When Mussolini came knocking on Hollywood’s door

John Ford was the first of the five famous Hollywood film directors to go to war. He went expecting to get given a sword, which he could then brandish. After all, he knew about swords; they were things that came out of props baskets in his cavalry epics, but that was in films. Unfortunately in real life he found he had an arthritic thumb, which meant that having once drawn one he needed help to put the sword back in its scabbard. It had not been like that in his films, where he had only to say the word for anything to happen. There he could put a coal mine on top of a mountain in How Green Was My Valley, and farm the desert in his Westerns.

But the first film he made in the navy was real life with a vengeance. He obediently made a 26-minute short, with close-ups, on the dangers of VD for sailors, watched it through and threw up. Still he was the first of the five to see action, real action, when he filmed, in colour, the naval Battle of Midway. Congratulating him, the producer Walter Wanger told him that what he had done was award material, which allowed Ford to say smugly, ‘I just want to remind you Hollywood guys that someone’s out there fighting a war.’

Only then he himself forgot this, got plastered during D-Day and was thrown out of the navy. So what did he do? What any spoilt crackpot would do in the circumstances. Ford booked into Claridges and cabled his wife, ‘Sorta winding this thing up.’ At times, whatever it sets out to be, Five Came Back is a funny book because of the tension between film, which the five knew all about, and life, about which they knew far less.