Five Came Back (2017)

4 Stars (out of 4)

Fight Films

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

Journalist Mark Harris adapts his 2014 non-fiction book into this three-part, three-hour Netflix original documentary, and it's a triumph; even if the book were already great, the documentary does it one better simply through its ability to show clips of the films in question. Five Came Back (2017) both argues and proves that film is a powerful medium for communicating ideas in an emotional way. But at the same time, it's a moving, powerful evocation of how alluring and how corrosive images of war — and, finally, war itself — can be. As WWII loomed, five key Hollywood filmmakers, John Ford, Frank Capra, William Wyler, John Huston, and George Stevens felt the need to do something for their country.

They wound up overseas making all different kinds of propaganda films and documentaries to help bolster the troops' morale, educate the folks back home, or simply record history. Of course, nothing went as smoothly as one might imagine. There were periods of trial and error, experiments with re-staging events, and many creative and technical decisions made on the fly. Sometimes visions were compromised, sometimes the films won Oscars, and sometimes they were flops, and sometimes the footage was too gruesome to even show. When they came back, they were all changed forever. Interspersed with footage, vintage interviews, photographs, and narration by Meryl Streep, five modern filmmakers turn up to champion the five original heroes: Guillermo Del Toro, Paul Greengrass, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and Lawrence Kasdan.