Five Came Back

Plot

Episode 1: "The Mission Begins"

The story opens in the months after Pearl Harbor, when Hollywood's biggest names face a choice: keep making hits or enlist. Ford, already a Naval Reserve officer, is filming at Midway when the Japanese attack and he grabs a camera himself, shooting the battle from a power tower; his footage becomes the Oscar-winning documentary The Battle of Midway. Capra, the Sicilian-born director of It Happened One Night and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, takes charge of the Army's film effort and, panicking after seeing Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, creates the Why We Fight series to answer it. Wyler, Huston, and Stevens sign on as well, and the episode establishes the central tension of the whole series: these are artists who want to make art, serving a bureaucracy that wants propaganda.

Episode 2: "Combat Zones"

The middle chapter sends the directors into the war itself. Huston arrives in the Aleutians to film Report from the Aleutians, then follows the invasion of Italy. Stevens films combat in North Africa and Europe. Wyler flies with bomber crews over Germany, and Ford and Stevens both land on the beaches of Normandy on D-Day to film the invasion.¹³

The series' most haunting stretch comes in this episode, as it recounts what Huston did at San Pietro. Arriving after the battle was over, Huston could not film it, so he restaged it: soldiers re-enacted the fight days later, dead bodies were moved and arranged, and the result, The Battle of San Pietro, was presented to audiences as real combat footage. Huston himself maintained the fiction for decades, and the series lets the modern directors sit with the paradox that one of the war's most honest-feeling documents about the cost of infantry combat was, in a literal sense, a lie.¹⁴ The episode also shows Wyler aboard a B-25 with his ears uncovered amid the deafening engine noise, an exposure that costs him most of his hearing and leaves him convinced his career is over.¹⁵

Episode 3: "The Price of Victory"

The final chapter is about what victory cost the five men. Stevens reaches the German concentration camp at Dachau with the liberating troops and films what he finds, footage he later treats not as documentary but as evidence, screened at the Nuremberg trials.¹⁶ Ford, shattered by the carnage he filmed on D-Day, goes on a three-day bender and never returns to the war.¹⁵ Huston's final wartime film, Let There Be Light, an unflinching portrait of soldiers treated for battlefield psychological trauma, is judged too honest by the Army and locked away for more than three decades, unseen until the early 1980s.¹⁴

The episode follows the men home and into their postwar work. Capra, Stevens, and Wyler form Liberty Films together, whose first release, It's a Wonderful Life, is a box-office failure, and which also produces State of the Union. Stevens, traumatized by what he saw, turns away from combat films toward gentleness, directing Shane, Giant, and The Diary of Anne Frank; while preparing the latter in 1959, he watches barely a minute of his own Dachau footage before locking it away forever.⁹ Wyler, deaf, directs by watching actors' faces and makes Ben-Hur. Huston makes The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The African Queen. Ford, the most decorated of the five, makes They Were Expendable and, in 1956, The Searchers. The series ends on the argument its title implies: all five came back, but none of them came back the same, and American movies were never the same either.

Characters

The series is built around five archival subjects, each voiced through their own footage and letters:

• John Ford, the gruff Irish-American Navy man, the first to enlist and the most decorated, whose D-Day footage later informs Saving Private Ryan; Paul Greengrass is candid about how difficult he could be.
• Frank Capra, the immigrant optimist behind Why We Fight, who also produced the openly racist Know Your Enemy: Japan, a contradiction the series does not soften.
• John Huston, the hell-raiser who staged San Pietro and made the suppressed Let There Be Light.
• George Stevens, the meticulous dramatist whose Dachau footage became evidence at Nuremberg and who never spoke of what he saw.
• William Wyler, the European-born craftsman who lost most of his hearing filming from bombers and feared his career had ended.

Around them, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Guillermo del Toro, Paul Greengrass, and Lawrence Kasdan serve as guides, each matched to the director who influenced him most, and Meryl Streep narrates throughout.

Interpretations and controversies

There is no fan-theory controversy here, but critics split on the adaptation. Variety's Peter Debruge called the series "glossy, if somewhat snooze-inducing," complaining that it strips away roughly 95 percent of the detail in Harris's book and that the five modern-director interviews are the only original material.¹⁷ Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter joked that the book might better have been titled Six Came Back, given Anatole Litvak's substantial uncredited contributions to the wartime effort.¹⁴ The Guardian's Peter Bradshaw found it "irresistibly watchable" but "a tad gung-ho."¹² The series itself refuses a sanitized portrait, openly addressing propaganda that embraced racism and xenophobia, such as Capra's Know Your Enemy: Japan.¹⁸

Sequels, spin-offs, and adaptations

The series adapts Mark Harris's 2014 nonfiction book Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. In conjunction with the Netflix launch, the platform also streamed 13 of the wartime documentaries discussed in the series, including Ford's The Battle of Midway, Wyler's The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, Huston's Report from the Aleutians, Capra's The Battle of Russia, Stevens's Nazi Concentration Camps, and Stuart Heisler's The Negro Soldier.¹⁹