Summer of '42

Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip
Movies, Memory, and World War II
by Richard Schickel
Ivan R. Dee, 336 pp., $27.50 IN HIS MEMOIR "Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip," Richard Schickel confesses that he became a "cinemaddict" at age five, when he was taken to a neighborhood theater to see "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." He didn't much care for the movie, but he was enchanted by the rite of moviegoing. The local picture palaces offered an escape, he says, from the mind-numbing serenity of growing up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, outside of Milwaukee. A film critic for Time and the author of thirty-one books, mostly about movies, Schickel has now turned back to look at the period he grew up in--with special attention to the movies made during and about World War II.

His reminiscences fill a gap in my experience. In 1944, Schickel was in the sixth grade. In 1944, I was in France with an Air Force Service Group charged with maintaining a fleet of Martin B-26 bombers (known to their pilots as "flying coffins"). So I missed the first run of the films that gilded Schickel's youth. And I've had to catch up with reruns, to which this book is a dependable guide.

At the top of the author's "Must See" list is "A Tree Grows In Brooklyn," "a near-to-great movie." Along with it is "My Friend Flicka" (called by Pauline Kael "one of the rare children's movies that doesn't make you choke up with rage"). Schickel's movie critiques are admirably comprehensive. He goes beyond the surface analysis of action to nuances of cinematography and production. This puts a human face on the movie credits for such directors as Howard Hawks, Michael Curtiz, and Raoul Walsh, and such writers as Dalton Trumbo, Dudley Nichols, and Howard Koch.

Along the way, Schickel fine-tunes the movies made about World War II. Why is it that movies set in the Pacific theater of the war emphasize enemy brutality more than movies set in the European theater? Partly this is a matter of timing. We engaged the Japanese "face-to-face, hand-to-hand" almost a year before we were similarly involved with the Germans. And undoubtedly there is the element of racism. (Here he cites John W. Dower's book, "War Without Mercy.") But the scales are tipped by "the routine sadism of the Japanese military" as documented in Iris Chang's "The Rape of Nanking." Schickel cites one damning statistic: "Only one in twenty-five Allied soldiers died in German prison camps; one in three died in the Japanese camps." He also regrets that "there is no serious, systematic history of Japan's wartime conduct." But there's at least one such history: "The Other Nuremberg," by Arnold Brackman, who covered the Tokyo war crimes trials for the United Press. The Nuremberg trials covered only ten months. The Tokyo war crimes trials lasted two and a half years.

MOVIES about land combat between Americans and Germans weren't released until after the war was over. Instead, the hostilities were represented by pictures featuring the Resistance, espionage, and naval convoys in the North Atlantic. The effect was to marginalize the us-versus-them aspect of the Nazi war machine. In the convoy pictures, the enemy was an "abstraction." In the spy and Resistance dramas, the enemy directed his villainy not at Yanks, but at the defeated Europeans.

In spite of the ubiquitous Hollywood left, little Soviet propaganda found its way into wartime movies. One notorious exception was "Mission to Moscow," based on a memoir by Joseph Davies, a sometime ambassador to the USSR. The script by Howard Koch (of "Casablanca" fame) was faithful to the book by, for instance, praising the judicial fairness of the Soviet show trials that sentenced Stalin's former comrades to death. Davies, played in the movie by Walter Huston, also approved of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland. "Mission to Moscow," says Schickel, is an arresting example of "awful screenwriting."

Wartime movies were punctuated with obligatory goodbye scenes, of which the masterpiece is that between Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in "Casablanca." Sometimes the farewell sequence is followed by an "imagined conversation between the ghostly fallen hero and the son he has never seen." "The most lunatic" of these encounters, says Schickel, occurs between Ginger Rogers and a deceased Robert Ryan in "Tender Comrade." Rogers faces a framed picture of Ryan with their baby and "introduces" them to each other: "Little Guy, this is your father."

In an understandable reaction to war-movie heroics of that time and the "greatest-generation" hype of our own, Schickel relies on the common wisdom that the war was won by our "infinite superiority in numbers and productive capacity and the safety of the North American continent as a staging area." But this isn't entirely true. The war's major turning points were the battles of Midway, Stalingrad, and the Atlantic. And as Richard Overy reminds us in "Why the Allies Won," all of these were won well before America's industrial potential kicked in. And let's not ignore the human factor. I can't forget those air crews leaving their Nissen huts on chilly mornings, day after day, to fly into the heaviest flak the world had ever seen. They really were a regiment of heroes.

SCHICKEL CLOSES by perceiving a postmodern decline of traditional narrative in every form of expression, from politics to motion pictures: "The aim of this art is the striking image, not the stirring thought. . . . This was the postwar world the wartime movies could not imagine." Schickel's attention-grabbing title, "Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip," comes from a ditty that the author's father used to sing to him at bedtime. He admits that it's more of a wakeup call than a lullaby. And he never refers to it again. Call it a postmodern disconnect.

Martin Levin is a writer living in New York.