Original subtitles

[Steven Spielberg] Nothing like World War II has ever happened

to give us any idea of why...

there was such solidarity.

I think everybody could see that Western civilization was at stake

and they needed to fight or die.

[Paul Greengrass] When you strip away

all the glitz and the glamour of Hollywood,

what you're left with is:

what is the witness that you're giving to the world that you see out there?

[Lawrence Kasdan] John Ford and George Stevens were chosen by Eisenhower

to land in the invasion on D-Day.

And they gathered around them

a large group of cameramen and soundmen

to make the landing.

That means you know you're going to sacrifice some of those men.

There was no protected place from which to film the invasion of Normandy.

You are about to embark upon the great crusade

toward which we have striven these many months.

In company with our brave allies and brothers in arms on other fronts,

you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine.

I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle.

We will accept nothing less than full victory.

[narrator] To capture the largest military operation of the war,

John Ford and George Stevens used hundreds of cameras and dozens of men.

The orders they gave were simple:

don't put yourself in unnecessary danger,

focus on what you see,

and take pictures of everything.

[Greengrass] Nothing, I think, could prepare anyone

for the sheer intensity of the conflict and the violence on the beach.

Ford talked about, in one interview,

about seeing a man drown...

and the bodies littering the beaches.

I mean, it's... it's beyond imagination.

[Kasdan] A lot of the footage that the Allied cameramen got on D-Day,

that is, the people under Ford and Stevens,

could not be shown in newsreels.

It could not be shown as propaganda.

It was just too brutal. There was just too much carnage.

[narrator] Capra was in Washington,

anxiously awaiting delivery of the footage.

His team packaged it into a newsreel

that was distributed to theaters around the country.

[trumpets and drums play]

[male voiceover] Today, just as in these scenes,

the armies of the United Nations have made their first landings

on the soil of Western Europe.

Another of the great, decisive battles of world history has been joined.

This is the day for which free people long have waited.

This is D-Day.

[Greengrass] The sheer human cost of that operation,

the numbers of people that died, was too pitiless.

[narrator] By the end of the first day,

over 4,000 Allied soldiers had been killed.

After it was all over, Ford went on a tremendous drinking bender.

[narrator] Alone, and without telling any of his men,

Ford made his way up the French coast to a house where officers were staying

and drank himself into a three-day stupor.

He was belligerent and incoherent.

Finally, the officers had had enough.

They summoned the men of Ford's unit to come and take him away.

[Greengrass] That journey, that began in the studios of Hollywood

in the late '30s,

recruiting a ragbag army for what became Field Photo...

it ended in the carnage of D-Day.

[narrator] Ford would never supervise Navy men again.

His war service was over. He was sent back to Washington.

[Kasdan]That was the end of Ford's involvement in the war.

But Stevens... it was really the start of his life-changing experience in Europe.

Stevens did not predetermine what he wanted to see.

Just as he does in his movies,

he wanted to observe what was going on.

[narrator] Stevens and his men traveled with the Army

as they liberated small French towns on the drive to Paris.

He didn't shy away from showing all aspects of war,

from the mundane...

to the terrible.

[Kasdan] He had his unit shoot everything that he thought was important,

and that included very cinematic details.

It could be a little boy running after the troops.

It could be a church steeple that is half-destroyed.

They are the texture of war.

[narrator] As they approached Paris,

Stevens got permission to go ahead of the American troops

and enter the city with the Free French Army

to film the liberation.

[Kasdan] The footage he got there is some of the most ecstatic and thrilling

and unique footage ever shot.

Stevens wanted to shoot the surrender of Paris,

and that surrender happened in the Montparnasse train station,

and Stevens went in there with his crew and shot that surrender.

But he became panicked that it was too dark in there

and that he would not get the images of this pivotal moment in history.

And he told them, de Gaulle and the German commander,

that they had to restage it outside the station, in the sunlight,

so that he would be sure to get it.

Now, that is a Hollywood filmmaker.

We all believe getting the shot is more important than anything.

[narrator] It was the last time Stevens staged any footage during the war.

[male voiceover] Paris is free!

While all the world catches its breath at the news,

joyful Allied armies speed in through welcoming crowds.

[music, cheering]

In this hour, Paris, crowned with honor and glory,

does not forget:

the war is still going on,

and will continue for everyone, everywhere,

until the final day of total victory.

[narrator] In Italy, Wyler was struggling to complete a new assignment.

As a follow-up to Memphis Belle,

the Army wanted him to showcase a new plane.

The P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bomber.

Wyler, with Memphis Belle, he had so many places to put cameras.

Suddenly, he sees a single-pilot P-47 Thunderbolt

and how can he get creative with that?

Where could he put his cameras?

He had to figure out places to put the cameras on the plane

and not mess up its aerodynamics.

[male voiceover] Behind the pilot, shooting forward and back.

Under the wing.

In the wing, timed with the guns.

[Spielberg] Wyler felt the mounted cameras on the planes

didn't provide enough footage to tell a complete story,

so he also filmed extensive devastation on the ground.

[narrator] While Wyler was figuring out

the story he wanted to tell with Thunderbolt,

the Army sent him on various assignments across Italy and France.

On June 5, 1944, he filmed the liberation of Rome.

[male voiceover] Citizens of Rome organize welcoming ceremonies.

After more than 20 years of fascism, they are free again.

[narrator] In Paris, Wyler met with Stevens and asked him for help.

Wyler's hometown of Mulhouse had just been liberated by the Allies,

and he was looking for a way to get there.

[newscaster] After the liberation of Mulhouse,

patriotic Frenchmen were able to bring their flags out into the open.

[narrator]Stevens recommended a trusted colleague:

Ernest Hemingway's younger brother Leicester,

who was a driver in the Army.

Wyler wanted to go home, and this was his opportunity.

Wyler and Hemingway left without telling anybody.

But Wyler, of course, brought along a film camera.

Like George Stevens,

William Wyler was a documentarian in the most literal sense.

He wanted to record what he saw,

and he wanted to give not just a sense of what was happening,

but how it looked and how it felt.

[narrator] After days of travel, they finally arrived in Mulhouse.

Wyler was heartened to see his father's old shop still standing.

[Spielberg] When he got back to Mulhouse, there was no one there.

The Holocaust had claimed all of them.

Hitler's Shoah, Hitler's genocide, had been so successful there

that there was no one left.

[narrator] Wyler returned to Air Force headquarters

to find he'd been reported missing in action.

He was ordered to go back to Italy

and complete the long-delayed Thunderbolt.

Wyler felt he needed more images of the devastated Italian coastline,

so he went up in a B-25 bomber to shoot the footage himself.

[Spielberg] My father flew in B-25s in World War II.

He said they were really noisy,

but, of course, he was only comparing it to nothing,

because he had not been on anything but a B-25

when he was fighting in Burma.

My dad told me that you had to wear ear protection

because you couldn't hear yourself think if you didn't have your ear guards on.

With all the time that William Wyler spent in the B-17

making Memphis Belle,

he got on the B-25.

And after one mission, after one flight,

he couldn't hear anything when he got down.

At first, he thought it was temporary and his hearing would come back.

[narrator] The next day, Wyler was examined by an Army doctor in Naples.

The doctor handed him the diagnosis on a piece of paper.

The damage was permanent. Wyler was deaf.

His time in the Army was over.

A day earlier, he had been one of the foremost documentarians

in the Armed Forces.

Now he was a disabled veteran going home.

So much of his cinema was as much about the ear as it was about the eye.

The performances and just the beautiful words

that were written for Wyler to direct actors to speak.

[narrator] Wyler returned to Hollywood,

but he believed that his directing career was over.

[Kasdan] After the liberation of Paris,

Stevens and others thought the war was near ending.

But, in truth, it wasn't nearly done.

And what Stevens found himself on

was a long, cold, hard, brutal,

violent slog to Germany.

[trumpet plays]

[male voiceover] Winter warfare on the Western Front.

The Allies grinding relentlessly ahead through heavy bogs

that slow down both machines and men.

[Kasdan] One night, they woke up and the earth was shaking,

and the Germans had counterattacked.

[narrator] In December, 1944,

the Germans launched a fierce counteroffensive.

Over the next six weeks,

tens of thousands of Allied troops were killed or injured

in the Battle of the Bulge.

Stevens and his men pressed on, filming the devastation and the aftermath.

He had been traveling with the Allies nonstop for seven months now,

sick and sleeping outdoors most of the time.

As winter set in and conditions worsened,

Stevens barely had enough energy to write home.

Instead, he sent back movies.

After a punishing month of being pushed back,

the Allies regained the offensive and began the final advance into Germany.

[newscaster] As the American troops approached Cologne,

they freed countless numbers of Russian and Polish prisoners

who were forced laborers under the German heel.

Imagine your son, your daughter, your husband or your wife, here.

Victory is in our grasp.

We have the opportunity to stamp out evil like this.

[Kasdan] That movement started again after the Battle of the Bulge,

and the end of the war did seem possible.

But they were not prepared for what they were going to find.

And the Allied forces start coming upon these concentration camps,

and Stevens was at Dachau.

He and everyone with him was changed forever by what they saw.

It's very hard for us to imagine now

the shock of what they discovered.

They had heard rumblings,

and a lot of people had tried to keep those rumblings quiet.

They had heard that the Jews had been taken to camps,

but they did not know, no one had seen, the result of that.

And what they thought might be prison camps

turned out to be extermination camps.

They were death factories.

I think the strongest feeling I ever had in my life

was the horror and the revulsion

and the exposure to things

that I couldn't believe was part of human existence,

the violence and wickedness

that took place in those... in those concentration camps.

[narrator] When Stevens entered Dachau, he realized his job had changed.

His task was no longer to make propaganda or even a documentary.

He would now use the camera to gather evidence.

And he was very rigorous about being right at the front himself.

He did not want to send his men

to see things that he was not willing to see.

Then you think, "What kind of a world is this?

You know, what kind of creatures are we?

And how much management we need to keep us from being ourselves?"

[narrator] Some of the men in his crew, overwhelmed by what they saw,

abandoned their cameras to become nurses or ministers.

One cameraman spent the next few days writing letters

to the families of dying prisoners

that they dictated from their beds.

Stevens wrestled with his own repulsion towards the prisoners,

many of whom treated him as just a new captor.

When a poor man, hungered and unseeing because his eyesight is failing,

grabs me and starts begging,

I feel the Nazi in any human being.

I don't care if I'm a Jew or a Gentile or what.

I feel a Nazi.

And that's a fierce thing to discover within yourself

that which you despise the most.

[narrator] Two nights later,

Stevens and his men heard the news on the radio.

The war in Europe was over.

I wish that Franklin D. Roosevelt had lived to see this day.

The forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations.

[narrator] Stevens' instinct to document the atrocities at Dachau

proved to be correct.

The surviving Nazi leadership was charged with war crimes,

and he was asked to create two films to be used as evidence against them.

[Kasdan] Stevens stayed in Germany for quite a while,

shooting Dachau and composing these two films,

one about the concentration camp,

one about the overreaching Nazi plan that allowed this to happen.

[male voiceover] These are the locations of the largest concentration

and prison camps maintained throughout Germany and occupied Europe

under the Nazi regime.

Dachau: factory of horrors.

Dachau, near München, one of the oldest of the Nazi prison camps.

Hanging in orderly rows were the clothes of prisoners

who had been suffocated in a lethal gas chamber.

They had been persuaded to remove their clothing

under the pretext of taking a shower, for which towels and soap were provided.

[narrator] The films Stevens made were shown at Nuremberg.

He had omitted nothing.

Journalists from around the world reported

those images were the turning point in the trials.

The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish...

have been so calculated...

so malignant and so devastating...

that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored...

because it cannot survive their being repeated.

[Frank Capra] Not until we showed them some of the stuff that we got at Dachau,

that George Stevens photographed with his crew,

did it actually impinge itself on the mind

of the horror... the horror of this whole thing.

[male voiceover] As in the case of other camps,

local townspeople were brought in to view the dead at Dachau.

[Capra] Man, the highest of all the animals,

man... the man who created God...

to end up here in a pile of bones,

burned...

It left me just... speechless,

colorless, bloodless.

I couldn't possibly believe

that there was that kind of savagery in the world, you see.

[Guillermo del Toro] If the propaganda gave you the reason to go into war,

the footage of the liberation of the camps, what these men saw,

proved that the enormity of the task was worth it.

[Spielberg] Well, it was the first Holocaust footage the world had seen,

and it was only after the war that this footage began to come out.

And that's when people began to see the true and terrible impact

of what Hitler had designed to accomplish

and had, in most part, been successful at in Eastern Europe.

[trumpets play]

[newscaster] The demagogue on his way to power and world infamy

as history's arch-war criminal.

In the Nazi downfall, Mussolini has been executed

by patriots of his own country,

and Hitler has come to an end appropriate to a war-maker,

the atrocities of whose Nazi regime have shocked the world.

[narrator] In Washington, Capra petitioned to be released from service.

He had given up his career to volunteer.

Now, he wrote, he would have to go back

and compete with those who weren't so patriotic.

But the Army wouldn't let him go until he had completed the program of war films

he had set out to make four years earlier.

So, he turned his attention back to the war against Japan.

[newscaster] Supplies that were sent to Europe

are now on their way to the Pacific.

[male voiceover] Foot by foot is the bitter and bloody story

of the advance on Iwo Jima.

[gunfire]

[male voiceover] The Japs make a bitter defense on Okinawa.

American troops battling their way forward.

A kamikaze dives into the Ticonderoga.

We still have a dangerous war to fight.

[del Toro] Know Your Enemy - Japan,

another project that Capra struggles with and struggles with and struggles with.

[Francis Ford Coppola] There was a problem

going all the way up to General Marshall, as to how to treat

who we were going to dislike.

[narrator] Know Your Enemy - Japan had been delayed for years

over conflicts within the US government

about where the film should place the blame.

Should it be on the Emperor? On the ruling class?

Or on the Japanese people as a whole?

The script went through countless revisions.

Huston and Capra wrote the final versions themselves.

[male voiceover] First, let's examine a typical Japanese soldier.

And the project, when viewed today, is brutally jingoistic

and horribly racist.

[male voiceover] He and his brother soldiers are as much alike

as photographic prints off the same negative.

[del Toro] This merciless, dehumanizing cartoon view

of the Japanese.

[male voiceover] Defeating this nation is as necessary

as shooting down a mad dog in your neighborhood.

[del Toro] It tragically coincides with the way Japan was dealt with...

with a brutal extermination tool.

[airplane hums loudly]

A short time ago,

an American airplane dropped one bomb on Hiroshima

and destroyed its usefulness to the enemy.

If they do not now accept our terms,

they may expect a rain of ruin from the air,

the like of which has never been seen on this Earth.

[narrator] Already en route,

prints of Know Your Enemy - Japan arrived at the front

three days after the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

General MacArthur informed Washington

he would not allow soldiers to see it

and recommended it not be shown to the public, either.

[del Toro] I think it was wise of MacArthur to say,

"We don't need this anymore."

Not only from a practical point of view, but from a human point of view.

[narrator] After three days with no sign of surrender from Japan,

a second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.

[General MacArthur] I now invite the representatives

of the Emperor of Japan

and the Japanese government

and the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters

to sign the instrument of surrender at the places indicated.

Let us pray that peace be now restored to the world

and that God will preserve it always.

[newscaster] The nightmare of war and separation is over.

[male voiceover] The guns are quiet now. The papers of peace have been signed.

And the oceans of the Earth are filled with ships coming home.

In faraway places, men dreamed of this moment.

But for some men, the moment is very different from the dream.

[Coppola] Huston was given the assignment to cover a military hospital,

and they had soldiers who had come back wounded

in other than physical ways.

And they made a film

called Let There Be Light.

[male voiceover] Others show no outward signs.

Yet they, too, are wounded.

[John Huston] Well, I made that film for the Army, for the American Army.

I was in the Army, a soldier at the time.

And it was the last work I did for the Army

before going out of uniform.

Each of these directors, they all went through a lot

and came back with scars.

You can't work on these projects

and be immersed in moments of horror and the despair

and not feel that.

The idea of battle fatigue, or neurosis related to battle,

was not considered at all valid.

[Huston] I followed one group through the hospital.

I followed them from their induction,

from the first time they filed in and sat down in the receiving room

and it was explained to them what the cameras were doing there,

and that the cameras would continue to follow them through their treatment.

There's no need to be alarmed at the presence of these cameras,

as they're making a photographic record of your progress at this hospital

from the date of admission to the date of discharge.

[Huston] They were so deep in their own despair and shock

that the presence of the camera made absolutely no difference to them.

Do you feel conscious? That is, are you aware of the fact

that you're not the same boy that you were went you went over?

Do you feel changed?

Yes, sir.

I'm not doing this deliberately. Please believe me.

I do believe you.

Now, a display of emotion is sometimes very helpful.

-I hope so, sir. -Sure, it gets it off your chest.

And it's in that film that I really get a sense

of Huston's bigness of soul.

Do you remember the explosion now? All right, go on.

[Coppola] The way he treated these young boys coming back,

and the style he used,

and the respect for them that is evident in that film,

and the beauty of some of the sequences,

and how he really expressed that, yes, there are wounds

that are far deeper than flesh wounds,

and maybe more serious and more difficult to ever be able to cure.

[Huston] And there was no pretension, by the way,

that they were curing these patients.

What they were doing was putting a fire out,

in an attempt to restore the men

to more or less the condition they were in when they came into the Army.

In societies where manliness and bravery are so admired,

it was knowledge that we're all different,

and something can happen that just cracks your spirit,

and it happened in every war there's ever been.

But in the case of Let There Be Light,

the Army no doubt wanted to show that these young men

could be helped by the Army.

Well, ultimately, economically, if they can rehabilitate those soldiers,

then everyone wanted to get back on making automobiles

and go back to work and buy houses

and bring about the great American miracle,

which was, ultimately, the baby boom.

There's a lot of love in that film.

There's more love in that film than maybe Huston realized he had in him.

The hope was, then, to create a better understanding,

not sugarcoated, but honest and straightforward.

[narrator] Just before it was to be screened in a documentary film festival

at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City,

the film print was seized by military police.

John Huston's film about PTSD, before the term "PTSD" was ever invented,

is a film that had been suppressed by the War Department.

It's no great advertisement for war to see what...

what the experience of combat does to men's souls.

[Spielberg] So much of the horrible truth of the war

was just removed from our culture,

almost in order to give Americans a chance to take a big, deep breath

and look forward into the future.

But I've always been a big believer that you really can't move into the future

unless you have a complete, solid basis of understanding

and empathy about the past.

[Greengrass] Many, many, many millions of men in the US and Europe

returned from war trying to pick up the threads of a civilian life,

of a peacetime life,

forever marked by what they'd seen and been through.

There was a change in Jack.

Because, you know, he liked to play soldier before the war.

But after he'd been out there, then it was a different thing.

[narrator] Ford was still in uniform, but with the Navy's blessing,

he was back in Hollywood, working for MGM.

They Were Expendable would be his first feature in five years.

Since Midway, Ford had wanted to make a film

about the sailors who manned PT boats in the Pacific after Pearl Harbor.

It would be a story not of victory, but of sacrifice.

We lost Mahan and Larsen. A couple of the kids got hurt.

-How'd they get slugged? -Machine gun from a plane.

[Greengrass] The idea of... of expendables,

those that have to sacrifice themselves for the greater good,

he'd seen it.

He'd seen it with his own eyes.

He'd documented it.

And it became profoundly important to him.

The trouble is that most of the actual things that happen to people,

the factual things,

put them on the screen and people say, "That's too sentimental.

Could never happen."

Well, in They Were Expendable, all these things did happen.

[Greengrass] And he chose Robert Montgomery, of course,

who was himself a veteran.

He was a PT boat captain during the war.

When Montgomery went down to Florida, where they were going to shoot,

he found the entire experience...

intensely mentally distressing,

so much so that Ford said to him, "We won't shoot," you know,

"You just get set."

And he kept the whole unit waiting, you know, for some days.

And Ford gave him the time.

Ford gave him the time, and then they started shooting.

That was the caring side of Ford. They were brothers in arms.

They'd both served.

But he also, of course, chose John Wayne, who had not served in the war.

Jack wanted to get me in, and I wanted to get into the service,

but, you know, I'm 40 years old and had four kids,

and I didn't feel that I should go in as a private.

I could do more good going around on tours and things.

Ford berated him and belittled Wayne at every opportunity.

In the scene where they salute...

-Ryan. -Goodbye, sir.

...Ford made them do take after take

until finally he shouted at Wayne on the set,

"Damn it, can't you salute like someone who's actually been in service?"

Which was tremendously difficult, I think, for Wayne to take.

Ford, I think somewhat tardily, realized what he'd done,

and actually burst into tears.

That film was as much therapy as filmmaking.

It began the long process

of trying to explore what this conflict had meant to America.

How did you make sense of the sacrifices that men, and some women, had made

to ensure that new world could be enjoyed?

None of us were the same after that experience with the war.

[del Toro] Capra comes out in a way

that is as fairy-tale as his fables, almost Pinocchio-like.

He becomes a real boy, a real American.

He embodied the principle of a land that was formed by immigrants.

Capra, viewing the Statue of Liberty as a kid,

and being moved by the possibilities,

the infinite possibilities, of that light.

What it is to be American is to contemplate that light

and feel in your heart that now,

the way you write your history is going to be in your hands.

And I think that Capra rewrites his history,

and the history of the world,

with his labor in World War II.

[uplifting string music plays]

And Capra successfully manages all the obstacles.

He was an incredible leader and a politician,

ultimately capable of gathering the best of everyone.

Ironically, out of this fruitful period

in which he produces seven Why We Fight films,

dozens of instructional shorts,

and commands hundreds of people...

he realizes that, for Hollywood,

he finds himself a forgotten man.

We came back to Hollywood, and we didn't know anybody.

People would introduce me to somebody, and they'd say, "Frank who?"

[Kasdan] When Stevens got back,

it was a difficult reintegration into his life.

He was in no hurry to make movies.

It was my feeling, after World War II,

nobody made any films about the war as it was.

It was happy to be forgotten.

These films that I was seeing then, after the war, in Hollywood,

were not made from life, they were made from other films.

It took him quite a while. It took him quite a while to adjust to it.

He became hard to talk with.

I don't think he wanted to express his horror.

Or maybe he just couldn't express the horror that he'd been through.

But he was a different person.

He was not the same George Stevens that left.

[Spielberg] When you're making movies,

and you walk onto a soundstage,

and you walk past a lot of two-by-fours holding up facades,

sawdust all over the floor, the smell of plaster and wood,

and then you come around the unseemly backside

into a grand palace which is perfectly, authentically decorated,

and you suddenly see the artifice in which you are telling your stories...

Everything seemed fake now. Nothing seemed real.

And being told off by Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn

and Jack Warner and Darryl Zanuck...

They weren't gonna stand for that anymore.

They wanted to bring back home with them

the reality of what they had gone through.

[del Toro] Capra takes this moment to restart himself

as one of the first independents.

[Capra] I came up with an idea to make a directors' company,

just directors who made their own pictures.

William Wyler was in it, and when George Stevens got back,

we offered him to come in with us, and he came in with us.

So, the three of us became Liberty Films.

This idea, which has been repeated through history

with United Artists and First Artists...

There's always an urge for filmmakers to take control of their destiny.

They don't want that force above them telling them what they can make

and how it should be cut.

[del Toro] And Capra is the first one out

with what is going to become his most important film.

It's a Wonderful Life is an incredibly genuine,

incredibly brave film for Capra to undertake after World War II,

because he has gone through an incredible experience,

where he has given so much for others in the way he sees his own labor.

And he comes out of it, and it's inconsequential,

in the same quiet, terrible way that George Bailey

postpones his trips, postpones his life...

-Uh-oh. -Please, let's not stop, George.

I'll be back in a minute, Mary.

...in order to serve a community of people

that render him, in his perception, invisible.

The essence of Capra is always a question of worth,

a question of self-worth.

Dear Father in heaven...

[Capra] I think it was probably the strongest picture I've made.

I think it's my favorite film.

Because it epitomizes everything I tried to say in all the other films

in one package.

I never have run across such a unique story

as a man who thought he was a failure...

[drowning man] Help!

...being given the opportunity to come back and see the world

as it would've been had he not been born.

A very unique fantasy.

-What'd you say? -I said I wish I'd never been born.

Oh, you mustn't say things like that.

You... Wait a minute. Wait a minute. That's an idea.

[del Toro] It's a true contemplation in which, you know, Capra asks himself,

"What the world would be without me?"

You're driving me crazy, too. I'm seeing things, here.

I'm going home to see my wife and family. You understand that?

And I'm going home alone.

[del Toro] The abandonment of George Bailey is truly existential.

That is as dark as he can get.

I think he really faces the darkest part of the mirror in that film.

Many filmmakers, even if they remain active,

create their testament movie at an earlier point in their career,

and then they go on working,

but not necessarily renovating themselves.

And I think It's a Wonderful Life rephrases Capra.

He truly ventures something that intimate,

truly himself, out there on a limb.

I want to live again. Please, God, let me live again.

[sobs]

[narrator] At the same time Capra was shooting It's a Wonderful Life,

Wyler was making his last film under contract for Sam Goldwyn.

He had regained about 20 percent of his hearing in one ear,

and Gregg Toland, his cinematographer, helped to rig an audio amplifier

that would allow Wyler to hear his actors.

I've made pictures for over 40 years.

There was one that was particularly close to me

because it was done right after the war.

Most of the films are fictional, you know, are fictional stories,

and didn't really involve me.

But since I was in the service during the war,

right after the war, I made a film called The Best Years of Our Lives.

[applause]

That film gave me a great deal of satisfaction

because it contributed something to the social life of the time.

It made people understand veterans better.

[Spielberg] William Wyler came back from the war

and suddenly saw, based on his knowledge of what war does to people.

He went back and he made a movie,

the greatest movie, arguably, of his entire career.

You'll probably have a long ride because she's making a lot of stops,

but you'll get there tomorrow afternoon. That suits you?

-Sure, that's swell. -OK, sign here.

Boy, it sure is great to be going home.

-Here you go, sailor. -Sign on the dotted...

I'll do it for you.

What's the matter, think I can't spell my own name?

No, I... I...

It was about three returning veterans

and the difficulties they had with returning to civilian life,

of whom one was hurt.

And supposedly, the others were not.

-Fourth floor. -Yes, sir.

[Wyler] Because they were physically not hurt,

but they were emotionally hurt.

You're not going to work right away.

You ought to rest a while, take a vacation.

I have to make money.

Last year, it was "kill Japs" and this year, it's "make money."

[Spielberg] In effect, when they come home,

they're still fighting the internal war,

and that internal war is something that haunts them,

it haunts their dreams, it haunts their waking hours,

it haunts the choices they make,

it haunts how they react to conflict in the real world of postwar America.

Can't you get those things out of your system?

Oh, sure.

Maybe that's what's holding you back. You know, the war's over.

You won't get any place until you stop thinking about it.

-Come on, snap out of it. -OK, honey, I'll do that.

[Wyler] Being a veteran, I knew the subject matter.

I didn't have to do much research about these people returning from the war.

I knew how they felt, I knew what they were thinking of.

Because I was one of them.

[Spielberg] You know, he stripped that whole production down

to just its bare essentials.

He didn't want to have fancy dolly shots.

He didn't want a camera to go from room to room.

[narrator] Wyler wanted the movie to be realistic in every detail.

He didn't want the help of a costume designer

for his two lead actresses Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright.

He gave them money to buy their wardrobes off the rack at a department store.

"You're all gonna do this for yourselves. We're not gonna be pampered

and we're not gonna be put on little pedestals."

And they all went along with it, you know, willingly.

I've given you every chance to make something of yourself.

I gave up my own job when you asked me. I gave up the best years of my life,

and what have you done?

You've flopped.

Couldn't even hold that job at the drug store.

He was saving his powder because he wanted to really pack a wallop.

When Fred Derry climbs up into the B-17,

he reveals to us all the pieces of the planes

that were sitting there with their tails in the air.

But Wyler moves the camera for the first time.

He really moves the camera.

And there's countless B-17s in this World War II graveyard.

And then he gets into the plane, and the camera does this amazing shot

where it just moves into Fred.

[dramatic music getting louder]

[man] Hey, bud, what are you doing up there?

Hey, you!

[music is suspended]

What are you doing in that airplane?

I think he backed the whole movie into that moment.

I used to work in one of those.

Reviving old memories, huh?

Yeah, or maybe getting some of them out of my system.

[Spielberg] And I watch The Best Years of Our Lives at least once a year.

I don't think a year has gone by over the last 30 years

that I haven't watched that film once a year,

and try to bring people to see it for the first time,

so I can relive it through their eyes.

[narrator] Wyler's movie was praised as a masterpiece of American social realism.

It won rave reviews

and became the second-highest grossing film in history.

I believe a film should have something to say,

and that, I suppose, is a message.

I think it should make people think and feel,

if possible, long after they've left the theater.

[narrator] The Best Years of Our Lives swept the Oscars that year.

Thank you very much, Shirley.

This is a very proud and a very happy moment.

[narrator] Wyler won his second Academy Award for Best Director

and spent the next 20 years

as one of Hollywood's most successful filmmakers.

When he came back from the war and he had lost his hearing,

his post-World War II movies seemed to become more cinematic.

With the added strength of his visual compositional acuity,

his painterly art became more painterly.

[narrator] In 1960, he won his third Academy Award for Ben-Hur.

He never lost contact with the crew of the Memphis Belle.

[Spielberg] It doesn't make any sense

that It's a Wonderful Life wasn't as big a popular smash

as The Best Years of Our Lives.

Because it wasn't. It was a flop when it came out.

But that, for me, is the best Frank Capra movie ever made.

[del Toro] The tragedy of It's a Wonderful Life to me

is that the film fails,

not only at the box office, but critically.

[Capra] The critics are notoriously unsentimental.

Of course it affects you.

You want people to...

And you... You must understand,

we all have egos, and I have a very big one.

And if somebody doesn't like something I do,

some critic knocks it, I feel it.

I feel it very badly.

[narrator] The failure of It's a Wonderful Life

put Liberty Films out of business.

The company never made another movie.

We sold Liberty Films to Paramount. We also sold our contracts to Paramount.

That kind of soured me on the whole thing,

so I said, "Maybe I should just lay off for a while."

So, I went down to my ranch and said, "I'm just going to quit for a while."

[narrator] Capra directed just a few more pictures before retiring in 1961.

[Coppola] Each of these five directors who went through the war,

some were shot at, Ford was wounded,

Wyler lost his hearing,

and they saw terrible things and participated in terrible things,

and yet, coming out of it, each one made possibly their greatest film.

Huston came out, and the first film he made after his military service

was The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

You're so dumb, there's nothing to compare you with!

You're dumber than the dumbest jackass! Look at each other.

Ever see anything like yourselves for being dull specimens?

[Coppola] And, of course, this wonderful performance by Walter Huston,

who's the best character in the whole piece.

[narrator] John Huston's work on The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

earned him an Academy Award for both writing and directing,

and won Walter Huston an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

[Walter Huston] Many, many years ago, I raised a son,

and I said, "If you ever become a director or a writer,

please find a good part for your old man."

He did all right.

[laughter]

[narrator] Huston went on to have a long and prolific career

as a celebrated director and actor.

In 1981, after 35 years of appeals to the government,

he was finally allowed to show Let There Be Light publicly.

Today, the film is recognized as a milestone

and is part of the Library of Congress' National Film Registry.

Huston and Wyler remained close friends for the rest of their lives.

I'd had three years in the war in Europe,

and that changed my life and my thinking.

Professionally, I knew I wanted to do very different things

than I'd done before.

I was a maker of comedies.

I came back and I tried to make a comedy, and I couldn't do it.

I started to work on one of those things,

to do with a fine star: Ingrid Bergman,

who was the number-one star in America at that time,

and I started on a comedy,

and she was waiting for it, and she says, "Where's our comedy?"

And finally, I said, "It just isn't gonna be funny,

so we'd better forget it."

What he had seen during the war and at Dachau was so impactful for him

that he thought he could never make something frivolous again.

[narrator] True to his word, Stevens never made another comedy.

Instead, in the 1950s, he reemerged

as one of Hollywood's most thoughtful and respected directors of drama.

I hated to see him leave comedy for the other stuff that came later on,

for the more serious stuff,

because nobody could do comedy quite like he was doing it.

[narrator] Stevens had taken all of the footage

he had shot throughout the war and at Dachau

and locked it up in a warehouse.

He retrieved the reels only once, in 1959,

when he was preparing to direct The Diary of Anne Frank.

He went alone to the screening room to watch the footage,

put on the first reel of film,

and after about one minute, turned it off.

He drove it back to the warehouse, locked it up...

and never looked at it again.

[Kasdan] To think that this is a man that had landed at D-Day

and walked through the entire European theater,

for this to be his war film is kind of extraordinary.

And I think it is a reflection of his difficulty,

feeling that any film could capture the feelings that he had had,

his despair about humankind.

And The Diary of Anne Frank tries to find a glimmer of hope.

I think the world may be going through a phase,

the way I was with Mother.

It'll pass.

Maybe not for hundreds of years, but someday.

[Greengrass] We will always go back and back and back to their films,

all of them,

because, whether pre- or postwar,

they speak to the lives that all of our parents and grandparents lived.

They, they... They told the stories.

Ford is the filmmaker with tremendously long vision,

tremendous sense of perspective.

There was an optimism in Ford's films of the '20s and '30s

that's never quite there after that.

You get much more the cinema of myth, the cinema of loss, I think.

It took me many years and fitful maturity

to understand that the questions that Ford was asking

about what is owed to the past

were still important,

and ever more important as the '50s became the '60s and the '70s.

And my generation, who grew up in a consumer society

and postwar affluence,

did we stop to think about the sacrifices that people made for us?

[narrator] Ford never forgot the men of his unit.

Soon after the war, he opened the Field Photo Home,

known by the veterans who used it as "the Farm."

It served as a social club and rehabilitation center for his men.

When Ford died, a tattered flag from The Battle of Midway

was draped over his coffin.

[applause]

[AFI presenter] Mr. Frank Capra.

Believe in yourself.

Because only the valiant can create.

Only the daring should make films,

and only the morally courageous are worthy of speaking to their fellow man

for two hours and in the dark.

[applause]

It's a Wonderful Life was only appreciated on television decades later,

and then it became a perennial.

Merry Christmas!

[del Toro] I think with Capra, his redemption couldn't be more complete.

Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building & Loan!

Kids! Janie!

[del Toro] It's not only a film that is remembered and loved,

but it's part of a season, it's part of a yearly ritual,

in every family, in every country in the world.

-George! George, darling. -Mary! Mary!

-George, darling! -Mary!

Oh, George! Oh, George!

[Capra] The greatest of all emotions that move us...

is love.

The world is not all evil.

Yes, we do have nightmares, but we also have dreams.

We do have villainy,

but we also have great compassion.

There's good in the world.

And it's wonderful.