Romeo and Juliet’. Overall, he claimed, the film was ‘fatally lacking in any ironic standpoint’.25 It would seem that Anwar, who clearly had little more than a passing familiarity with Shakespeare, also failed to understand Parker’s film. Time Out was even more hostile – ‘turgid melodrama’, it noted and complained that Jack is too ‘poetically articulate’ for such a ‘working-class hero’26 – a reviewer who presumably had never heard of Brendan Behan? Such reviews did little to ensure the financial success of the movie. Nevertheless, it did receive three nominations for the Palme d’Or at Cannes and was nominated for an award for its contribution to human rights by the US Political Film Society. Come See the Paradise was released on video in late 1991, but appears to have been deleted within a year; even a DVD release was delayed until June 2006. The film has been almost totally ignored by film historians; only Terry Hong, writing on Asian-Americans in the Columbia Companion to American History on Film, complained that even in well-intentioned films Asian-Americans are, ‘even in their own stories, subordinated to white Americans’, and cited Parker’s film as one of the worst offenders.27 Yet a close reading of the film shows that Parker’s emphasis is firmly on the disintegration of the Kawamura family under the pressure of interment rather than on Jack. Jack’s story provides an essential counterpoint to the experiences of the Kawamuras. In the film’s prologue, the fiery Irish-immigrant, an active trade unionist, is involved in a firebombing incident against a nonunion theatre in New Jersey and is forced to hide out with his brother Gerry in Los Angeles. A troublemaker and wanted by the police, he is still more welcome in America than the patriotic, law-abiding Nisei. And even the few scenes that deal with his story are filtered through Lily’s experience as a Japanese American woman. The original poster for the

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film does foreground Jack, but this would seem to be because Quaid was more well known to audiences than the rest of the cast. Despite the lack of commercial success Come See the Paradise is a remarkably well-made and engaging film that exposed a distasteful episode in the American past to a mass audience – a story that is told with historical accuracy, restraint and great understanding; as Parker has noted, it was a project that, ‘for many of our Japanese-American cast and crew    wasn’t just a movie, but a part of their lives’.28 Come See the Paradise is not a masterpiece, but it is a sincere and compassionate film that powerfully reminds us what can happen when hysteria and panic replace reason and justice. As the American film critic Roger Ebert noted in his review, Come See the Paradise is a reminder that ‘when the country is threatened, our civil liberties are among the first casualties’,29 a message that has perhaps even more relevance for contemporary audiences.30

10 Commissioning Mass Murder: Conspiracy and History at the Wannsee Conference Simone Gigliotti

We will not sterilize every Jew and wait for the race to die. We will not sterilize every Jew and then exterminate them, that’s farcical. Dead men don’t hump, dead women don’t get pregnant; death is the most reliable form of sterilisation    These words, signifying a shift from the conditional survival of the Jews to their physical death, were pronounced by an exasperated Kenneth Branagh in Conspiracy, the 2001 HBO dramatisation of the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942. It was this performance, as Reinhard Heydrich, that gave the thespian Branagh the most difficult acting experience of his 20-year career. He remarked that ‘in 20 years of acting, I’ve never been involved with a character so disturbing to my own peace of mind’.1 This disturbance of mind was, presumably, absent for Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), when he invited 15 men representing the civil service, the SS and the Party to an imposing villa in a Berlin suburb of Wannsee. They were summoned to discuss, in the words of the Protocol, the only surviving transcript of the meeting at Wannsee, the ‘organizational, policy and technical prerequisites for the Final Solution of the European Jewish Question’ and to ‘ensure in advance that the central organizations involved be brought together and their policies properly coordinated’.2 This meeting has been recently characterised as the ‘most infamous in history’.3 The calling of the Wannsee Conference sealed the fate of the remaining Jews in Hitler’s Europe. Up to that point, millions had been impoverished in ghettos and killed through massacre, disease and starvation. The Wannsee Conference continues to embody key tropes of the Nazi regime: the objectified male perpetrator who excels in the commission of a clinical, corporate approach to killing. Wannsee also offers 119

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the incongruous setting of a luxurious villa to inflict further deprivations onto a besieged ethnic group who had already suffered 9 years of Nazi bondage. It also offers evidence of genocidal intention, the heavily edited Wannsee Protocol. When seen in context, Wannsee is not the only location for villains planning heinous crimes. There is of course no shortage of Nazi crimes or repellant perpetrator types from which to draw cautionary comparisons about existential, moral or historical crisis; Hitler’s return in recent films such as Bruno Ganz’s saliva-splattering portrayal in Downfall suggests a slight revision of the possibilities of representing his apparent human side in a reworked cinematic biography. The focus on the men of genocide in Conspiracy, however, takes the viewer into situations where perpetrator actions are ostensibly less conflicted, and more plausible and believable than the evil personified by Hitler’s seemingly endless professional and personal pathologies. This chapter outlines what I see as critical interventions of Conspiracy to the representation of genocidal actions, which apart from the enduring and not unrealistic representation of Nazis as calculated and sadistic, remains a fairly under-analysed topic of feature films or dramatisations about the Holocaust. How does Conspiracy portray the interactions of bureaucrats and working together for the Führer? How are technical differences and ostensible moral objections to the Final Solution’s most advanced method, gas chamber killings in camps, proposed and resolved? How have the lead actors, particularly Kenneth Branagh, publicly cast themselves through their performance in Conspiracy as victims of acting as a traumatic occupation like or unlike some of the conspirators at Wannsee? And finally, how does Conspiracy acknowledge the historical responsibilities that attend to the cinematic representation of perpetrators of genocide? The Wannsee Conference was originally planned for 9 December 1941. Its main purpose was to resolve existing conflicts between governmental and party functionaries as to the future treatment of Jews, particularly the borderline status of ‘half-Jews’ and Jews in mixed marriages.4 Key events terminated the planned meeting of 9 December, which was now re-scheduled for 20 January 1942. With the impact of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour that prompted the entry of the United States into the war, the pace of extermination plans of the RSHA (the body combining the Gestapo, the criminal police and the SD for the whole of Germany) accelerated, and it was that office which thereafter assumed operational responsibility for the Final Solution. The original invitees from the 9 December list did not all appear on the re-issued list of 8 January 1942. The group that attended the meeting

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at Wannsee on 20 January 1942 comprised representatives of ministries with responsibilities for the Jewish question: Wilhelm Stuckart (Interior), Roland Freiser (Justice), Erich Neumann (Four-Year Plan organisation), Friedrich-Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Chancellery) and Martin Luther (Foreign Ministry). Representatives from the civilian administration of the occupied territories in the East included Alfred Meyer, Georg Leibbrandt and Joseph Bühler, Hans Frank’s deputy. Gerhard Klopfer (Party Chancellery) and Otto Hofmann (SS Main Office for Race and Settlement) had special interests in race questions, while those from the field included Rudolf Lange (Commander of the Security Police and the SF for the General District of Latvia) and Eberhard Schöngarth (Chief of the Security Police and the SD in the Generalgouvernement). Rounding off the group were those from the SS, Heinrich Müller, Gestapo Head and chief of RSHA Department IV, and beneath him, Adolf Eichmann. Reinhard Heydrich, the convener of the meeting, was also Reich Protector in the occupied territory and, at just 37 years, ‘one of the most feared and powerful men in Germany’.5 The Wannsee Conference remains central for historians in debates about the importance of conceptual transitions, administrative mechanisms and bureaucratic agency in the formulation of Nazi anti-Jewish policy. The wording of the invitation to the meeting was itself so vague as to incite speculation about the priority given to Jews in Germany, and the deportability of Jews in other countries. The historian Christian Gerlach contends that original conception for the conference sought to define who would be killed in a continental ‘war of extermination’, a decision, he contends, Hitler made public with ‘clear and calamitous consequences’ in early December 1941.6 Most historians view Wannsee’s significance as the outcome of, rather than location for, a Hitler decision for authorising the ‘Final Solution’, the comprehensive plan to murder Jewry in Europe and intended territories rather than the piecemeal and unsystematic approach which characterised earlier regional killing actions of the Einsatzgruppen against Soviet Jewry and deportations and killings of German Jews. Roseman sees the Wannsee Conference as a ‘kind of keyhole, through which we can glimpse the emerging Final Solution. It took place at a time when the idea of a reservation had been abandoned, labour scarcities were pressing, and when the Nazis may or may not have decided exactly how to eliminate all the Jews’.7 In addition to these readings, I suggest that the Wannsee Conference’s significant symbolic contribution relates to what Conspiracy depicts: the high point of bureaucratic agency in the Holocaust. Indeed, Conspiracy

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is the visualisation of the still-persistent trope of the ‘banality of evil’ that Hannah Arendt applied to Adolf Eichmann’s testimony given at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961. This enduring though not uncontested trope significantly re-considered what it meant to be complicit in a regime where knowledge of one’s contribution in perpetrating mass death was insufficient to encourage a moral conscience and resignation from that role. Finally, the conference is significant for the survival of a singular evidentiary document, the Wannsee Protocol, a transcript of the meeting, edited first by Eichmann and then by Heydrich, which was stamped ‘Top Secret’, ‘and 16th copy’ out of ‘30 copies’ when it was discovered by US legal officials in March 1947.8 The document’s restrained and euphemistic language concealed what was overwhelmingly an ideological, physical and passionately pursued project over the course of 12 years of the regime: the bloody, intimate and human crime of genocide. While historians urge a cautious approach to interpreting the Protocol’s objectified status in Holocaust historiography, the document still ‘remains the most emblematic and programmatic statement of the Nazi way of doing genocide’.9 Like other historians, I read the Protocol discursively in its written and unwritten power. Several themes dominate the protocol as a basis for thinking about the representation of bureaucratic agency in Conspiracy: the appearance of lawful authority for the transition from ‘emigration’ to ‘evacuation’ and the associated administrative difficulties, the geographical dispersion of Jews as global enemy who require ‘evacuation’ under the new directive from the Führer, and the ambiguous status of persons of ‘mixed blood’ and in mixed marriages who threaten the achievement of an ‘overall solution’. Various incarnations of ‘the Jew’ pervade the Protocol: as enemy, as dispersed and displaced, as reproductive threat (‘the germ cell of a new Jewish revival’), as a statistical object of accounting, as wealthy and dominating, as racially liminal according to the Nuremberg Law’s ‘mixed blood’ criteria and as legally and socially subversive if married to a German citizen. In Heydrich’s editing of the discussion, the Protocol’s language is restrained with occasional glimpses of a military procedure: the Nazis have been engaged in a ‘struggle’ with the ‘enemy’. Insistence on technique takes precedence, for time utilisation is paramount in the concentrated direction and forced movement of Jews, as reflected in phrases like ‘increased emigration’, ‘flow’ and ‘speed the procedure of emigration’. Of course, there were many synonyms in Nazi discourse for the evolving physical assaults that concentrated the bodies of Jews spatially,

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socially and in language: ‘ghettoisation’, ‘emigration’ and ‘evacuation’. The burden of identifying, capturing and transporting Jews is not just a ‘German problem’, but a shared responsibility for the receiving countries in terms of financing and visas. New possibilities are recorded in the document, for if the report card on emigration could glowingly confirm that 537,000 Jews were ‘sent out’ of the country between 1933 and 31 October 1941, it did not deny that emigration was now prohibited ‘due to the possibilities of the east’. The East was a colonial imaginary of unparalleled imagination, anticipated expansion and exploitation. It was also a defined geographical area which housed the majority though not all of the extermination camps. In administrative terms, the East included the Generalgouvernement, a Nazi-controlled territory of occupied Poland with over 600,000 Jews in overcrowded ghettos. It also included the camps Lublin (Majdanek), and the Operation Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. Although the camps of Chelmno and Auschwitz were not located in this administrative region, their destructive capacities are commonly carried over into it. It was this territory of the East which the protocol refers as the location of the ‘new solution’, for which the Führer has given ‘prior approval’. If the protocol is replete with euphemisms of action, the bureaucrats and killers do not claim it. The Final Solution is an anonymously performed and planned murder, without extensive admission of agency of the bureaucrats and the killers. ‘Practical experience’ refers to prior measures developed and applied in relating to killing, such as the intimate and gratuitous murders of the Einsatzgruppen, while ‘practical execution’ refers to tasks to be done, such as the sweep and hunt for Jews from west to east. If action is stated, it is the Jews who are admitted as victims of the ‘new solution’. There is little equivocation about this in the Protocol, for as Roseman states, ‘Heydrich’s aim of establishing shared knowledge of murder explains one of the real oddities of the Wannsee Protocol, namely its peculiar juxtaposition of euphemism and undisguised murderousness.’10 The Jews are the recipients of this unconcealed murderousness, of ‘evacuations’ and ‘new solutions’. It is they who are in the constant performance of dying: in terms of being ‘put to work’ in the east, in constructing roads, with the admission that the majority will be eliminated by ‘natural causes’. Given the statistical breakdown of the ‘occupational Jew’ into agriculture, urban workers, trade, civil service and professions such as medicine, it seems highly implausible that the Jews would have been capable of working in this manner, forcing a statement that ‘any final remnant that survives will

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doubtless consist of the most resistant elements’, and ‘they will have to be dealt with appropriately’. Jewish ethnic survival was not permitted in the death world of the Protocol. Attendees at the conference make appearances in the Protocol as responsible workers in a bureaucratic conglomerate, doing their jobs by following orders, taking minor initiatives when necessary, and contacting various representatives in and outside Germany to remove technical obstacles. Key figures stand out: Hitler, Heydrich’s constantly stated authority and mandate (‘irrespective of geographical boundaries’), Hofmann, Stuckart and Bühler. Concern with the lawfulness of the Final Solution is underscored in the application of the Nuremberg Laws to individual cases of contingent biological status. The Protocol’s written text also highlights its subjectively applied criteria for survival, whereby ‘it is not ruled out that the decision may be made to the detriment of the person of mixed blood’ and that the prerequisites for ‘any exemption must always be on the personal merit of the person of mixed blood’. The Protocol also makes reference to sterilisation for ‘persons of mixed blood of the first degree who are exempted from evacuation’ as a voluntary precondition of remaining in the Reich. This section of the protocol emphasises the discursive ‘biological Jew’, the living and unborn, since prevention of a Jewish ethnic future was a prerequisite to German racial purity. Roseman contends that ‘in the pressured atmosphere, with such a strong corps of supporters from the RSHA, the SS and the Party, Heydrich was able to push forward with little opposition, even on the contested Mischling question. Only the borderline cases enjoyed any defence at all – the privilege of sterilisation. Only Jews essential for German production should enjoy a temporary reprieve.’11 The Protocol’s chronicle of various ‘solutions’ and the bloodless and anonymous agency of their commission are suggestive of why the meeting endures as a major boundary-crossing moment for historians and other scholars seeking to understand perpetrator behaviour. The shared complicity of the Wannsee men in implementing widespread mass killing are seen by scholars as exemplary of the Nazi approach to genocide: emotionless, distanced and calculated. It is easy to see how the Wannsee Conference and Heydrich’s version of it in the Protocol have reinforced this vision. The fatal job descriptions and ostensible conflicts of bureaucratic perpetrators receive central treatment in this burgeoning literature situated between the structural features of Nazi totalitarianism and the motivations of an estimated 100,000 perpetrators who implemented and escalated its ideological visions of racial cleansing and territorial domination, particularly the genocide of the

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Jews. This literature was both energised and complicated by Arendt’s ‘the banality of evil’. But how is it possible to affirm a blueprint for genocide from a document that cites a Hitler decision as its mandate but is not the record of oral instruction itself? How does the lack of written evidence of genocidal intent, so characteristic of the oral culture which facilitated discussions and orders about Jewish matters, influence readings of the Wannsee Protocol as a symbolic ‘stand in’ for what Peter Longerich has called ‘an unwritten order’?12 The curiosity of the text’s oscillation between pronouncements on the death of Jewish labourers and the pretension to survival from ‘evacuations’ certainly complicates its potential readings, rendering almost redundant the predilection for euphemisms. Indeed, is it possible to overestimate the importance of the Protocol as emblematic of the Nazi way of doing genocide, since as Roseman says, ‘there is no camera-eye view    Why did Heydrich select this group of participants? What was his original agenda? Why did his invitees attend and what did they say that is not in the minutes? On all of these things, we have to speculate.’13 Based on what its scriptwriter Loring Mandel called ‘informed speculation’,14 Conspiracy gives angry, frustrated and impassioned voices to what the Protocol does not. It constructs a narrative truth for the anonymous agents of the Final Solution: individual male egos at work, backstabbing, jealousies, competition and frustrations. Mandel’s method of informed speculation aspires to become a plausible historical conversation between these men at Wannsee and historians who have written about them. The claim that the Wannsee Conference has become ‘the most infamous meeting in history’ sets a near-impossible standard for cinematic renderings, becoming its own limit event of genocide enacted, and indeed Conspiracy is not the first to venture into this territory. Most often, it is compared to Heinz Schirk’s Der Wannseekonferenz (1984), which depicts the same group of men discussing details about the Final Solution.15 But there, arguably, the similarities end. While both are the so-called ‘docu-dramas’, Der Wannseekonferenz appears to be much more convivial and casual, with the topic of mass death made palatable through the willing consumption of alcohol. Heydrich directs his attention equally between the flirty glances of the secretary and the global distribution and intended captivity of the Jews, while Eichmann displays a stereotypical neurosis for task facilitation and punctuality. The sequencing of topics at Der Wannseekonferenz does not follow the protocol, for it is implicit that the participants already knew about the intention to kill Jews through gassing before the conference, though, curiously, not

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all of the logistics of the Final Solution take place openly, as Heydrich, Müller and Eichmann are often separate from the others discussing details. More attention is given to the problem of transport provision, and preventing escapes during deportation. Der Wannseekonferenz also displays a camaraderie and atmosphere that are missing from Conspiracy, and indeed Conspiracy’s representation of its key figures arguably evokes familiar identifying figures of Nazism: perpetrators as villains, social misfits, pathological and obedient. If Der Wannseekonferenz departs from the item sequencing of the Protocol, how does Conspiracy give agency and action to the absent perpetrator voices and create an alternative truth of the Wannsee Conference? Mandel’s method of ‘informed speculation’ carries the weight of the historical burden of representation that in some respects suggests that the representation of Nazi crimes on screen requires more attention to factual accuracy in the artistic reconstruction of an authentic truth than other historical events. The implicit limit event of the Holocaust also carries over to its authors – are there limits to what activities, personalities and behaviours can be represented visually? Conspiracy’s director, Frank Pierson, laboured for 8 years to produce the film. The director of other HBO historical dramas such as Citizen Cohn (1992) and Truman (1995), Pierson, wanted Conspiracy to ‘elicit in viewers a kind of tenderness for the thin veneer of civilization that keeps us all from savaging each other to death’.16 The feeling of simulation was evident in the rather theatrical set for Conspiracy, to generate a claustrophobic feel for the place by placing the actors and the audience at desk level, and filming at certain camera angles reinforced this audience participation.17 The script remained crucial. After seeing Der Wannseekonferenz, Pierson and Conspiracy’s editor Peter Zinner wanted to portray the contrast between ‘the exasperated, morally indifferent manner in which these Nazis contemplated the Final Solution, and the unimaginable awfulness of its consequences’.18 To this end, they hired Loring Mandel, an Emmy-Award-winning screenwriter, to write a draft, the first of which he completed in 1996.19 Mandel’s method of ‘informed speculation’ continued the filmmakers’ attempts to render what they thought as plausible and authentic within the limits and possibilities of the historical record. First, Mandel’s research for the film encompassed archival work at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC, and the YIVO Institute and the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. Mandel was provided with a researcher to liaise with staff from the Wannsee Museum, and other specialists were present, such as an expert on German uniforms and

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consultants including the historian Michael Berenbaum. Mandel faced hurdles not entirely dissimilar from historians investigating Wannsee – lack of evidence of clear planning and of first-hand testimony. His ‘informed speculation’ therefore sought to provide what historians avoided through the creative reconstruction of conversations and the licence of dramatic art: ‘But what was most important, given the paucity of documented fact and first-hand testimony, was to gain as much knowledge of the political forces and of the backgrounds and actions of the participants, to the extent that it was possible. In almost every case, I was able to find enough about the participants to have what I considered a sound basis for creating their characters and anticipating what their responses might be.’20 With informed speculation, Mandel imagined a narrative and oral truth from an unrecorded transcript of genocide: ‘I knew what was discussed, but not exactly how.’21 ‘Informed speculation’ allowed him latitude for some of the characters and their anti-Semitic beliefs so that the statements they made in support of ‘solutions’ were not implausible and that Stuckart’s alternative proposal in the film for forced sterilisation or what he calls ‘medical re-socialization’ was in line with his beliefs about Jews. Secondly, the quest for legal authenticity is found in the film’s title that implies group participation, an obvious cinematic witness to the Nuremberg prosecution claim, of coordination, common plan or ‘conspiracy’ as stated in Section II, Article 6c, of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal of Nuremberg in relation to Crimes Against Humanity.22 Finally, the film’s quest for authenticity is mediated by its advertised blend of fictional and non-fictional truths. Its opening disclaimer states, ‘this film is based on a true story, with some scenes, events and characters created or changed for dramatic purposes’. The anticipated simulation of the conference and the Protocol’s iconic authenticity are established when the voice-over announces that 15 men ‘changed the world forever    only one record of what was said and done here survives from the wreckage of what was the Thousand-Year Reich’. Conspiracy proceeds in a rather routine fashion. Each of the 15 men arrives in the chill of winter at the grandiose villa, with Eichmann (Stanley Tucci) present long before the others, ensuring that preparations are made while flirting, badly, with one of the female maids. The men arrive in varying order of importance to a brief reception, and for some an awkward reunion, until Heydrich (Kenneth Branagh) arrives. Unlike Der Wannseekonferenz, the bulk of Conspiracy’s conversations are conducted at the table, with occasional crass interjections of Gerhard

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Klopfer, a caricature of the obese, gorging Nazi, while Neumann, from the Office of the Four Year Plan, seems to annoy everybody with his insignificance and earnestness. The moral conscience of Conspiracy is Kritzinger (David Threlfall), the only one of the group to express remorse after the war for his involvement in Nazi crimes, while intellectually, the star of the show is Stuckart, played by Colin Firth with a superiority complex and intellectual arrogance not dissimilar from his characterisation of Jane Austen’s Mr Darcy. Mandel’s script for Conspiracy is a visual essay about language. While other historians may look for representations of accuracy and historical plausibility in Conspiracy, my concern is how Mandel uses language as an agent of reclamation and witness to create an alternative ‘Wannsee Protocol’, a visual text of historical and biographical probabilities. Key themes prevail in Mandel’s vision: the use of alcohol to release inhibitions, the theme of affirmation and denial of killing that exists in the protocol is written into the script as deception of key figures like Kritzinger, the battle between law and ideology to authorise incrementally fatal solutions to Jewish life in Europe, and the stripping of language to revise the long-standing ‘banality of evil’ trope synonymous with the agency of desktop perpetrators. Conspiracy’s revisiting of these tropes occurs alongside affirmations of stereotypes, such as obsession with efficiency, selective record-keeping and coded discussion. Motifs of time punctuate the film, which at 87 minutes is of similar duration to the actual conference, reflecting the film’s aspiration to be a ‘live event’.23 At the start of the film, Heydrich removes his watch and places it on the table in front of him, and food and alcohol are delivered into the room on several occasions to soothe the hard work of the participants and also to introduce a level of relaxation and openness into the discussion. Mandel’s language shifts in Conspiracy acknowledge the Protocol’s historical symbolism as the product of bureaucratic labour. His script follows the sequencing of the Protocol, and incorporates direct phrases from it, as if to mediate the historical and the fictional truths of the meeting. The types of ‘Jews’ that appear in Mandel’s script echo their representation in the protocol. Dispersed Jews need to be identified, captured and transported as if the success of emigration was not a failed initiative of the Nazis, but due to the unwillingness of other countries to accept the refugees: ‘We have pursued a vigorous policy of emigration, but who would take more of them, who would want them, was the policy’s ultimate limitation. Every border in Europe rejects them or

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charges outrageously to accept them.’ The notion of Conspiracy is underscored in Heydrich’s invitation to all governmental agencies to accept the mandate: ‘This is our mandate, all of us’, with the highlighting of the last three words in the script indicating the complicity, shared burden and collective enterprise of Nazism’s death work. The Protocol’s authenticity as a sole, surviving copy of the conference is acknowledged in the multitude of references to denial, absence and secrecy. Apart from the destruction of transcripts, instructions are made to dispose of notes and communicate only with superiors about the topics discussed. When the villa’s main phone rings during the meeting, a fuming Eichmann tells the attendant: ‘This meeting is not taking place and take no phone calls for anyone at that meeting. Anyone. Unless the Führer calls. And he won’t.’ Mandel’s adherence to the Protocol is clear in conversations about potential obstacles to the various types of solutions. As the film’s moral dissenter, Kritzinger contends that the estimated 5 million Jews who were earmarked for labour and construction would not be able to perform that work based on their occupational profiles: ‘seventy-five percent of those five million haven’t picked up anything heavier than a pencil’. Heydrich’s need to assert his power is observed not only in Branagh’s icy stares and intimidating chats during meal breaks, but also through the public statement of his mandate which negates all other claims at interference. In a tense exchange with Hofmann, he chided, ‘We both serve the Reichsführer, but he gave the superior position to me. I suggest that your expert serve as an assistant to my man. That preserves the relative powers of our offices, does it not?’ The juxtaposition of excess and austerity is reflected, respectively, in the abundance of food and alcohol and the use of restrained language, but over time, this gulf collapses, leading to extravagant behaviour, outrageous statements and petty jealousies to air. Escalating moments of minor crisis or revelation are ‘limit events’ for some of the participants. Mandel intends Rudolf Lange (Barnaby Kay) to be the traumatic victim through his killing practices in Riga, Latvia. A lawyer by training, Lange led the Einsatzkommando 2 in Riga and was responsible for the killing of Jews there in late November 1941.24 He is perplexed at the constant use of ‘evacuation’, interrupting the discussion to ask if the killing he committed in Riga was indeed ‘evacuation’, since for Lange it is important to ‘know what words mean’. A stunned Kritzinger claims that the possibility of eradication has been personally denied to him by the Führer, to which Heydrich replies that ‘it will continue to be’.

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The ostensible struggle between the integrity of the law and Nazi ideological vision is most apparent in relation to sterilisation and the treatment of ‘half’ Jews and Jews in mixed marriages. As in the protocol, Conspiracy devotes considerable time to this topic, permitting Stuckart to soliloquise about the administrative problems of subjectively applying the Nuremberg Laws. The obsession with the ‘biological’ Jew is evident in Stuckart’s objections to Heydrich’s determination that the SS assume all responsibility for sterilisation. Colin Firth’s Stuckart is somewhat testy and objectionable, reflecting his proposal for the compulsory sterilisation of half-Jews rather than deportation, while Hofmann wanted to give half-Jews a choice between deportation and sterilisation. Stuckart also proposed compulsory divorce. The discussion on sterilisation underscores an apparent race crisis in the effective application of the Nuremberg Laws. These issues were not resolved at Wannsee and were the subject of two further conferences in March and October 1942.25 Stuckart’s antisemitism promoted a racial apartheid, a separation based on ending the reproductive future and thus ethnic survival of Jews. Killing Jews would be their ultimate victory. He warned, ‘Sterilisation recognises them as part of our species and prevents them from being part of our race. They’ll disappear soon enough. We will have acted both in defence of our race and of our species. And by the law.’ In the following meal break, Heydrich’s approaches Stuckart privately: ‘We’re going to do this. I won’t allow administrative technicalities to slow it down. Every agency will jump to follow my order, or asses will sting, and there are no shortages of meat hooks on which to hang enemies of the state. This will be an SS operation.’ Conspiracy’s conversation on labour is the clearest indication of genocidal murder in the Protocol, and another example of the victory of ideological vision over utilitarian needs. The erosion of language’s veneer is evident in exchanges when Meyer – the Gauleiter for NorthWestphalia and the only participant at the Wannsee Conference who had also been present at Hitler’s address to the party leadership on December 12, 1941 – voiced concerns about the need for Jewish labour essential to the war effort. The words in these exchanges are increasingly less guarded, edging closer to ‘what words mean’, so that Bühler (Ben Daniels), based on the administrative frustrations of swelling ghettos, could say without reservation: ‘Deportation, evacuation, elimination, where I am, we’ve got to move them out now, quickly, wipe them away.’ The participants’ casual indifference to murder talk is reflected in a consistently perverse undercurrent: conversations about killing are peppered with that about food, such as the availability of sausages and

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wine appreciation. Mandel’s most creative addition in his Wannsee Protocol is the introduction of the method of the ‘final solution’, to make what is unspoken in the historical document a little more spoken for. The Final Solution will involve gassing of the dispersed and enumerated 11 million Jews to camps in occupied Poland. The gassing method represents, as the script notes, ‘the crossing of some previously accepted moral boundary.26 Conspiracy represents this last limit in terms of grand ambition and in somewhat stunned facial reactions on a few of the participants, some of whom, like Bühler, are annoyed because they were not informed previously of the method’s experimentation at Chelmno, the first gassing installation of the Final Solution, as it could have taken care of Jews in his administrative vicinity. Heydrich sees the gassing operations as central to the ‘purpose of a triumphant German vision’, and he compels them: ‘This is my command to you here. Link arms, your ministries, your units, apply your intelligence, your energies. The Machinery is waiting. Feed it. Get them on the trains and keep the trains rolling and History will honor us    for having the vision to advance the human race to greater purity in a space of time so short Charles Darwin would be astonished.’ The conclusion of Conspiracy sees the conference end as it began, with lingering conversations and drinks. Eichmann, wracked with nerves and unable to eat because of his approval-seeking behaviour, receives patronising plaudits from Bühler, ‘I admire your gift for organization’, and the still-gorging Klopfer, ‘you sure know how to throw a party’. He then returns to his bullying mode, dismissive of Schubert’s ‘sentimental Viennese shit’, and continues to follow Heydrich’s orders by preparing a ‘discreet transcript’ of the meeting. In their reviews of Conspiracy, historians have applied, unsurprisingly, rigid assessment criteria that limit the possibility of artistic licence in creating an alternative visual truth and memory of the meeting at Wannsee. Apart from adding to the library of films about villainous bureaucrats, the reception of Conspiracy’s alternative Wannsee Protocol highlights how the Holocaust and Nazism are self-consciously freighted with representational limits of history and the imagination, a discussion that often cautions about the dangers of fusing fact and fiction. Historian Alan Steinweis reviewed Conspiracy as an exercise in translation, rather than an effort at speculative re-interpretation of a discursive and subjective text: ‘In translating the document into a film    the makers of Conspiracy took certain liberties. Cinematic license is most conspicuous when the film presents conversations that are mentioned neither in the Protokoll itself nor in related documentation.’27 Though not departing from what is factually plausible, Steinweis argues that the

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main danger with Conspiracy ‘is that most viewers will not be able to tell the difference between plausible speculation and documented fact’.28 The provocative fusion between fact and fiction maintains a residual presence in several actors’ publicity about the perils of simulating evil as a sickening acting performance, particularly for Kenneth Branagh, who, ironically, received several awards for his performance. The traumas of playing one of Nazi Germany’s most reviled men stalked Branagh. He portrayed himself as a victim of a traumatic occupation, exposing and exceeding his own limits as to what kind of performance was commensurate with the wrongdoing of the Wannsee men: ‘There’s a spiritual revulsion against playing. You don’t want to be saying the things he was saying, or be part of his psyche. I found it got under my skin in an invasive way.’29 Thinking himself reasonably well informed about the Holocaust, Branagh interpreted the role as his own discovery of the Holocaust’s most infamous meeting. He dutifully visited Holocaust museums and read biographical material, only to find that Heydrich’s inner life remained an enigma: ‘We were looking for elements that would lend to an understanding of his behavior, whether it be a childhood trauma or some physical or mental disability, but nothing seemed to make psychological sense.’30 Indeed, it was this elusive search for the human side of Heydrich which plagued Branagh, a search that characterises the veritable black hole of understanding the motivations and actions of countless other Nazi perpetrators: ‘He was enjoying, it seemed, a craven exercise in absolute power. This is both chilling, it’s also very gripping. But to play it is very, very disturbing and unusual – unusual and unsettling for the actor    It was very disturbing. I suppose you could end up saying he was a fantastically efficient executor of an absolutely extraordinary, awful and desperate plan. But it was very hard to find what was human inside him.’31 In Conspiracy, Loring Mandel sought to make several interventions about the continuing moral and historical meaning of the Wannsee Conference to contemporary audiences. First, he wanted to place the viewer into what was a closed setting, the villa’s secret chamber of death. The claustrophobic setting invited viewers to pause with some of the twentieth century’s most-repulsive and least-understood men: Hitler proxies of Reinhard Heydrich and Adolf Eichmann. It gave agency to unwritten and unauthored practices in the Protocol, and offered a plausible historical truth to the document’s discursive silences. The film is not beyond criticism in its quest for authenticity. Many of the actors’ accents are hybrid constructs, for ‘in keeping with the spirit of the production, the actors used their regular speaking voices rather than

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German accents, which Pierson and the cast felt would have interfered with the immediacy of the performances, distracting audiences from the emotional truth of the material’.32 Many of the actors are far too handsome and imposing if one considers their less-than-appealing real-life counterparts. Some of the participants have mental and physical health pathologies, such as the killing trauma of Lange and the eating disorder of Klopfer. Yet the film also offers a model of difficult identification, for in the attempt to promote audience empathy with the characters, who among the men is worth that effort? While the men of Wannsee represented a range of perpetrator types from field killers to paper pushers, the film’s emotional and moral power depends critically on the viewer’s knowledge of the outcomes of the conference. Though Wannsee’s impact was not definitive in this respect, it represented a signpost indicating that genocide had become official policy.33 The familiar refrain about the Holocaust occurring in a country of high culture, and of esteemed traditions of intellectualism, receives a thorough exercise in this film: ‘How was it possible?’ ‘Who was implicated?’ ‘Did the bureaucrats know that what they were doing would contribute to the death of millions?’ While these questions arguably remain for some unsatisfactorily resolved despite decades of national self-examination and intellectual inquiry, Conspiracy grips and entangles contemporary viewers in the language and practices of dehumanisation. The film’s conflation of the everyday setting, frequent meal breaks, competitive banter and extraordinary discussion all conspire to show that atrocity does not need graphic bodily depiction for its effect. Atrocity is foremost a philosophical denial of the humanity of individuals. Eye-level camera angles induce involvement in the meeting, and close-ups create the illusion of intimacy with the perpetrators, who are temporally displaced from our contemporary world and yet remain so much a part of it. It was in the Wannsee villa on 20 January 1942 that the fate of Europe’s Jews was in the hands of 15 men, who smoked, drank and administered for the worse. At the end of the Conspiracy, viewers have become trespassers to the Nazi regime’s secret death work.

11 Laughing Against Horror: Life is Beautiful and Train of Life Pierre Sorlin

As they advanced through Germany in the spring of 1945, the allies discovered, with amazement and horror, the death camps. Information about the Nazi system had filtered out long before; on the eve of the war it was known that some 300,000 people, political opponents, suspects and the ‘socially maladjusted’ were already gathered in seven camps directly ruled by the SS, beyond any control of judicial power. Later news arriving from resistance organisations made it clear that thousands of partisans, Jews and Gypsies were packed in trains and sent to Germany, where many died of hunger and illness. But the decision to carry out a final solution, which would ‘free’ Europe from the Jews, and the opening of extermination camps went almost unnoticed;1 few realised that the Nazis were carrying out a policy of systematic humiliation, degradation, and annihilation. The opening of the camps gave the liberators a nasty shock. George Rodger, one of the American photographers who were entrusted with taking pictures in Bergen-Belsen, immediately after the arrival of the Anglo-Americans in the camp, has told that, initially, he attempted to ignore what was under his eyes, by concerning himself with practicalities, such as the direction of the sun. Then he began to shoot, as he said, ‘clinically’, efficiently, and coldly.2 Film operators did the same, avoiding emotion, doing their best to shoot objective views of the monstrous heaps of corpses.

Mourning the Shoah The Germans did not want to leave traces of their extermination programme so there are not many visual documents about the camps. A film was shot, at the beginning of 1944, at Theresienstadt,3 but it was 134

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intended for neutral observers and gave a reassuring image of the place; there are also a few shots taken during Himmler’s visit to Auschwitz, a series of photographs of unknown origin found in Auschwitz at the end of the war,4 and other pictures taken by a member of the Sonderkommando in Birkenau: it is not enough to apprehend the daily sufferings of the deportees. On the other hand, the allies filmed extensively the scrawny, weak survivors, the guards, the filthy groups of huts, the crematorium, the dead bodies.5 Projected during the Nuremberg trials, then circulated all over the world, these films became the symbol of Nazi crimes. As it was urgent to bury them, for fear of an epidemic, the corpses were hastily pushed into collective graves by bulldozers. Even nowadays these images give an agonizing impression of anonymity, these were victims deprived of names and identity, and no attempt was made to tell apart the various groups prosecuted by the Germans. More than a half of the dead had been killed only because they were Jews, but they were mixed up with all those who had been butchered. In the documentaries about death camps shot in the two decades that followed the war the word ‘Jew’ did not appear; the first, and possibly most famous, film, Night and Fog, was conceived as a deeply moving but almost timeless echo of a drama to which no meaning can be assigned.6 In the 1970s, deportation and extermination were re-historicised, while the difference between the persecutions of political foes on the one hand and the genocide of Jews and Gypsies on the other was clearly displayed. It is often thought that the broadcasting by NBC, in 1978, of Holocaust, The Story of the Family Weiss, then its diffusion by most world television networks, was a watershed, but the series merely triggered an awareness which had been slowly maturing during the previous decade.7 After the war, the Jews who had withstood deportation seldom spoke of their experience, they were too busy trying to rehabilitate themselves in European society, or participating in the foundation of Israel. Thirty years later the Hebrew state was involved in a latent war. The generations born in Israel were anxious to ponder the origins of their country, all the more that some, in Europe, played down or even denied the drama, claiming that the numerous casualties had been a side effect of the fights, not the result of a planned operation. Scandalous though it was, the revisionist crisis was not fruitless. On the one hand, new archival research resulted in a better apprehension of the part played by the Germans in the killing of the Jews.8 On the other hand, survivors, who had previously kept silent, began to testify. A French writer and filmmaker, Claude Lanzman, systematically interviewed ex-deportees, and Poles or Germans who had witnessed

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the martyrdom of the Jews or, in some cases, had even participated in the persecution; he forced reluctant people to tell what they had gone through and had attempted to forget; his film was the painful delivery of a hidden past, all the more impressive in that the director did not make use of archival material, but was content with showing faces and the places, now peaceful, where the camps had been. Noting that a ‘holocaust’ is a sacrificial offering burnt to honour God, Lanzman substituted it with the Hebrew word ‘shoah’, which means unforeseeable catastrophe.9 Released in 1985, Shoah,10 despite its exceptional length, no less than 6 hours, made a strong impact and prompted historians as well as filmmakers to go deeper in the study and exposition of the persecution of the Jews. A great many films and television programmes were screened during the last decades of the 20th century; to list them all would be useless, enough that we mention two especially important works. War and Remembrance, put in the air by ABC in 1988, modified the approach to the extermination. Not only was it exceptionally long, with 30 hours of projection, but it displayed also a violence never seen before; instead of focusing on a small group of Jews, as Holocaust had done, it presented the savage arrest, the torture, and the mass killing of hundreds of people; the scriptwriters had been influenced by recent historical research; they wanted to show, beside the death camps, the slaughters perpetrated by the Einsatzgruppen, small units which, operating in the rear of German army, were entrusted with executing Jews and communists and were responsible for the collective massacre of millions. But the most impressive was Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. Released in 1993, the film was awarded an Oscar but provoked polemics and harsh criticism. The main character had existed; he was a Nazi industrialist who, employing Jew deportees in his factory, had been moved by their miserable condition and had saved more than a thousand of them. Spielberg was blamed for staging a ‘positive’ Nazi and for using the camps as a background to his script. At the same time Schindler was a go-between who had looked both at the victims and at their torturers: he witnessed the slow destitution of the former and the madness of the latter, ordinary men who, having full licence to kill, had lost any humanity. In a half-century, between the German capitulation and the end of the 20th century, the awareness of that deportation had been changed dramatically. Historical investigation proved that the butchery had not taken place only in the camps, that the SS were not the only murderers and that, beside the Germans, local populations had played a part in the

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extermination of the Jews. Television and cinema contributed powerfully to propagating this new vision.11 A comparison between the audiovisual versions of the Diary of Anne Frank is telling. The first film, shot in 1959, focused on the inner life of a teenager not fully conscious of the threat impending upon her family and finished with the arrest, as if the girl’s sufferings and death could not be represented. Anne Frank Remembered, a 1995 television broadcast, put the diary back in its context and avoided neither the climate of anti-Semitism that prevailed in Holland nor the period spent in the Belsen death camp by the Frank family.12

Two problematic films The audiovisual works of the late 20th century had a clear purpose. First of all, against revisionism, they aimed at asserting the tragic reality of what had happened during the war. They attempted also to produce in their spectators a deep impression likely to last after they had left the cinema and to make them think over what they had seen. Eventually they wanted to evidence how difficult it is to reconstruct such past drama and how fragile memory is. As a whole, it was a sense of tragedy that overwhelmed the screens where the Shoah was concerned. In such context the issue, in 1997, of an Italian film, Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella), directed and performed by Roberto Benigni and, the following year, of a French film, Train of Life (Train de vie), directed by Radu Mihaileanu came as a shock as these movies, dealing with the deportation of the Jews, attempted to introduce a new sub-genre, the light comedy, in the growing category of Shoah pictures. It had taken Mihaileanu 4 years to find the money he needed and turn his screenplay into a film. His story was the fanciful journey of an EastEuropean Jewish community that, in 1941, faked a deportation train to fool the Germans and go to the Holy Land through the Ukraine and Russia. Most producers, being afraid of a scandal, dismissed him. The complicated arrangements that enabled him to set up a financial deal with a small French firm, specialised in sitcoms, and Rumanian and Belgian financers, made the project difficult, location shots were taken in Romania, interior scenes in France, while editing took place in Belgium. Benigni did not meet with the same problems since he had performed in several Hollywood movies and enjoyed an international reputation. The director of the 1998 Cannes festival wanted to turn his film down, again for fear of hostile reactions, but the pressure of the influential Italian producer, the Cecchi Gori group, and above all

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the fact that Miramax had bought the world rights of distribution for 7 million dollars obliged him to change up his mind. Life is Beautiful met with a very favourable reception; there were reservations about the representation of a concentration camp but the rendering of his role by Benigni and the technical quality of the picture were unanimously acclaimed. The launching of Train of Life could have been handicapped by Benigni’s success: the film was only granted an unofficial showing at the September 1998 Venice festival, but many attending the projection made a comparison with Life is Beautiful, and the press comments were extremely positive. Both movies backed each other. Benigni did not need help, his triumph was granted in advance. Yet, the fact that a young filmmaker born in a Rumanian Jewish family dared joke about deportation made the harshest adversaries of the Italian actor think twice. As for Mihaileanu he benefited from the parallel with Benigni.13 The almost simultaneous release of two comedies dealing with the extermination of the Jews interests us for its historical significance; there is no reason for us to comment on them from an economic or an aesthetic point of view. It is nevertheless necessary to note that a fairly different fate awaited these pictures. Life is Beautiful was a big hit worldwide. To give but a few examples, in the year of its release it was seen by 6 million Italians, 4 million Spaniards and as many French; when it was broadcast by Italian television on 21 October 2001, in prime time, it was seen by 16 million spectators. The destiny of Train of Life was modest; as a whole, despite a good distribution in Europe and the United States, it gathered an audience of only 2 million people. The film was not faultless, the lack of finance was obvious, the train journeys throughout the country had all been shot in the same place, with different camera angles; the public recognised this easily, every time it saw them, the track, the railway bridge, the countrymen harvesting in the background. More importantly, while the Rabbi was the central character of the first part, it was the fake German officer who had the leading role in the second part, so that spectators were disconcerted by the change of protagonist. On the other hand, Benigni was the focus of his movie, he appeared: or was addressed by someone else, in practically every shot, the story was nothing but his amazing performance; he was witty, moving, in turn funny and pathetic. Benigni has often been compared to famous American comics, Chaplin, Keaton, Langdon, but his infectious laughter, his warmth, his rapid, persuasive delivery are unique.14 During the shooting his overwhelming presence and his striking impressive manner had enthralled the actors who submitted willingly to his direction. Later, he enchanted the audience.

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A summary of the films is necessary, all the more so that they were not widely seen in Britain.15 There are two fairly different parts in Life is Beautiful. The first is a comedy, halfway between comedy of manners and slapstick. In 1939 Guido, a young Jew, leaves his village, in Tuscany, to settle in Arezzo, where he would like to open a bookshop; to earn a living he works in a hotel where he makes friends with Doctor Lessing, a German crazy about riddles and who is delighted by Guido’s ability to solve the most complicated conundrums. The young man falls for Dora, a schoolteacher, born in an affluent family and about to get married; he courts her in the most extravagant way, calling her ‘princess’, telling her, ‘You don’t imagine how much I’d like to make love to you, but I’ll never confess it, especially not to you.’ Dora looks more amused than seduced but the very day her fiancé announces publicly that he will soon marry her, she asks Guido to carry her off. He kidnaps her on a horse painted green. In this section the film makes fun of the stupid bourgeois; Guido is the typical seemingly frail chap who proves cleverer than the rich and powerful. Six years later Guido is managing his bookshop. He has a son, a nice boy, Giosué. The Germans who occupy northern Italy arrest the Jews; Guido and Giosué are deported and Dora willingly jumps onto the train that carries them away. Guido succeeds in persuading his son that they are taking part in a difficult, very hard game whose prize will be a real tank. Once in the camp he hides the boy in his bedstead, feeds him with his own sustenance, maintaining the fiction of the game. He happens to encounter Lessing, who, always anxious to decipher brainteasers, transfers him to the officers’ mess; Giosué gets a better food and, provided he does not speak (it is a rule of the game), can play with the German kids. When the Americans are close, the Germans want to massacre the deportees; Guido hides his son, saves Dora but is killed. An American takes Giosué on his tank and the boy tells his mother, ‘We won!’ At the beginning of Train of Life a breathless, tired man is running, running, through woods and fields. He is Schlemiel – a Yiddish word, which designates the village idiot, the maladjusted but perceptive simpleton present in many folk tales. He has heard of Nazi atrocities and hurries to inform his community. The decision to counterfeit a deportation train is quickly taken. People give their most precious possessions; the money is used to buy coaches and an engine; and tailor, cobbler, and knitters are busy creating German uniforms. There are arguments, conflicts about minor details but there is also much joy manifested thanks to Yiddish songs, dances, flirtations, games, and a collective

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involvement in the work. A few men reluctantly accept to play the part of the soldiers, and Mordechal, the tall, handsome, good-looking wood merchant, is appointed officer. The travellers have to face three perils: the train has not been scheduled and risks interfering with other trains, the partisans who believe it is a German convoy and would like to blow it up, and the Germans who have been quick to discover the trick and want to arrest the fugitives. Many films have shown two trains getting up to full speed on the same track and avoiding the crash at the last minute; Train of Life does not miss the cliché that always amuses the public. The partisans clumsily run after the train which eschews predictable routes; one day, dumbfounded, they observe deportees and Germans praying together: these people must be Nazi Jews, but are they to be regarded as Nazis or as Jews? The puzzle looks so complicated that the partisans prefer to give up. The German threat is the worst; it provides also the best comic effects: spectators tremble when the enemy is about to stop the train, and laugh when they are deceived. We shall soon go back to the farcical side of the film but, because of its symmetrical function, we have to mention here one of the puns: a German, entrusted with escorting Jews to a camp, offers to take charge of those in the train; ‘impossible’, Mordechal tells him, ‘they are special, they are communist Jews’. The train arrives in the war zone and stops. Cut. Close-up of Schlemiel. He explains how everybody escaped. A quick backward zoom shows him in the striped uniform of deportees: only a village simpleton could contrive such a crazy story while being in a death camp.

In the wake of Jewish tradition However different they are, in intention and in quality, both films are deeply imbued with references to Jewish cultural traditions. There exists a so-called ‘Jewish humour’, probably not shared by all Jews, and maybe more effective in novels, theatre plays, films or puns than in daily life. It is a frame of mind made of solid common sense, superficial self-derision, liking for debate, confidence in one’s ability to sort out difficult problems, and above all of the belief that, in the worst situations, humour is helpful and that laughter helps more than sadness to solve predicaments – think of Woody Allen’s comical exploration of Jewish familial conflicts, Jewish mother-and-son relationships, and Jewish gossips. Wit shows visually and orally in our films. The first half of Life is Beautiful is an anthology of cinematic gags. Benigni has accumulated the most classical jests (car with failed brakes racing on a dangerous

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slope, ordinary chap mistaken for a king, hat filled with eggs pulled down over a head, car hood which opens while it is pouring, dance on a table in boxer shorts), in order to emphasise, by contrast, the temperate funniness of the second part, where Guido continues to laugh, to gesticulate, but where the impending threat is always present. Train of Life also uses traditional jokes, the men of the village – dressed in black, throwing up their arms, and running in line towards the rabbi’s home – look like an army of scarecrows travelling the country; they enter the house and start quarrelling in disorder, but when the rabbi’s wife orders them to shut up, they calm down instantly, as if they were schoolboys caught out in an uproar. An engine and a driver are necessary for the fake deportation train, but all the villagers can find is the archivist of the Ministry of Transport who brings, from the museum, an outmoded, half-destroyed machine which he will drive following the instructions of the service manual; during the journey the mistakes and hesitations of the driver provoke ceaseless farcical incidents. On the verbal level the puns often sound provocative, at least for those who cannot bear the introduction of a humorous note in the tragedy. In the camp, Giosué has been summoned to the ‘showers’; he does not want to go but his unsuspecting father, fond of hygiene, urges him to go. Later the boy enquires about the oven where, it is said, people are burnt; Guido makes fun of him: ‘There are wood ovens, there aren’t people ovens. Putting people in an oven would produce too much smoke.’ Solicited to become one of the fake German soldiers, a man in the village says, ‘No, I have an ulcer, true Germans don’t have ulcers.’ After affirming that, because of their Yiddish accent, most men will not sound like true Germans, Mordechal goes on, ‘Someone is German if he has made an effort to become German’: spectators may laugh at the craziness of the statement, but they may also find it tasteless, not to say offensive for the victims. The death trains have become a symbol of deportation; crammed into cattle trucks where people were packed without air and food for endless hours was an anticipation of the camp. Far from eschewing the difficulty, our films try to subvert it, in a risky string of jokes. Arrested by the Germans, Giosué and his father are taken to the station and pushed towards the truck; Guido affects pleasure: ‘You have never been in a train, have you? Inside it’s terrific. Made of wood, with no seats’ – ‘No seats?’ – ‘Seats in a train! It’s obvious you have never taken one. All standing up, crammed in it. I have got the tickets it’s miraculous. Let’s get on, otherwise they would say: too late, go back home.’ Train of Life is not as sarcastic. Once it has been settled that the villagers will leave

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by train a man says to his friend: ‘We’ll travel by train! Oh! My wife can’t bear it.’ ‘What on earth are you talking about? your wife has never taken a train’ The friend objects. ‘Of course, and that is precisely the reason why she can’t bear it.’ ‘Are we leaving by boat?’ a woman asks her neighbour. ‘No, by train.’ ‘Thank you for telling me, I had bought rubber rings for the kid, I’ll bring them back to the shop.’ Guido’s bitter, forced laugh is a form of resistance, a challenge to adversity, a way of asserting that the impossible can be carried out. Our films, consciously or not, are akin to Hasidism, an important movement that flourished among the Jewish communities of Eastern Europe from the 18th century. Against the rigid interpretation of the sacred books practised in rabbinic schools the Hasid adopted a milder, more poetic orientation. In the popular Hasidic tales, told by storytellers who travelled from village to village, hopelessness is overcome, God shows himself not by his word but by his presence, his hand may always put the persecutors to flight and save the faithful. Life is Beautiful and Train of Life are both Hasidic tales – but they are secular ones. There is a miracle in Train of Life, the train is about to drive into another train arriving from the opposite direction, but, at the last second, a sidetrack appears, there is no crash. However, nobody thanks God. Religion is radically absent from Life is Beautiful, while the rabbi, in Train of Life, is a mayor or a leader rather than a religious figure. If, as we have noted, there is, in this movie, a religious celebration, observed from afar by the partisans, it serves to offer us the strange, surreal scene of (false) German soldiers praying shoulder to shoulder with Jews; it provides also an excuse for a hilarious debate: men, when praying, must wear a hat but what about the ‘Germans’, will they be bareheaded or will they keep their Nazi helmet? At the end of the sequence people enter into a harsh argument, the atheists proclaim, ‘God created man in his own image. But who wrote this? The man. Man created God to show himself.’ Needless to say, such dialogue between inhabitants of a small village, anachronistic in the 1940s, is characteristic of the late 20th century. Our films partake of what has been called the ‘disenchantment of the world’,16 the release of any faith in the potential intervention of a supra human, sacred ‘other’, and the promotion of individual autonomy. Schlemiel, the mentally retarded man who opens Train of Life, is still imbued with past ideas, collapses when he realises what the Nazis are doing: ‘He let them do it! God let them do it!’ His fellows are quick to react: something has to be done. Fight? There are no weapons. Wait until some help comes from abroad? ‘They cannot destroy entire villages without somebody even knowing it’, a man timidly suggests – but who

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would come to rescue them? Leaving is the only sensible solution, and this means that the entire community is ready to go for it; the equipment of the train, the making of uniforms, and the acquiring of supplies are together a collective activity carried out by people who know that they can rely only on themselves. Every time the Germans are about to catch the fugitives the group finds a solution, its aptitude to surmount the obstacles is something of a wonder accomplished by humble people. The same is true where Guido is concerned; the second half of Life is Beautiful is the account of a miracle – an earthly miracle achieved by a man, thanks to his human love for his wife and son. The debate about the two films is complicated by the fact that it interferes with another discussion between secular Jews who think it is time to get rid of an illusory Almighty, and religious Jews who believe that God sealed an Alliance with his people. Both films stand up for the ability of mankind to withstand the most horrible ordeals. They do it from a profane point of view and yet they are in agreement with another deep Jewish conviction, the assurance that existence is stronger than death. It is not by chance that the word ‘Life’ appears in the title, it resounds like a proclamation. After the war a saying spread among the Jews and became a leitmotiv: ‘By their death they ordered us to carry on life.’ Life is Beautiful ends at dawn, a new, sunny day breaks, and Giosué enters it resolutely; on both sides of the road the liberated deportees, in their grey uniforms, march with a heavy step, whereas the boy moves joyfully towards the future. Guido was not merely a loving father: by saving his son he took charge of tomorrow.

Coping with history Those who like much in these films – and there are many – say that they pay a tribute to fundamental human values: love, friendship, solidarity, devotion to duty. It is true. The movies are not historical works in the usual meaning of the term; they do not try to reconstruct the past ‘as it happened’ so that listing their errors, anachronisms, and inconsistencies would be useless. Yet, it was possible to represent an admirable father, a tight, close community in a different context; for instance a man and his son deported for anti-fascist activities, a Polish or Russian village trying to escape the German occupation, and so on. If the pictures are not historical they put to the fore crucial historical data, Nazism, the fate of satellite states, deportation, the Shoah. And it is here that they depart from each other.

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Let us compare two significant scenes. After a halt in the country the train is about to go off again but the village tailor is missing, the Germans have captured him. Time presses, every minute’s delay could be fatal, but it is not possible to abandon a fellow; despite the danger, at the price of a risky trick, the man is rescued, a deep feeling of joint responsibility pervades the whole film. When Guido and family arrive at the death camp the men are placed on one side, the women on the other. Guido jumps on the wrong side, endangering his life, to make a sign to Dora; he looks at the long file of dull, washed-out clothes and spots a flash of colour, Dora’s red dress. The allusion to Schindler’s List is obvious. Spielberg had inserted, in his black-and-white film, a tiny coloured blob, a young girl in red who alternately appeared and disappeared among the crowd. However, it is only the public which perceives the anonymous child of Schindler’s List; she is like a symbol of the group that neither the Germans nor the deportees can see. On the other hand, Guido catches sight of his wife, we recognise her through his eyes, and he does not see anybody else; the three members of the family are isolated in the middle of hundreds of other victims. Benigni wanted to be the centre of his film and this explains partially the omnipresence of the family. We are not concerned, here, with the filmmaker’s ambitions but there is more, in his choice, than a banal paranoia. Guido is not conscious of his Jewish origin, or he does not attach any importance to the fact. His surname, Oreficio, jeweller, is typical. Since the 18th century the Jews, who were previously identified by their name and their father’s name, were progressively obliged to adopt a surname and often took the appellation of their job. In the 20th century, few remembered such past occurrence. Anti-Semitism rages in Arezzo when Guido arrives: anti-Semites ransack the home of his uncle and they paint ‘Jewish Horse’ in black letters on his horse, but the young man does not bother his head about that; he contends that these acts are merely the excesses of ill-mannered youngsters. Later, during the war, despite the insults that marr his bookshop, despite the frequent interruption of the police, he goes on smiling. Historically, the film is totally inaccurate, the first dispositions against the Jews were taken in 1938, when Mussolini fell into line with Hitler so that, at the time Guido is meant to enter Arezzo, the Jews were already set apart. Arrests and deportation began in 1942; no Oreficio could have run a shop and circulated freely in 1944 or 1945. But historical truth does not reside merely in correct facts and exact dates, and Benigni has caught something of interest. Some Italians of Jewish ancestry, having lost contact not only with religious practice but also with Jewish circles,

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did not conceive of themselves as Jews. Guido embodies the unlikely, but symbolically significant reaction of someone who retires within himself because he does not accept the label, the racial identification imposed on him. Against the individualist hero Train of Life stages a collective character. Before the Second World War many East European Jews lived in a separate part of the village or small town. Initially they had flocked together to protect themselves from assaults and to practise their religion. Little by little the Jewish township, the Shtetl (‘little town’ in Yiddish), generated a folklore: there were characters, relationships, conflicts typical of the Shtetl which appeared in songs, theatre plays, and even films. In his movie, Mihaileanu drew inspiration from the tradition: his village is an ideal Shtetl, spectators meet the expected stereotypes – rabbi, matchmaker, cobbler, tailor, wood merchant – the mothers behave like over-fond Jewish mothers, parents involve themselves in the sentimental life of their children, neighbours quarrel about trifles, bad ideas, born in towns, prompt the young to revolt. Even during the journey conflict and solidarity interact, up to the end Mihaileanu pulls all the strings of the Yiddish comedy. But the play does not work, and the film, beyond its humorous aspect, is a requiem for the Shtetl: the East European communities were systematically destroyed, and the few survivors migrated to Israel. The fanciful, almost surrealistic side of Train of Life is not, or at least not only, aimed at entertaining the public; it states that all that has been left of centuries of Yiddish culture is a smiling, nostalgic imagery. Both Benigni and Mihaileanu twist accepted historical facts in order to emphasise generally neglected problems. On what terms? Interestingly, despite the gap that separates them, they deal with the same things. Train of Life takes place in an ill-defined region but, since the train must go across Ukraine to reach Russia, the country cannot be anything but Rumania. In Rumania as well as in Italy local authorities participated actively in the arrest and transportation of Jews of Rumanian or Italian nationality. Ignoring this willing assistance, our films put all the blame on the Nazis as if the local fascists and state police had not been involved in the persecution. The fascists, in Life is Beautiful, are harmless idiots who raise their arm mechanically, in a derisory salutation: Guido easily makes fun of the official racism by speaking highly, in front of an entire school, of the perfection of the genuine Italian navel. If Train of Life neglects the nasty Rumanian anti-Semitism, it deals with it indirectly, when it tackles the ticklish question of collaboration with the Nazis. We noted earlier that, in the 1990s, new research unveiled the

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active participation of ‘ordinary men’, often good fathers and citizens, indifferent to Nazism in the systematic hunt and massacre of Jewish villagers.17 The slow transformation of the fake German soldiers in Mihaileanu’s film is impressive from that point of view and illustrates directly the findings of the historians. When the train makes its first stop, the travellers are slow to disembark and the ‘Germans’ push them out firmly. People settle but a clash arises about the soldiers’ bearing. Mordechal behaves like a true officer; he contends that he, and only he must decide. There follows an argument with the rabbi, Mordechal insists that a head is necessary, abuse bursts out, and someone calls Mordechal a Nazi. A handful of the young who do not accept the authority of the elderly take advantage of the disorder to run away. It is decided that they must be caught, the ‘Germans’ are entrusted with the task, with their dogs they chase and terrorise the fugitives whom they bring them back with blows from their guns. ‘This train makes us mad’, Shlomo comments. Mihaileanu does not pursue the demonstration any longer but his message is clear: victims are not prevented from changing into hangmen.

Memory, yes, but what kind of memory? Historical processes are not that straightforward but movies are obliged to condense in a few minutes evolutions which extended over months or years. This is what makes hopeless the transcription of the Shoah on film: the cinema is unable to convey the feeling of lived time. Claude Lanzman, when he released Shoah, insisted that the tragedy of the camps could not be represented. He added that his film would bring to a close the epoch of the direct testimonies, nobody would encounter and hear that many witnesses, and the last survivors would soon disappear. Neither Benigni nor Mihaileanu made useless attempts to screen the deportation. They used, as their starting points, the unforgettable evidence of the genocide:, Guido’s uncle is sent to the gas chamber, the young man himself is killed, and there is no more room for doubt, after the last shot of Train of Life, the whole village has been transported. However, the films do not deal with the death camps; they are two pieces, two points of view that were put forward in the middle of an animated debate. The generation which reached adulthood in the 1990s had no access to a living memory of the extermination; all it could do was look at videos or films. It was therefore an imaginary memory exacerbated on the one hand by the flood of dramatic television programmes

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or movies made during these years, and on the other by the military and political crisis that went on and on in the Middle East. Our films deal with remembrance, not with historical events; they ask whether the homage paid to the millions of victims must always be anguished and doleful. Train of Life draws a portrait of the Shtetl but stresses the fact that this world is lost, letting spectators wonder whether it is sensible to go on mourning it. Life is Beautiful puts to the fore a man who, having been persecuted because of his name and origin, does not accept the label imposed on him and does not want to be considered a member of a community he ignores. And both pictures tell us that life builds itself in the future, not in the past. Taken out of their context, such propositions might look candid, but they are not timeless; they appeared in a well-defined historical framework and help us gauge the intensity of a controversy that marked the last decade of the 20th century.

12 Enemy at the Gates as a ‘Soviet’ War Film Denise J. Youngblood

The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of the Russo-German war and one of the costliest battles in history. In nearly 6 months of fighting, from the end of August 1942 to the beginning of February 1943, at least 1.2 million soldiers lost their lives, countless more were wounded, and over 91,000 Germans were taken prisoner, most of whom never returned home. Hitler’s plans for the conquest of the Soviet Union disintegrated in the smoking ruins of Stalin’s city on the Volga. After the war, this great and improbable victory became a victim of cold war politics. As far as the West was concerned, it might never have happened. The invasion of Normandy in June 1944 became the centerpiece of the Anglo-American mythologization of the war in Europe, whether on- or off-screen.1 It is not surprising, therefore, that the first major Western movies about the storied battle on the Volga – Josef Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993) and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates (2001) – appeared after the fall of communism and the demise of the USSR. Although both directors are European, the two pictures are quite different. Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad, which presents a uniquely German point of view, is an anti-war war film from the losers’ perspective. A thoughtful exploration of the futility of war, Stalingrad is also a restrained elegy for the thousands of German lives lost in the name of an iniquitous ideology. Although constructed on an epic scale that makes both the scope and the brutality of the battle chillingly clear, Stalingrad is a quietly moving film that interrogates conceptions of honor, loyalty, and personal responsibility in the service of the wrong cause. Generally well received by critics, Stalingrad was too serious and downbeat to enjoy much box-office success.2 Its only awards were local (Bavarian). Annaud’s Enemy at the Gates is an entirely different matter: war as adventure! big, noisy, and romantic. It is the subject of this chapter 148

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not because it is a better film than Stalingrad, but because it is not. Enemy does, however, illustrate key issues surrounding the postcommunist World War II film and allows us to consider the inherent problems in ‘global’ commercial filmmaking. Enemy’s subject – super-sniper Vasily Zaitsev (1915–1993), whose much publicized exploits at Stalingrad earned him the USSR’s highest military honor, Hero of the Soviet Union – is tailor-made for the movies and had never been filmed. For Us There Was No Land beyond the Volga: Notes of a Sniper (Za Volgoi zemli dlia nas ne bylo: zapiski snaipera), Zaitsev’s lively and entertaining memoir, originally appeared in 1956 to little notice. In 1971, on the eve of the battle’s 30th anniversary, it was republished in a mass-market edition (150,000 copies at the low price of 40 kopecks), with an introduction by Marshal Georgy Chuikov.3 Notes of a Sniper recounts an appealing, quintessentially Soviet success story: a peasant boy from western Siberia, who learned to hunt from his grandfather, moves to a collective farm in 1929, the front wave of collectivization. There, through the power of education, he rises above his class origins. He studies accounting, leaves the farm to work in a factory office, and becomes a bookkeeper for the Soviet Navy after he is drafted in 1939. Stationed in Vladivostok when the war breaks out, he and other sailor comrades beg for a transfer from their desk jobs to the ‘real’ war at Stalingrad. At the front, the young man’s extraordinary shooting ability is discovered, and he is quickly promoted to master sergeant and head of sniper training. Credited with at least 242 kills, Vasily Zaitsev’s name and face become known throughout the Soviet Union.4 At the end of the battle end, he is promoted again, to lieutenant. Annaud and his coauthor Alain Goddard did not rely much (if at all) on Zaitsev’s own account of his glory days. The film’s title and a few details came from William Craig’s 1973 popular history of the battle, but Enemy’s most important source appears to have been David L. Robbins’s 1999 historical novel War of the Rats, from which the scenarists drew significant character details and plot elements.5 The result is an elaborate melodrama constructed around two duels. The first is between the sniper Vasily Zaitsev (Jude Law) and Major König (Ed Harris), a German marksman who has supposedly been sent from Berlin specifically to kill Zaitsev. The second ‘duel’ is a romantic competition pitting Zaitsev, the barely literate but handsome Russian peasant, against Commissar Danilov (Joseph Fiennes), a bespectacled Jewish Party intelligent responsible for propaganda and political education (in Soviet-speak, a politruk). Both men have fallen in love with the beauteous Tania Chernova (Rachel Weisz), a Jewish university

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student and home-guard member whose parents have been executed by the Germans. A heart-wrenching subplot concerns a little boy, Sasha Filippov (Gabriel Thomson), who has taken refuge with his mother (Eva Mattes) in a spacious, well-furnished cellar. At Danilov’s direction, Sasha is traveling across lines to shine Major König’s boots and feed him disinformation about Zaitsev’s plans and whereabouts. Political commentary is provided by Zaitsev’s only true friend, the cynical sniper Kulikov (Ron Perlman), a ‘political’ recently released from prison.

The film’s critical reception Reputedly ‘the most expensive European movie ever made,’ Enemy at the Gates was trumpeted as the European answer to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998).6 Its German financing and location, French director and screenwriter, and good-looking young British stars notwithstanding, Annaud’s film is pure Hollywood schmaltz, from its heart-pounding opening battle scene to the bloated sentimentality of its finale in the hospital. Despite its deficiencies (or because of them), Enemy was widely seen. Although not a true ‘blockbuster,’ available business data suggest that it recouped its production costs and perhaps turned a small profit.7 American film critics found it deliciously ironic that this supposedly ‘European’ film was such ‘bad Hollywood.’ Enemy at the Gates became the film that they loved to hate – for its jumble of movieland clichés, clumsy and often-comical faux-Soviet dialogue, and wooden performances from its accomplished, but miscast, actors. Most reviewers were merciless – and often hilarious – as they lampooned the picture’s many flaws. To cite only two examples, one critic decried Enemy as a ‘cornball and sanctimonious, an anti-Communism [sic] diatribe dolled up like war porn   ’ while another noted that ‘It’s as if an obsessed movie nut had decided to collect every bad war movie convention on one computer and program it to spit out a script.’8 Not surprisingly, the film fared no better with European critics. Annaud was lambasted at the Berlin Film Festival, where the picture opened, for having ‘gone Hollywood’ (although surely he had done so as early as 1986 with The Name of the Rose).9 The BBC called Enemy ‘audacious but leaden,’ ‘directionless and tension free,’ with an ‘unlikely and insipid romance.’10 The starchy Russian critics, always offended by the way Russians are stereotyped in ‘Western’ cinema, were appalled to see British actors, especially Bob Hoskins (Khrushchev), trying to impersonate Russians.11

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Enemy at the Gates is a film that historians also love to hate. If Annaud and Godard consulted with historical, military, or cultural specialists in the preparation of the script, none are credited. Craig’s book Enemy at the Gates, one of the presumed sources, is riddled with mistakes and based in large part on Craig’s uncritical acceptance of his interviews with Stalingrad veterans.12 Most important for the purposes of our analysis, Craig apparently drew the Zaitsev story from a 1960s interview with Tanya Chernova, Zaitsev’s self-styled lover, rather than from Zaitsev’s own reminiscences.13 In Zaitsev’s own, very vivid recollections of his adventures, there is no Tanya, no Commissar Danilov, and no König.14 Novelist Robbins, however, has said in an interview after the film’s release that he met and interviewed Zaitsev in 1992, shortly before the old man’s death.15 In his introduction to War of the Rats, Robbins writes that although he embroidered Tanya’s background and character, ‘   Zaitsev’s personal and family histories are recounted faithfully.’16 If this is true, Zaitsev must have confirmed three key elements of the film and novel’s plot. First, he and Tanya were lovers. Second, the supersniper duel was real, except that Zaitsev told Robbins the German supersniper was SS Colonel Heinz Thorvald. Third, a smarmy politruk named Danilov hung around Tanya and Zaitsev (although Robbins’s Danilov is not romantically interested in Tanya). One must, however, question the vagaries of an elderly hero’s memory; to this point no one has been able to find a sniper named König or Thorvald in German military records, nor an official Soviet military record about the duel. The pedantic among us could also dwell on all sorts of little mistakes in the film, from the way the Russian characters make the sign of the cross, to the name of the Red Army newspaper, to an anachronistic version of the Soviet national anthem.17 How much does any of this matter? In my view, a much more important problem than small factual and cultural errors is Annaud and Goddard’s interpretation of the larger historical picture, an interpretation they share with, or borrowed from, Craig. How does one depict the unimaginable calamity of the Battle of Stalingrad on screen (or on the page) with integrity? Of course, this question is not confined to the cinematic representation of Stalingrad and is raised most often in reference to films about the Holocaust. Following Craig’s lead, Annaud and Goddard sought to communicate Stalingrad’s horror by individualizing it. Noted military historian John Erickson, who has written one of the most important scholarly accounts of Stalingrad, interrogated the wisdom of this decision in his review of

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Craig’s book. In it, Erickson acknowledges that Craig’s reliance on interviews with survivors gives his account the ‘crispness of reality,’ making ‘cruel but compelling reading.’ Erickson goes on to argue, however, that the Battle of Stalingrad ‘might well merit the opposite treatment to do it full justice [  ] the endless hacking and stabbing are readily comprehensible in human terms, but it is those spectral operational maps and the ghostly signals which have the clammy chill of death about them. There is no humanity here and Stalingrad was from start to finish an inhuman battle.’18 Interestingly, many movie reviewers, who are not required to be sensitive to historians’ concerns, agreed. They also found the overpersonalized, microcosmic scale of Enemy at the Gates troubling in the light of the historical context, especially the ‘jarring soap opera tone’ of the steamy romance between Zaitsev and Tanya.19 The other historically problematic plot point for reviewers concerned the film’s increasing focus on the putative rivalry between Zaitsev and Major König, the Junker marksman and Great War hero assigned to assassinate him. As one critic wrote, ‘There’s something more than a bit perverse in making this intimate sniperfest the core of the action while the fates of Europe and the world hang in the balance. The film’s promo might as well read: “Russia vs. Germany! This time it’s personal!” ’20 When Enemy at the Gates appeared in 2001, I was in the early stages of research for a book on the Soviet war film.21 Naturally, I considered it my professional obligation to rush to the theater to see it. As a historian, Russianist, film scholar, and cinephile, I was horrified, for all the reasons described above and more. As contemporaneous reviewers made abundantly clear, if Annaud ‘succeeded,’ it was in making a mediocre ‘fifties’ combat film. However, after 5 years of living with, and thinking about, war films in general and Russo-Soviet war films in particular, I propose that we consider Annaud’s film in a different light, as a neo-socialist realist film that conforms in significant respects to the style and substance of many Soviet war films. In order to test this hypothesis, in the following pages we shall evaluate Enemy in the context of Soviet tropes for a World War II film and compare it against Soviet films about the Battle of Stalingrad. We shall also consider Enemy in light of recent Russian war films.

The ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the Soviet combat film During Stalin’s final years, Soviet culture, including cinema, was in a deep freeze. After Stalin’s death, the Khrushchevian cultural thaw began

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the USSR’s true ‘postwar’ period, and films about the Great Patriotic War became extraordinarily popular. The humanity and individualism that had characterized Soviet wartime war films returned and evolved. These trends continued despite the putative end of the Thaw after Khrushchev’s ousting in 1964. The Thaw was not so much a rejection of the positive hero and other tropes of Soviet socialist realism as an evolution of socialist realism that should perhaps be dubbed ‘neo-socialist realism.’ Once again, as in the wartime war films, war movie heroes were shown as motivated primarily by their desire to defend friends and family, comrades, and homeland. ‘Positive’ though they were, their moral energy and motivation for sacrifice were grounded in the personal, not the political. Western cold war rhetoric notwithstanding, crude political propaganda was practically nonexistent in Soviet war films from the mid-1950s on. The outline of the postwar Soviet combat film is, therefore, not so different from Western war films, although the details are historically and culturally specific to the circumstances on the Eastern Front. Young men (and women) – some braver, smarter, or nicer than others – fight to live, but not at the expense of their comrades. Sometimes their superior officers prove as inimical to their chances for survival as the Germans. The men’s attitude toward the few women they encounter – nurses, radio operators, interpreters, cooks – is mainly affectionate and familial, not sexualized. There was, however, a unique role for children to play as characters. Not only were Soviet children shown as victims of the enemy, they were also depicted as being exploited by the Red Army and Soviet partisans, deployed as scouts and saboteurs (a plot device of some importance in Enemy at the Gates).22 Soviet combat films in the 1950s and 1960s were not exposés, per se, but by the 1970s the subtext of many Soviet war films subverted the cult of the Great Patriotic War that Brezhnev’s regime so fervently promoted.23 What is the place of Soviet films about Stalingrad in this paradigm? Given the centrality of the Battle of Stalingrad to the mythology of the Great Patriotic War, there are fewer Soviet movies about the Stalingrad campaign than one might imagine, only five fiction films.24 These movies can be divided into two combat subtypes: ‘generals’ and ‘comrades.’ The ‘generals’ films take John Erickson’s approach to the material; that is, an ‘inhuman’ battle like Stalingrad should not be ‘personalized.’ Fridrikh Ermler’s The Great Turning Point (Velikii perelom, 1945, released 1946) is a generals-and-maps war movie that even its director

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and scenarist considered ‘boring.’ Vladimir Petrov’s The Battle of Stalingrad (Stalingradskaia bitva, 1949) was a grandiose combat film that positioned Stalin front-and-center. Although it was heavily promoted in the Soviet press and premiered in Stalingrad on Victory Day, 1949, to a (reportedly) wildly enthusiastic audience, no one was fooled. The fact that the next ‘generals’ film about Stalingrad, Yury Ozerov’s mammoth but inconsequential Stalingrad, did not appear until 1989 clearly indicates that the large-scale approach was a cinematic dead end. But was a personalized approach to this sacred subject more successful in terms of ticket sales or critical response? None of the ‘comrades’ films set in Stalingrad can be counted major box-office or artistic successes, although they were certainly more audience-friendly than The Battle of Stalingrad. Aleksandr Stolper’s Days and Nights (Dni i nochi, 1944), the first fiction film about the battle, followed the fortunes of a small group of combatants and the touching love affair between a young lieutentant and a nurse. Stolper’s next attempt at a Stalingrad film, Retribution (Vozmedie, 1967), was a disjointed series of tableaux set on the Don front and widely regarded as unsuccessful. Finally, there was Burning Snow (Goriachii sneg, 1972), directed by Gavril Yegiazarov. Burning Snow is the Soviet Stalingrad film most directly relevant to Enemy at the Gates because it concerns a love triangle between a battlehardened kombat and a fresh-faced young lieutenant newly arrived on the front for the attentions of a pretty nurse. This personal conflict, which threatens unit cohesion, is resolved when the nurse is killed in battle, rushing into the fray to drag a wounded man to safety. Although this film was among the first Soviet war films to allow teenaged soldiers to behave like the adolescents that they were (thereby offering interesting commentary on a generational tragedy), it was criticized, like Enemy at the Gates, for too much emphasis on the personal. As these examples show, a satisfying balance between the personal and the ‘big picture’ was hard to strike, even for native directors. Enemy at the Gates in the Soviet context Annaud’s directorial career has been an idiosyncratic one. A director who has made films as eclectic as the wonderful Black and White in Color (Noirs et blancs en couleur, 1976) and the turgid Seven Years in Tibet (1997), Annaud is both ambitious and fearless (if not foolhardy). Although we have no reason to believe that either Annaud or his coauthor Goddard was familiar with Soviet Stalingrad films when they conceptualized Enemy at the Gates, it is safe to infer that they understood the central conundrum, even if subconsciously. How does one make a

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‘big’ film on a major historical event and provide the human touch that draws audiences (and earns profits)? As we have seen, Soviet filmmakers had tested a variety of approaches, from ‘very big’ (Petrov’s The Battle of Stalingrad) to ‘very small’ (Yegiazarov’s Burning Snow). Neither extreme worked. Experienced directors like Fridrikh Ermler (The Great Turning Point) and Aleksandr Stolper (Retribution) had also failed with their experiments in mixing large- and small-scale elements, even though both had enjoyed great success in previous war films. Annaud’s conception for Enemy at the Gates followed the Ermler/Stolper lines, to mix large and small elements by using the battle as a backdrop for a film that is both plot-driven (the ‘duels’ between Zaitsev/ König and Zaitsev/Danilov) and characterdriven (the comrades). Because the film would be set inside the city, primarily in the ravaged factory district, Annaud would not need to stage big battles after the opening scene. Historical credibility would derive not so much from careful attention to historical details as from the ‘true life’ credentials of the Zaitsev story. Enemy at the Gates resists easy genre classification. Its parallel ‘duel’ plots reflect genre conventions, but not the ones we might expect. The hunt-and-duel-to-the-death between the ‘good guy’ and the ‘bad guy’ is a convention of the American ‘Western,’ not the combat film. Although the Zaitsev/König duel is fought in the abandoned, bomb-shattered buildings of Stalingrad’s factory district, not on the dusty streets of Laredo, it does not function effectively as a metaphor for the battle writ large. After the opening sequence, the viewer loses sight of the conflict’s scale, and Annaud never establishes the district’s geography. And where are the armies? With the exception of a few Red Army snipers and a few German soldiers for them to kill, nobody seems to be around. The romantic duel also confounds genre expectations. Romantic rivalry between two men over a woman, a well-worn convention of romantic comedies and melodramas, has also found its way into war films, especially in the West. In this convention, the ‘girl’ may be a frontline nurse but is usually a home-front sweetheart. Even so, ‘love’ is rarely foregrounded in Western combat films to the extent that it is in Enemy at the Gates. Likewise, although romance has figured in many Soviet war films, primarily as a device to add human interest, rivalry over the girl (which would not reflect a ‘socialist’ spirit) is quite uncommon. As noted above, Burning Snow, the exception, was criticized for trivializing the Battle of Stalingrad (and, by implication, the war) by focusing on the romantic competition between the two young officers. In Enemy at the Gates, Annaud actually seems to court critical disapprobation as

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the romance between Zaitsev and Tanya becomes increasingly overwrought. A stealthy sex scene in the overcrowded barracks is a prime example, but the film’s finale – a contrived reunion between Zaitsev and Tanya in the hospital to which she has been evacuated – beggars belief and undermines any remaining shred of credibility the film might have had with its audience. Annaud’s attempt to interweave the two duels is an imaginative, if ultimately unsuccessful tactic intended to forge artistic unity. Danilov has ‘created’ Zaitsev as a hero, unwittingly attracting not only Tanya’s attention, but also that of the Germans who send for the sniper König to kill Zaitsev. As Danilov schemes to separate Tanya from Zaitsev, he begins feeding König disin