Cinema: The Disasters of Modern War

LET THERE BE LIGHT Directed and Written by John Huston

When "the best and the brightest" went to war against the Axis, there was no ambiguity attached to the phrase.

Many of the best fueled the American war machine with their guts and lives. Some of the brightest designed the strategy that won the war and the Bomb that ended it.

And a few heroes—John Ford, George Stevens, William Wyler, most especially John Huston—emerged from the klieg lights of Hollywood fantasy into the strobe lights of enemy strafing to record the war as artist-combatants. Ford, wounded while photographing The Battle of Midway (1942), kept on shooting and won an Oscar for his pains. Huston's war trilogy suffered more serious casualties.

The first documentary, Report from the Aleutians (1942), included a shot of an aircraft bombsight, which was considered a military secret; the film was quickly pulled from movie theaters. San Pietro (1943-44) chronicled the battle for one ancient village in a forlorn corner of the Italian campaign; the film was chopped from five reels to three and its release delayed a year, until after V-E day. Let There Be Light (1945-46) showed the scarring effects of the war on soldiers hospitalized for shell shock; the War Department slapped a ban on it. Wrote Critic James Agee in the Nation of May 11, 1946: "I don't know what is necessary to reverse this disgraceful decision, but if dynamite is required, then dynamite is indicated."

Dynamite may have been required; patience was indicated. Let There Be Light remained suppressed for 35 years—until last month, when the Department of Defense finally authorized its release. There are good soldiers in peacetime too: silver stars should be awarded to Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America, and Ray Stark, producer of three later Huston films, who lobbied with the Government to liberate Let There Be Light; Ron Haver of the Los Angeles County Museum, who organized the film's first public showing; and Joseph Me Bride, whose barrage of articles in Variety cast light on the film's splendid achievements and sorry history. This week the hour-long documentary receives its theatrical premiere at Manhattan's Thalia theater.

Another task remains. Report from the Aleutians, San Pietro and Let There Be Light must be seen on a single program, as a single work. Each comments on, draws contrast with and enriches the others. Together they describe the arc of experience common to every foot soldier in every war: the preparation, the fighting, the hope of recovery and reconciliation.

Report is a 45-minute manual on the grunt's first challenge: combatting boredom while he learns his job. War isn't hell, it's just a drag. In depicting men at work, at meals, at the meager forms of play available to them, the film seems relentlessly mundane. And so it is —if the viewer forgets that many of these youngsters, smiling or shivering or just hanging around, are marking time before an early, explosive death.