In the latest issue of the New Yorker, David Denby reviews Mark Harris’ new book, Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War:

In early 1944, John Huston made a film about an infantry unit’s tortuous struggle to clear the Germans out of San Pietro, a small town northwest of Naples, and the surrounding countryside. When “The Battle of San Pietro” came out, in 1945, it was hailed for the power and the grit of its combat scenes and for its portrait of civilian misery, and Huston was praised for his courage. The film has been honored in those terms many times since. Yet, as Harris reports, the scenes in “The Battle of San Pietro” were largely re-created after the town had been taken from the Germans. Huston had access to official accounts of the struggle, culled from interviews with soldiers who had fought in it, and he used maps and a pointer to keep the American tactics and the chronology straight. But the bloody progress of the G.I.s across fields and along a stony ridge outside the town was staged; Huston’s actors were soldiers whom the Army assigned to the project. The men certainly look the part, their faces fatigued and worried. Huston asked them to stare into the camera now and then, as people do in newsreel footage. At times, the camera jerks wildly, as Ford’s camera had in Midway. Huston turned the signatures of authenticity into artifact.

“San Pietro” ends with text that demurely admits that some of the footage was taken before or after the actual battle—which hardly amounts to full disclosure. Harris has seen the mass of uncut footage, and he’s indignant about the imposture. Yet the issue remains complicated. Certainly, it’s dishonest to claim that something is authentic when it’s not. But all movies are illusions of one sort or another, and perhaps it’s best to say that some illusions are truer than others. In the case of war, what kind of representation brings you the most vivid and the most accurate sense of a terrible event? Steven Spielberg, staging the D Day landing in “Saving Private Ryan,” delivered a greater sense of the deadly turmoil on Omaha Beach than either John Ford or George Stevens, both of whom were in Normandy during the landing, with multiple crews and hundreds of cameras. Many of the cameras were unmanned or didn’t work; the footage recorded that day is largely out of focus or grisly in a fragmentary way.

The War Department wanted morale-building movies for the home front, and, under pressure, both Ford and Wyler softened their groundbreaking work. Ford added hokily reassuring dialogue (spoken by Jane Darwell and Henry Fonda) to “Midway”; Wyler included scenes of ceremonial visits to the Memphis Belle by top generals and by the King and Queen of England. In “The Battle of San Pietro,” Huston offers no such reassurance. As the soldiers advance through smoke and mist, many of them falling to machine-gun fire, the tone of the narration, which Huston himself speaks, is grim. The beautiful old town, when the Americans get there, is nothing but rubble. The survivors look exhausted—not jubilant but merely relieved that their part of the war is over. Huston not only presents the physical hardships of battle; he creates the war as a cultural and moral catastrophe. The sense of desolation is broken only at the end of the movie, by a scene of children playing in the street, their innocent faces making a minimal claim against despair. Even if the images are mostly contrived, “San Pietro” is aesthetically of a piece—and magnificent.

Mark Harris wrote a long feature on Deborah Winger for the Times Magazine this past weekend.

Dig:

When Debra Winger, the actor who is now as famous for walking away from her chosen profession as for excelling within it, first met with the producers of HBO’s psychotherapy drama “In Treatment,” it was because they were hoping to entice her to take on the role of Frances, a complicated, unhappy and sometimes evasive leading lady whom Winger wryly describes as “just another in a long line of women I hope never to become.” Early meetings between actresses and producers are an odd Hollywood ritual. They’re not quite mating dances; they’re more like strenuously casual preinterviews for a first date, full of mutual courtesies designed to prevent any hurt feelings. Accordingly, Winger arrived prepared — not only with a list of questions and ideas about the role, but also with the names of several other performers the producers might want to pursue instead of her if she wasn’t the right fit. “I had in my head the names of five other actresses,” she said, “all of whom I thought would, in a way, be better. It’s pretty amazing who’s out there, not working.

“So I told them those names. And when I said one of the names, this little look went across their faces.” She paused. “And I suddenly thought, Oh — I have a feeling that maybe they already asked that one.”

The first part of that story — the gesture of suggesting others for a role you want — could have been told by any actress of Winger’s stature; it’s a nice way of expressing both your own generosity and, by implication, the fact that yes, they truly wanted you and you alone. The punch line, however, in the way it identified a wordless, awkward millisecond of actual ego-deflating embarrassment, struck me as something only Winger would share. That kind of candor, predicated on an awareness that a single moment can house its share of paradoxes, is what makes Winger special. She’s a performer who has always possessed what Pauline Kael, writing about her breakthrough role in “Urban Cowboy” 30 years ago, called her “quality of flushed transparency.” That unsparing emotional honesty makes moviegoers believe that they are seeing through her skin, past any layer of self-protection or self-deception, and into her heart and mind. She had it in her 20s, when audiences first met her; at 55, she can still count it among her most remarkable assets, and her ability to deploy it has only become richer and more fully controlled.

Mark Harris writes about the disappointing start to the summer blockbuster season in the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly:

As TV has surged, the risk-averse souls atop the movie studios have stopped pretending that their job is anything other than to find and greenlight renewable, easily marketed franchises for undemanding audiences on big weekends. Making movies because you belive in the script, the director, the idea, the creative possibilities? That’s 1970’s nostalgia, if not rank sentimentality–leave it to the indies.

…The rest of this summer will certainly provide some big hits, because that’s what summers do. And–who knows?–maybe we’ll even see some really good mainstream films; perhaps some combination of Pixar, Christopher Nolan, vampires, Julia Roberts, 3-D, and Michael Cera will save the season. But a few clean wins aren’t likely to change the fact that in 2010, the Hollywood studios and those who run them are behaving like irresponsible custodians of the great tradition of mainstream moviemaking. Their choices are lazy and defensive; their creative ambitions are hidden even from themselves; they look to marketers rather than filmmakers for inspiration; and their product just isn’t very good. When the grosses go back up, all this will doubtless be airbrushed away like a starlet’s worry line. But what if they stay bad? The result will be, at last, a crisis. Perhaps exactly the crisis Hollywood needs.

Well put from a guy who is the only reason to ever glance at EW.

[Photo Credit: Jakarta Daily Photo]

My cousin Jonah is an avid Met fan. He and his wife live in Brooklyn and they are great movie-lovers too. But they do not have cable TV, so Jonah listens to virtually every game on a small, old-fashioned transistor radio. When he’s out and about, he has a small, white earphone plugged into one ear to keep up on the action. When I’ve asked why he doesn’t just get cable like every other “normal” person he says that he doesn’t like the idea of being held captive in front of the television. The thought of it is oppresive to him, even in the age of Tivo.

He can do as he pleases and take the radio with him. I admire him for this quality. I can’t imagine doing such a thing, not with Lord Sterling as the Yankee play-by-play announcer–that would be too much to bear. Still, baseball on the radio can be a wonderful experience for the listener and many of my favorite childhood baseball memories are made up of evenings secretly listening to the Yankee broadcast while I was supposed to be asleep.

I got to thinking about all of this when I read a short essay, “Recalling the Joy of Watching Baseball on the Radio,” which is featured in the collection Diamond: The Baseball Writings of Mark Harris. Most famous for his Henry Wiggens trilogy, Harris doesn’t argue that radio is superior to television, just that they each offer distinct pleasures:

Radio left things to the brain, to the imagination, and to fantasy. On radio we saw the whole baseball field because we saw it in our minds through wide-agnled fantasy. We knew no limits upon our vision. We were our own camera. Pictures arose in our imaginations from the merest hints of things. Our minds were tubes that seldom blew.

This is not to say that radio was better than television, or that one age of mankind was better than another. But that radio was significantly different from televsion, and not always less efficient, cannot be denied. Radio was awe. The awe produced by remoteness…Television reduces awe.

The last bit reminded me of Nicholas Dawidoff’s new memoir, The Crowd Sounds Happy. In it, Dawidoff describes following the Red Sox of his childhood on the radio. Just yesterday, Dawidoff had a compelling piece in the latest edition of Play:

Recently I turned 45, which I think of as a mortal age for a baseball fan; by now, with the rarest exceptions, you are older than every major leaguer. What I notice at midlife is that the passion doesn’t abate; it simply changes. Thinking of the Red Sox as heroes was an innocent fantasy and, for that reason, a seductive one, but adulthood meant finally coming to terms with ballplayers as real people. That wasn’t so difficult in our time of heightened public scrutiny. We wanted to know them, and now we know them too well. Much of it is the money, the millions they earn while most of us are struggling with the rent. Our pastime is a big, mercenary business, and we’ve learned that players will deform themselves with steroids, cheating mortality and their opponents in an effort to stay forever young and powerful. Those of us who are offended by steroids may feel that what’s most unpleasant is that we can’t look at a juiced physique and still think, That could be me.

Athletes are often amazingly unformed as people, and much as I retain the naïve, nostalgic longing for them to be good in all ways, when they aren’t it helps to exercise a little circumspection. I can do that, because the older I get, the more I see that the fun of it is not the results but the process. What’s magical now about baseball is the continuity of having these splendid performers there for me month after month, year after year. I didn’t savor the Red Sox’ long-awaited World Series victory as much as I enjoyed the growing possibility that they could win. These days, I try not to know too much about the players. I want to care — and by being more distanced, I find I still feel close to them.

I recall having a conversation a few years ago with a couple of Baseball Prospectus writers. They wanted to know as little as possible about big leaguers, at least about their personal lives, because they didn’t want that to get in the way of what they were watching on the field. I can appreciate that. Having worked in the movie business, and to a lesser degree, in the world of sports, I understand what it is like to be meet a favorite actor or director only to find that they are lacking (or worse). I think it is critical to separate the artist (or the athlete) from their art. At the same time, I have a curiosity bordering on desire to not only want to know more about my favorite jocks and artists but also a childlike need to like them, to know that they are good people. As if their personality has anything to do with their gift.