NARRATOR:

From 1974 to 2013, Saturday Night at the Movies, created by the beloved Elwy Yost, pulled back the curtain on the magic of cinema. In this series, we delved into TVO's treasured archives to uncover often never-before-seen footage revealing the secrets of the silver screen from the legends who built it. So, I suggest you go ahead and make your move. (Airplanes whirring) (Exploding) War. One of cinema's most enduring themes. Over the decades, films like

Lawrence of Arabia, Saving Private Ryan, and Apocalypse Now have captured the courage and chaos of war. These stories of heroism, sacrifice, and the fight between good and evil resonate across generations. They're always good because they put people into such a compromising position that it causes a great deal of emotions to come out. There's so many people that can relate to them because there's so many that have been involved in wars. At the inaugural Academy Awards in 1929, Wings, a silent movie about fighter pilots in World War I, made history as the first film ever to win Best Picture. Just a year later, All Quiet on the Western Front

stripped back the glory of war and brought audiences into the trenches with an unforgettable ending.

LEW AYRES: That idea for the butterfly evolved by Karl Freund, who was the cameraman. To my thinking about the butterfly, which is different from most other creatures in that it emerges from the chrysalis of being just a humble caterpillar. In a sense, you could compare that to the soul of man. Moving from the chrysalis of the human body. (Gun firing) These films proved that war stories could move audiences, not just through heroics, but through humanity.

What fascinates me with war, with violence, and with all the way that we've come as human beings, why we still find it necessary to resort to it and every movie that I have been involved in as director has, I hope, been a passionate anti-war statement. War has shaped Hollywood's storytelling for over a century and World War II has inspired more films than any other conflict. It began as powerful storytelling. William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver

for MGM tells the story of an ordinary English family trying to survive the Blitz. Jan Struther, the author, wrote lots of funny little stories about Mrs. Miniver. A charming character. And they were collected into a tiny book and MGM, somebody was inspired buy this tiny book and to show this very normal English family in the abnormal circumstances of total war. President Roosevelt asked him to get it out in general release so that as many people could see it as soon as possible. I'd like to think that it had something to do with dispelling the last traces of isolationism in America. I don't blame people for not wanting to get into a war, not wanting their sons and husbands and fathers to get into a war, but, of course, it was not a skirmish over in Europe, it was a global war and it would have affected America disastrously anyhow as the freedom-loving countries had been overcome in Europe. America would have been next. Winston Churchill is alleged to have described the film as "propaganda worth 100 battleships."

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the script changed. Movie heroes now became symbols of national unity and moral righteousness. The US Office of War Information was created in 1942 and quickly launched the Bureau of Motion Pictures to harness its own, not-so-secret, weapon. Hollywood! NEWSREEL REPORTER:

Here are produced training, operational, and inspirational films. Films which graphically illustrate what we're fighting for.

Already masters of good versus evil storytelling, movies now stirred patriotism and unity. Propaganda as popular entertainment. In fact, the Army Air Forces created the First Motion Picture Unit to produce training and recruitment films. Its first release proved so successful that over 150,000 men enlisted. Shown in theatres nationwide, Winning Your Wings featured a very familiar face. Well, hello. Gee. It looks like I'm back in the movies again, doesn't it? James Stewart was the first Hollywood name to sign up to serve, but many, many more followed, including combat engineer Mel Brooks. What had I done? I hadn't said a word to them! And they were just levelling their cannons and their rifles at me, shooting at me morning, noon, and night, I said, "This is no good." Acclaimed film star, self-taught engineer and inventor Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency-hopping system to guide torpedoes preventing them from being jammed by the enemy. Her invention later became the foundation of modern Wi-Fi. For many, service opened up new opportunities when they returned home. I was 22 years old. I had spent three years in the Navy, uh, and that was about it. I was really very lucky. As soon as the war was over, I was able to use the GI Bill of Rights, which gave me the privilege of going to an acting school before I had to go out and make a living for myself and it was while I was at that school that someone from Universal, saw me and sent me out to Hollywood. That was for eighteen months from the day I left the Navy and eighteen months from the day I was under contract that I got my first lead in movies. One of the best moves this government or any government in the world ever made was the GI Bill of Rights. Millions of men and women become better educated through the GI Bill of Rights. Now, maybe for the wrong reasons, in my case, I said, "What the hell! I don't have to work for four years. I'll be an actor. I'll tell them I'm an actor." They sent me $85 a month, I got my $5-a-week room up on 82nd Street. I'm living like a king. Yes, Rod Steiger, the actor. You know.

ELWY: How did you go from being on stage from being in high school productions to being Charlton Heston, to being one of the leading actors in film? Well, I suppose after I got, that really depended on coming back in one piece from the war after two years.

In King Rat, the story of American and allied prisoners of war trying to survive inside a notorious Japanese prison, a young George Segal shared the screen with many actual veterans who poured their real-life trauma into their performances. I've done a lot of movies. It's been very rare to get all these people together all on the same page, all in agreement about what it had to be and that has to do with the quality of the script, the quality of the director, and that they'd all tasted war in one way or another. In ways that we just don't know about. A few were forever changed.

Before the war, director George Stevens had built a reputation in Hollywood for light romantic comedies. Films like Swing Time with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and The More The Merrier, But World War II transformed him. ANTONIO VELLANI: He never directed a comedy after the Second World War. He was one of the first people to enter Dachau, the concentration camp, and I believe that experience marked him and from then on, George being always a man very involved in social aspects of life. He always told me, he says, "You know, film is very dangerous. The camera is a very dangerous weapon."

INTERVIEWER: Because of the propaganda potential? ANTONIO VELLANI: Absolutely. He saw, he also, in his point of view, he felt that the responsibility of the person who uses this medium that reaches so many people throughout the world and he felt that that was the most important thing in a director and a filmmaker. And, um, he told me that he decided to, uh, to, uh, enlist in the American Army when the war came out after seeing Leni Riefenstahl's films. ♪ Because he saw these propaganda pictures, he hated the Nazis, and he felt how seductive that particular philosophy can be and how seductively that it was portrayed in this film and he said these people have got to be stopped.

Leni Riefenstahl was one of the most technically brilliant and controversial filmmakers of the 20th century. In Olympia, she pioneered shots that are still used today in sports. Slow-motion diving, tracking shots, and underwater filming that redefined sports footage. However, her artistic vision was inseparable from its purpose, glorifying the Third Reich. Horrified, George Stevens recognized celluloid as a weapon. Since he was a filmmaker, he wasn't seduced by the art effects or all the other things, and he joined the army. For George Stevens, the war ended the notion that film was harmless entertainment. Post-war, his films like Shane

and The Diary of Anne Frank carried the weight of what he had witnessed and his conviction that film must serve truth, not illusion.

My dad was hard to pigeonhole, but I think there was just a thread of humanity through his films of understanding the human condition. Auguste Renoir, the impressionist, said, "No shadow is black." And I think that's really true of my father's films that he didn't, he did, wasn't interested in archetype villains. You know, he wanted to show the dimension in people. Uh, I remember when we were casting The Diary of Anne Frank. Working on it and we had to cast the two German green police in German uniforms who come up and shine their light through the bookshelf with the Frank family hiding behind it and my father fought in World War II and was there at the liberation of Dachau. Nobody had a better understanding of the evil of the Hitler Germany. But the casting director brought in these guys and they were all sort of beefy Otto Preminger Germans and I remember Dad saying to the casting director, he said, "You know you're making that Annette Funicello picture down on Stage 10?" He said, "Bring me some of the boys next door." Because he had seen German soldiers and he didn't want the audience to be able to distance themselves from these German soldiers, so they could say, well, if that's a certain kind of people who do this. He really wanted to explore the deeper humanity of it all.

Over three years, the US First Motion Picture Unit produced over 300 films, including the famed

Why We Fight series from another Hollywood legend, Frank Capra. Riefenstahl used film for Nazi myth-making, Capra struck back with his own propaganda revealing the stakes and stirring America's resolve to fight. Why are we fighting? Well, I had to get in and-- it was a must job, absolutely everything else was dropped and that had to be done fast. To think that these kids could, in some way, meet and challenge the disciplined armies of Germany and Japan was absolutely ridiculous. You couldn't get them to do anything. They were undisciplined. The reasons, they had to believe. If they didn't believe those reasons why, we'd be in a mass. It takes us 30 years to make good soldiers. They're gonna do that, they're gonna do that in 30 days. Well, that's just about what happened, we made soldiers in 30 days.

ELWY: Great soldiers. Why We Fight became more than a series of military briefings. It was national storytelling on grand scale. America's success was based on unity, but segregation threatened it. They needed stories that could keep the nation together. In 1943, the War Department had an idea to unite a divided force. I was calling the Secretary of War's office and he says, "You've gotta drop everything and make a film here about the Negro soldier." How badly these Blacks have been treated here and there and the army and all this, which is primarily made for the white soldiers. The first documentary about the American Black, and when we showed it to about 300 of their editors, their papers, they just couldn't believe it, they were thunderstruck. The Negro Soldier was the first US Army film to show African American service and history with dignity and pride. Over time, this shifted attitudes among the military and the public and set the stage for major reforms including the desegregation of the US Army in 1948.

"Mr. Capra, we know about your films and all that, but how can you possibly make a film like this in the army?"

As peace returned, wartime filmmakers faced its grim moral aftermath. The same cameras that had rallied nations now turned to expose humanity's darkest crimes. George Stevens' film

Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps was used at the Nuremberg Trials to reveal the full horror of the Holocaust. Stevens' experience reinforced his belief that film carried the obligation to remember. An idea echoed in Stanley Kramer's 1961 courtroom drama Judgment at Nuremberg. Which probed not just individual guilt, but the broader responsibility of ordinary people and institutions that enabled such atrocities. It is easy to condemn the German people. To speak of the basic flaw in the German character that allowed Hitler to rise to power and at the same time, constantly ignore the basic flaw of character that made the Russians sign pacts with him, Winston Churchill praise him, American industrialists profit by him! We went to Berlin for the film premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg and Willy Brandt was then mayor and he made an impassioned speech that they might not like this film so much in Berlin, but if they want to ever be a cosmopolitan city again, they should look at it and judge it on its merit. Well, we screened the film for an audience of about 3,000 and a sprinkling of international press and some of the old German officials who were Nazis, you know? We had a buffet dinner in the esplanade afterwards for about 1,500 people and only 200 appeared. The reviews were very mixed from very extreme attacks for opening up the old wounds to outright praise. But we never did a nickel's worth of business in Germany with the film no matter how much we opened or in how many cities, and it was too soon. Now, that happens once in a while. The too soon. It just is. It's too soon always reminds me of the success of Platoon as a film about Vietnam. When I had Lieutenant Calley's story at My Lai and his court martial and I never could sell it to anybody. They wouldn't buy it.

ELWY: That's right! That's right! You were ahead of the whole game there. They wouldn't buy it. Well, it isn't a question of being ahead, it's just a matter of timing. Too soon for some, unnecessary reckoning for others, but two decades later, director Oliver Stone's

Platoon, a story of America's failure in Vietnam was perfectly timed. When I made Platoon,

it was with John Daly, after Salvador. I'll never forget the day I gave both scripts to Daly and he read them both over that weekend and he called me and he said, "Which one do you want to make first?" And I had forgotten about

Platoon. It had been a heartbreaking thing. It hadn't been made in 1976 and here it was, 1984. To Platoon,

I had a feeling of doom. An aura of, like, if I say, Platoon, it's never going to happen, so I didn't believe that it was going to happen. I did Salvador first and then I did Platoon. Platoon was an instant success around the world. The irony, of course, is that if I had done Platoon first and Salvador had come out, would have had much more attention would have been paid to it. It was bad timing. I was wrong again. (Laughing)

In the '80s, Platoon shattered expectations and the American facade of heroism. But back in 1970, at the peak of anti-Vietnam protests, America still craved old-school valour. Hollywood happily obliged with a bold World War II epic. Directed by Franklin Schaffner, Patton tells the story of General George S. Patton's triumphs, clashes, and outsized ego. LIEUTENANT GENERAL ROHMER: One was a total disaster for the military, the Vietnam, the other war had great kudos for the military and for America itself. So, it probably was a good tonic to have going. The thing with Patton was right down the line, it was a war story, dealt with war, how to fight it, how to win it, how to do it. Bringing in an army and trucks and tanks and airplanes all on cue and being able to structure that around, you know, where to put the camera and how to do it and, you know, and out there in sometimes miserable conditions and standing tall all the time. When you're directing, you're right, you have to be kind of a captain or a military man. Hardest thing to capture on film, although, we make our livings working in motion pictures. The hardest thing to capture on film is motion. It was a six-month shoot and we shot in five countries on 87 location sites. Good grief! We travelled 55,000 miles for that picture. Good God. Um, it was a monumental task.

FRANKLIN SCHAFFNER: There's a parade in that picture at the very beginning. In Morocco and we shot in Morocco and we shot another sequence in Morocco by some Roman ruins where Patton recites that poem of his "Through a Glass Darkly." As if through a glass and darkly. The age-old strife I see. Almost everything else with the exception of a small sequence taking place in Crete and a sequence taking place in the village of Knutsford in England. Everything else was done in Spain, either southern or northern. Franklin Schaffner was a seasoned director with TV roots and the success of Planet of the Apes under his belt. However, the scriptwriter, though soon to be a cinematic legend, was little known. You could stop a lot of people and say, "I'll bet you don't know who wrote the screenplay for Patton."

Yes, that's good! And they won't know who it is. No, no. And it's Francis Ford Coppola. Coppola did a draft, which was a remarkable draft in terms of capturing the spirit of the man. That input, that spirit, was so extraordinary that the reworking of it provided all sorts of opportunities. For Schaffner, every detail had to be right. So, he enlisted his composer from Planet of the Apes. ♪ Ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, bop, ba, bop ♪ JERRY GOLDSMITH:

Patton was a, it was more intimate for me than apparently it was because I was dealing with a character, so I-- ELWY: Such a character. Yeah, and my job was to get inside that character. Jerry Goldsmith's masterful music amplified George C. Scott's performance and the legend of the real General Patton. LIEUTENANT GENERAL ROHMER: Patton was a tough, fighting, SOB general, and that's the way he was brought up and that's the way he conducted himself until he died. "Blood and guts" was fundamentally the way that he would like to be called, but he was a, a really, put it this way, kickass leader. He was out in front. Patton, a believer in reincarnation, was convinced he was the reborn spirit of ancient warriors. There's no question that that's what he believed. He had a phenomenal knowledge of history and of things that related to the unreal and the whole business of being able to put yourself back into a situation 1,000 years ago and say, "I was there." Soldiers lay naked in the sun. 2,000 years ago. I was here. Eisenhower wasn't a colourful man, but the colour was George Patton. Up to the point of slapping, I thought it served him well. How it was portrayed in the film appeared to me to be very well done. We have a yellow bastard sitting here crying in front of these brave men who have been wounded in battle. (Sniffing) Shut up!

The press became aware of this and the media, the New York Times and all the people that were involved started to write their editorials decrying this terrible American general who would slap a soldier. Um, they went after him very heavily. Eisenhower and Marshall had to decide what to do with this man. Had to show some discipline for him, which they did. But then, it was, I think, Eisenhower who saved his bacon, as they would put it, and got him into this position of heading up this fictional FUSAG force. It was designed to get the Germans to believe that that's where the main force was coming and they appointed him as the, the fictional leader of this operation. To add authenticity, the film weaves in genuine wartime footage shot alongside the real general, by a name behind the camera later known for a very different style of film.

War is pretty difficult to photograph, you know? It's the people that, it's the shot you never hear is the one, I suppose they say that gets you. It was just the excitement of creeping and getting something and the feeling at night that you'd had. You had been witness to something in history and that maybe you photographed that would live through the years. And that's, that personally is like in Patton, the picture, they had like four newsreel shots and they were shots I had made. Somewhere it was used within the body of the film. It took a team of great talent to create Patton, yet George C. Scott, portraying the legendary general, felt the immense pressure of the title role. For him, coming off of the other films that he was doing, which were magnificent roles, but this is where he was the film. Everything rested on his shoulders, so you can imagine that even as big as he was in his, in his abilities and his stature, he was kind of scared shitless about, you know, having this responsibility and I think it, the first day, he did not show up for work and, uh, the director had to go and talk and they were, you know, he just had real fear of getting out there and being the total responsibility and carrying this whole thing on his shoulders. Well, of course, once he started, you know, he had this thing nailed. I mean, there's never going to be an entrance into a picture like that. From the iconic opening scene when he first marched into view as General Patton, he captivated the screen. ♪ Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! Ba! ♪ ♪ (Trumpets playing) ♪ It was done at a little, cold, damp, almost warehouse-looking place in Madrid where they shot this film.

MICKEY ROONEY: This tremendous American flag covering it up. He's got all his badges of authority on. "At ease!" I want you to remember that no bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.

STEPHEN YOUNG: Franklin Schaffner had the camera angle below and dolly down below and close-up, take one. Boom! Nailed it! Nailed it. He must have done it about four times and nailed it each time and I'm sitting there and this, when you consider what it looks like on screen with the flag, it was so in your face and it had everything going for it. And yet, it was so simple, wasn't it? And I actually had third billing. What happened is the film, it was running about an hour and 40 minutes too long, they're certainly not going to cut George Scott out of it because he was what made that film, obviously, so all of the things that they trimmed out are stuff that wasn't with him or relevant to his character, and that became me, and that's, and that is fair game. Patton and Omar Bradley, his superior officer, respected each other, but they were not friends. George C. Scott and Karl Malden had equal respect for each other, though very different acting styles.

He never went to acting school. He never took acting. He just became an actor and he also was a photographic mind, so it didn't matter what the situation or what, he would say this is me, and he had a very overt and big personality when he became angry or when anything that he did, it just, it exuded this, a kind of inner strength, but it was honest. But Karl Malden was a very much a pro from the old school. He was a method actor. I think he kind of drove George Scott a little crazy with that kind of way that he worked in a scene. George C. Scott's portrayal of the general is so memorable, it's hard to imagine anyone else in the part. Yet he was not the only actor considered for the role. I remember once, I turned down

Patton as a movie because I said, "I'm a pacifist, I don't believe in that." I was feeling so good that day and my career was going well, I was cocky, right? Well, it was the biggest, stupidest thing I ever did. Well, if I had done Patton half as well as George C. Scott, I would have walked into

The Godfather. General Patton is immortalized, not only because of his triumphs and larger-than-life presence, but also, in part, due to the notoriety he gained from the film. Because it's now a classic film, I think that that is the one thing that has taken Patton to forefront of the American history of Second World War and the public awareness of him. I don't think it was glamorizing, I think it was just showing it as it was. Patton won seven Academy Awards, including Best Actor for George C. Scott, Best Director for Franklin Schaffner, and the coveted Best Picture. Only thirteen films have won seven Oscars and almost half of those were war films. Though Hollywood's own myth-making can sideline the allies who fought alongside them.

The Americans are very great when it comes to, to saying that they did everything. JAMES STEWART:

And by the time you finish your training, America will have overwhelming superiority in the air. I have a copy of LIFE Magazine in 1964, by the way, and there's not one reference to Canada being part of this thing. Totally the United States won the war, but that's the way they operate. I-- that's fine, I couldn't care less. But it's the reality in terms of the way they see themselves.

NARRATOR: Patton endures as one of Hollywood's great war epics. Part of a tradition that celebrates World War II, a time when America's heroism seemed unquestionable. But that clarity faded with later wars. Vietnam, Iraq, and current crises, with America's conscience no longer clean. The lines between hero, villain, and victim are blurred. STEPHEN YOUNG: It boggled one's mind, doesn't it, to see that these things don't really teach us anything. If there was a war that had to be fought, that had to be fought. But what do we learn which we should learn from sending innocent people killing other innocent people? Because two schmucks at the head said, "Okay, you know, let's go for it." Films can mirror their moment, soften the past, or even rewrite it. But, at their best, they confront us with war's loss, cruelty, and pain. Urging us towards peace, lest we forget.