Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
Although the idea may be hard for us to imagine fifty years later, especially given the historical weight of the subject, the first of the great postwar entertainment classics to come out of the American experience of World War II took shape initially as a set of comic short stories by Thomas Heggen about the backwater Pacific Navy. Gathered into a slim 1946 novel, the stories became the basis of a hit Broadway play of 1948; and that play in turn became the basis of an extraordinarily popular 1955 movie. The classic so described, of course, was Mr. Roberts, with the titular hero eventually so thoroughly identified with the actor playing him on stage and screen that by the end of the decade in question, a New York Times Reviewer would observe of the actor, Henry Fonda, “it now appears he is Mr. Roberts.”
1 I use the term here to denote a certain kind of production artifact — as opposed, for instance, to the equally popular but more serious-minded 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives — designed for a popular audience whose interests in representations of the war were already being determined by what one should call “entertainment” values. To reinforce the point, one might add that Mr. Roberts's closest competitor for the title was Rogers and Hammerstein's South Pacific, derived from James Michener's 1948 story collection, which initially seems to have caught the producer Joshua Logan's eye as possible background material for the Broadway Mr. Roberts, then in production. For a related study of South Pacific in this production-entertainment mode, see also my essay, “South Pacific and American Remembering; or ‘Josh, We're Going to Buy This Son of a Bitch!’” journal of American Studies, 27 (1993), 2, 207–222Google Scholar.
2 Heggen, Thomas, Mr. Roberts (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946)Google Scholar.
3 Heggen, Thomas and Logan, Joshua, Mr. Roberts (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1948)Google Scholar.
4 Weiler, A. H., review of Mr. Roberts (film), New York Times Film Reviews, IV (1949–1958) (New York: Arno Press), 2871Google Scholar.
5 In his classic study of the transformations wrought by World War I upon Georgian and Edwardian British culture, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975)Google Scholar.
6 Heller, Joseph, Catch-22 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961)Google Scholar.
7 I choose a gerund intentionally, wishing to define remembering as an ongoing process, something that mediates between what we might call (very approximately) history — what happened — and memory — how it is retrospectively constructed in a certain cultural moment. I do so, among other reasons, to avoid unwieldy distinctions, in addressing issues of American democratic culture, between what Michael Kammen has called “collective memory” on one hand—“(usually a code phrase for what is remembered by a dominant civic culture)”—and “popular memory”—“(usually referring to ordinary folks)” (10)–with the latter also recently made to embrace, as Kammen also notes, currently fashionable notions of “oral cultures” or “working-class” and “community history” (9). I use remembering here to address these and other ways of negotiating between history and various forms of cultural memory. See Kammen, Michael, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1991)Google Scholar.
8 The term denotes my particular interest here in the World War II classic — with Mr. Roberts the case at hand — achieving its status through multiple forms of production. In this sense of the text as “production classic,” I obviously imply the idea of mass-cultural production used by Walter Benjamin, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and others, as spanning the orbits of artistic and politico-economic enterprise. At the same time, I want to use it in the less ideologically restrictive sense of relationship between literary production in America, from the earliest days of the Republic onward, and the production of cultural myth. In sum, I mean here to address within post World-War II political and economic contexts popular-culture representations of the war in various forms — literary, dramatic, cinematic — of commercial genre or medium.
9 Logan, Joshua, Josh: My Up and Down, In and Out Life (New York: Delacorte, 1976), 207Google Scholar.
10 About Logan's knowledge of Fonda's service history, we can be virtually certain. As members of a closely-knit entertainment community comprising the elite of American stage and screen, the two had been associates and friends throughout their careers. About any corresponding knowledge of Heggen's — to use his phrasing, while he “was writing Roberts,” — we must speculate. Fonda's wartime service was publicized in at least three nationally syndicated wire service stories, appearing in the New York Times, for instance, on 25 Aug 1942, 11 May 1943, and 13 August 1945, and concerning his enlistment in the Navy, his graduation from Quartermaster training, and his receipt of the Bronze Star for service as an air intelligence officer in the Marianas. The first, which Heggen may have seen while he was in midshipman training at Evanston, IL, highlighted the suddenness of Fonda's enlistment as a common seaman as part of his determination “to get into combat service” (18). One might alternatively guess that during Heggen's collaboration with Logan, the two may have discussed the subject, thus lending the author's creative “remembering” a certain suggestibility.
11 Leggett, John, Ross and Tom: Two American Tragedies (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974), 282–83Google Scholar.
12 Leggett, 284–85. Ensuing page citations on history of composition refer to this text.
13 According to a differing account of this false start on an earlier novel, the good advice came from another friend, who sent him a copy of Frederic Wakeman's The Hucksters to prove, in Heggen's words, that he had “ been beaten to it.” Anon., comment on Mr. Roberts (novel), Publisher's Weekly, 150, no. 7 (17 08 1946), 687–88Google Scholar.
14 Anon, review of Mr. Roberts, New Yorker, 22 (24 08 1946) 70Google Scholar. Decades later, in Wartime, his iconoclastic response to the “good war” myth of World War II, Paul Fussell would identify a contemporary word for this: “chickenshit;” petty authority, that is, arbitrarily bestowed and stupidly enforced. In a vast literature of this great war against totalitarianism, Fussell suggested, the war against “chickenshit” would become one of that literature's great anti-totalitarian themes. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.
15 It is important here to recall the intensely visual dimension of World War II books, newspapers, and magazines. This was the last war to generate “war art” and a large cartoon literature. It was also the last great poster war. Themselves in their heyday, major photographic magazines such as Life and Look were mainly pictorial with text confined to captions and narrative sidebars. More heavily print-oriented magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, Time, Newsweek, and Reader's Digest were still intensely visual in the same key. (The pictorial dimension of all of them was further accentuated by the ominipresence of wartime artwork connected with advertising.) And even such predominantly print magazines as the New Yorker, Atlantic, or Saturday Review, interspersed text with both “serious” artwork — sketches and line-drawings, for instance, and humorous cartoons.
16 As a demonstration of the friendship, in 1950 Logan and his wife named their adopted son Thomas Heggen Logan.
17 Here, as suggested in my conclusion, one cannot overemphasize the appeal the hero's selfless, albeit wasted death in combat, for the noncombatant veteran who supplied the majority of civilian returnees. Among Allied ground forces, for instance, Ellis, John notes, on the basis of converging statistics, that “only between a fifth and a quarter of any army's paper strength was actually involved in the shooting war”: The Sharp Edge (New York: Scribners, 1980), 158Google Scholar. The naval war would be harder to estimate, since supply ships and tankers could be blown up or sunk as readily as combat craft. On the other hand, the popularity of such navy books as Tales of the South Pacific, Mr. Roberts, The Came Mutiny, would suggest that a sense of the behind-the-lines experience was common to sailors.
18 Roberts, Allen and Goldstein, Max, Henry Fonda: A Biography (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984), 76Google Scholar. Biographical information is taken from this text and Fonda's own account in Fonda, Henry and Teichmann, Howard, My Life (New York: Signet, 1982)Google Scholar.
19 Fonda/Teichmann, 151–52.
20 Thomas, Tony, The Films of Henry Fonda (Seacaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 1983), 231–32Google Scholar; also Roberts and Goldstein, 101.
21 Here too, extending the reciprocities of art and life, the production of another beloved World War II classic mentioned earlier, the musical South Pacific — in the process of making a similar passage from novel to stage to screen — seems to have impinged both on the remainder of Heggen's short career and on the film version of his book. Further, major participants overlapped, including Logan, who realized, as did many of his cohorts, that the production of Mr. Roberts as a stage comedy had largely laid the way for the new Rogers and Hammerstein musical entertainment. In fact, according to Logan's memoir, he and co-writer Jo Mielzener had come upon Michener's book while the Broadway Mr. Roberts project was under development and, as mentioned previously, had initially considered Michener's novel as a source of background color for the former. As Logan moved on to the new and more spectacular production of South Pacific that developed on its own, Heggen felt deserted by his mentor's shift of enthusiasm, and this sense of abandonment, along with a failure to move on to new work of his own, contributed to the suicidal depression eventuating in his death at 30. Meanwhile, as Mr. Roberts played out its original success and took to the road, South Pacific enjoyed an even more extraordinary Broadway run, appearing there until 1954 and yielding millions of copies of sheet music and a best-selling original cast LP. Then, it too went on the road. How many places did the two productions cross paths in the course of a season? How deeply, as contemporary classics of stage and, eventually, the ; 50s screen, were they identified in the public mind ? Certainly both movies are infused with the same South Seas atmospherics and the same wide-screen, big-star, technicolor production values of the era.
22 Roberts and Goldstein, 104.
23 For varying versions of the casting history and the Fonda-Ford conflict, see the Fonda biographies cited. On the latter, see also Bogdanovich, Peter, The Films of John Ford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976)Google Scholar and Gallagher, Tag, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar.
24 This was also proved appropriate to the relatively bland screenplay, which itself had required a sanitizing of the 40s Broadway artifact for 50s audiences.
25 For listings of World War II films, see Brock, Garland, War Movies (New York: Facts on File, 1987)Google Scholar; Longman, Larry and Berg, Ed, Encyclopedia of American War Films (New York: Garland, 1989)Google Scholar; Monaco, James, The Connoisseur's Guide to the Movies (New York: Facts on File, 1985)Google Scholar; Parish, James R., The Great Combat Pictures: Twentieth-Century Warfare on the Screen (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Wetta, Frank J. and Curley, Stephen J., Celluloid Wars: A Guide to Film and the American Experience of War (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992)Google Scholar.
26 As Mr. Roberts had prospered by continuing to capitalize on Fonda, this might have succeeded as a film had it capitalized on Lemmon. In fact, Ensign Pulver resembles its progenitor only in the look and feel of the technicolor Pacific. Besides being deprived of a Mr. Roberts, Ensign Pulver, played by Robert Walker, Jr., seems unable to forget that he is not Lemmon, projecting only a dreadful earnestness. The same sense of the flaccid sequel pervades the performances of Burl Ives as the Captain and Walter Matthau as the slurred, wisecracking doc.
27 As noted, for instance, by Roberts and Goldstein, 106.
28 This really is the basic plot, like those of Mutiny on the Bounty, a renowned 30s antecedent, and a roughly contemporary World War II classic, The Caine Mutiny. Here, Roberts, the good officer, mediates between the unhappy crew and the tyrannical captain. The former, sensing his fairness and humanity, love and respect him. The latter, while knowing him to be a loyal subordinate, fears and hates him. The men feel betrayed when Roberts begins suddenly to kowtow to the Captain, not knowing that he has sacrificed his virtuous independence to gain them a liberty. After he dies, his example lives on in the callow Pulver, who is transfigured in his image.
29 Or, perhaps, if twenty years earlier, The Hurricane? Tabu? South of Pago Pago?
30 On the other hand, not all the tradeoffs in medium are negative. Here, for instance, the film effectively represents the predawn passage of the great battle fleet imaging the magnitude of Roberts's noncombatant frustration. Thus, in contrast to the play's first scene, when he tells the Doc about seeing it go by, in the movie, we too have witnessed the actual spectacle.
31 For perspective, compare, Mr. Roberts, with a contemporary combat film, full of amphibious assaults and Kamikaze attacks, Away All Boats. Again, in this 1956 Jeff Chandler-George Nader command drama set aboard an attack transport, what one mainly remembers is the intense color.
32 Roberts and Goldstein, 111. The history of the scene also reveals the way Hollywood values dominated the production. As shot and eventually used, it was a Ford addition, a Leroy deletion, and then a Jack Warner addition.
33 Roberts and Goldstein, 112.
34 Ibid., 2.
35 Jones, James, WWII (New York: Gorsset and Dunlap, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
36 One might note also that by the time of Catch-22's 1961 publication, Fonda would have been even older than he was when deemed too old to play Mr. Roberts in 1955. Accordingly, by the 1969 film, in which Major Major Major Major was played by Bob Newhart, the gag was simply dropped.
