Casualties of the Spirit: Liberating John Huston’s Let There Be Light (1946)

Naturally, Huston was furious about the film’s suppression and remained so all through the intervening years. In his words, “I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted to maintain the ‘warrior’ myth, which said that our American soldiers went to war and came back all the stronger for the experience, standing tall and proud for having served their country well. Only a few weaklings fell by the wayside. Everyone was a hero, and had medals and ribbons to prove it. They might die, or they might be wounded, but their spirit remained unbroken.”

 * * *

Over the years I had been asked to write my recollections of my role in helping free John Huston’s banned World War II documentary Let There Be Light. But I did not do so until I was working on my collection Two Cheers for Hollywood: Joseph McBride on Movies and a journalist, Joseph Connor, approached me for an interview about the film for World War II Magazine. With that encouragement, I looked back over my 1980 press campaign in Daily Variety in Hollywood and studied documents in Huston’s papers in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library (with the help of researcher Barbara Hall) to put together my own reminiscence for the historical record.

I’ve always felt that part of the job – the obligation – of a film historian is to rediscover and, if necessary, liberate lost films. While studying the careers of great directors, I’ve managed to fill in some missing pieces. I found Orson Welles’s previously unknown 1934 short film The Hearts of Age in the late 1960s (on a tip from my University of Wisconsin film professor Russell Merritt), discovered ten unknown Frank Capra World War II documentaries at the National Archives (which were released after my Capra biography was published), and documented several dozen previously unreported films made by John Ford’s OSS unit in the war (many of which have since surfaced on YouTube and elsewhere). The many gaps I have found in the official histories, and the always-maddening fact that so much film history is inaccessible, have compelled me to this task of scholarly sleuthing. I also feel a drive to right injustices in the cases of films that have been mislaid, ignored, slighted, or, in some cases, banned. Among the latter, for thirty-five years, was John Huston’s Let There Be Light.

After making several films for the U.S. Army, including his 1943-45 classic combat documentary San Pietro, Huston was assigned near the end of the war in 1945 to make a documentary showing how soldiers with what was then known as “psychoneurotic disorder” could be successfully rehabilitated to reenter civilian life (the film was given the working title The Returning Psychoneurotic). Their affliction, common to about twenty percent of the army’s battle casualties in that war, had been known in World War I as “shell shock” and since the early 1980s has been called post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. As a society today we are so much more aware of this psychological problem, even if we still struggle to deal with it adequately, that when I appeared on a national radio program in the 1990s with a doctor who helped develop the theory of PTSD, he complained that the diagnosis was being spread overly wide. He contended that it should be reserved for such grave causes as war or genocide. I differed with the doctor, pointing out that PTSD also affects victims of other kinds of trauma, including shootings, rape, and other assaults; physical, sexual, and psychological abuse; severe automobile accidents; and earthquakes (after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, it was reported that as much as a quarter of the population of the Los Angeles area was suffering from some classic symptoms of PTSD, including sleeplessness and anxiety). I am familiar with some of these symptoms in my own life because of the abuse I suffered in my youth and my incarceration in a mental hospital after a psychological and physical breakdown as a teenager, which I document in my memoir The Broken Places (2015). No doubt it was my personal connection to such trauma that explains my unusual interest in Huston’s film and my role in helping to free it from its suppression by the army.

Let There Be Light documents the process of trying to heal soldiers with severe psychological trauma, whom it calls “casualties of the human spirit.” One of the most overwhelmingly moving films I have ever seen, it is so disturbing in its portrait of what war can do to the psyche, despite its somewhat strained efforts to be upbeat about the healing process, that the army refused to authorize public screenings after its completion in 1946. The army evidently concluded that even though it had been made to convince employers to hire men who had been rehabilitated, the film would be counterproductive for enlistment. Over the following decades, Let There Be Light was shown only internally in the army and for small private showings to mental health groups, despite many efforts by Huston and others to lift the ban on public exhibition. The film originally had been announced for its public premiere as part of a series of documentaries at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1946. But when Huston first tried to show it to friends at MoMA, two MPs showed up and confiscated the print. The museum had to withdraw the film from the series. Efforts by distributor and exhibitor Arthur Mayer, programmer Amos Vogel, French archivist Henri Langlois, the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (Filmex), and others failed to budge the army into declassifying the film. As film historian Robert Hughes wrote in 1962, the story of “Mayer’s fight to free the film for public showing will have to wait until another time; perhaps the best moment would be when some other dedicated and determined individual mounts a new campaign to save the film.”

On November 8, 1980, Ronald Haver, the film curator of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), held an unauthorized premiere of the 59-minute film as part of a Huston retrospective, using a bootlegged print, and I then conducted a successful five-week press campaign in Daily Variety to liberate the film. At the urging of Motion Picture Association of America president Jack Valenti and Huston’s friend and producer Ray Stark, and the intervention of Vice President Walter Mondale at a critical stage, Army Secretary Clifford L. Alexander Jr. was persuaded to issue an order on December 15 to release the film. The final order was issued on December 29 by Thomas Ross, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. The film began playing theatrically at the Thalia Theater in New York City on January 16, 1981 (also in a bootlegged print), and the government made the film available for sale on VHS and in 16mm. Huston showed and discussed Let There Be Light along with Report from the Aleutians and San Pietro on an April 1981 KCET-TV (Los Angeles) special, A War Remembered, with reporter and documentarian Clete Roberts, who had been a pilot and correspondent in World War II; that public television show has not been released on video but is in Roberts’s collection at the University of California, Los Angeles. (Roberts has a moment of screen immortality as the reporter who speaks a key line in John Ford’s The Last Hurrah, declaring that Mayor Skeffington is “Victorious in defeat.”)

Let There Be Light was selected by the United States National Film Preservation Board for the National Film Registry in 2010, mandating its preservation and storage in the Library of Congress, and it was restored in 2012 from an acetate fine-grain master, the best surviving source, with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation through Chase Audio by Deluxe and the National Archives and Records Administration. Now you can buy DVD and Blu-ray copies of the film and watch it online; the film the army fought so hard to suppress is on sale in the gift shop at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Museum and Boyhood Home.

Although Huston willingly gave up his promising new career as a director to enlist in the Army Signal Corps after Pearl Harbor, at first he did not seem to take the role of documenting warfare with the seriousness he gradually displayed. He told me that when he visited a secret “war room” in Washington, D.C., shortly after reporting for active duty in April 1942, he was shocked to learn just how badly the Allies were losing the war. But his first service film, Winning Your Wings, which he co-directed at Warner Bros. that year with Owen Crump, is little more than a gung-ho recruiting film for the Army Air Forces, hosted by Lt. James Stewart, who had extensive experience flying bombers in the war. Huston’s mordant personality may be evident in the perfunctory attention given to patriotism in its pitch to potential fliers, with the focus instead being placed rather crassly on personal advancement and paychecks (and with no mention made of any risks involved). Huston also shot what he characterized to me as “fraudulent” war footage for Tunisian Victory, a “documentary” feature cobbled together by Frank Capra’s army unit with the British Ministry of Information in response to the superior British film Desert Victory. When I interviewed Huston for my Capra biography, he described his and George Stevens’s reenacted footage for Tunisian Victory (released in 1944) as “so obviously false that it was just disgraceful.” He added, “I regarded the whole thing in rather a more frivolous light than Frank did. The whole thing was a fraud and a frost, and funny as hell. Looking back on it, it was absurd, and I was also aware of its absurdity at the time, I’m afraid.” (Oddly, in all my dealings with Huston, which also included acting with him in Orson Welles’s The Other Side of the Wind and writing the 1983 CBS-TV special The American Film Institute Salute to John Huston with producer George Stevens Jr., I never asked him about Let There Be Light.)

By the time he made San Pietro, filmed in 1943-44 and released in May 1945 (its title is often mistakenly given as The Battle of San Pietro), Huston had sobered up considerably in his approach to the making of war films. As he recalled, after completing his work on Tunisian Victory, “I got orders to go to Italy and make a film that would explain the difficulties we were having in getting to Rome as quickly as everybody had thought we were going to. To show the hardships of the campaign.” Huston witnessed the actual grim conditions of infantry warfare and the massive sacrifices of both GIs and civilians, which he depicts in the army’s destruction of a small town in order to save it (to borrow the notorious expression from the Vietnam War). Although Huston did not arrive at San Pietro until the very end of the battle in December 1943 and had to recreate it with the survivors (a fact not discovered until 1989, when the raw footage was studied by a scholar, Lance Bertelsen, in the National Archives for an essay in Southwest Review), the film takes a stark, absurdist view of the futility of warfare. Although the reenacting somewhat compromises the film, San Pietro’s expression of that theme is persuasive and trenchant in a way no other combat documentary of the war approaches. So that film is compromised historically, even if it is so well shot that it is one of the most convincingly raw portraits of warfare.

When army brass tried to ban the film on the grounds that it was “antiwar,” Huston famously declared, “If I ever make a picture that is pro-war, I hope someone would take me out and shoot me.” The film was ordered released by Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, who said it “should be seen by every American soldier in training. It will not discourage but rather will prepare them for the initial shock of combat.” But about twenty minutes of footage was removed at the army’s orders, including some of the grislier scenes of the film. Frank Capra told me he personally carried out those cuts, notably scenes of dead soldiers being placed in body bags while their voices are heard on the soundtrack; Huston had interviewed them shortly before they were killed. That was considered too rough for audiences to see and hear at the time. I discovered while writing my Capra book that while working on San Pietro, Huston had also contributed a short report on the Italian campaign for Capra’s wartime newsreel the Army-Navy Screen Magazine. By the time he returned from Italy, Huston was a sadder and a wiser man. He suffered for some time from serious symptoms of PTSD.

I first encountered Let There Be Light when I read a transcript of the film in Robert Hughes’s 1962 anthology Film: Book 2, Films of Peace and War, which also includes frame enlargements (and a 1960 interview with Huston on his war films). The transcript was made from a viewing of the film on a Moviola, with frame enlargements shot from the screen. One of the ironies of the film’s suppression was that the army allowed this record to be published. Lt. Gen. Leonard D. Heaton, surgeon general of the army, gave permission, provided that the names of soldiers were omitted and their eyes covered in the frame enlargements. The army had earlier allowed use of frame enlargements from the film for an October 29, 1945, Life magazine article by John Hersey about combat fatigue, which credits a Huston documentary for the stills (some stills even ran in Harper’s Bazaar). Even before I saw the film, I was gripped by the documentation in the Hughes book. And in the mid-1970s, actor-director Paul Bartel, with whom I worked on the 1979 film Rock ’n’ Roll High School, showed me a 16mm print of Let There Be Light he had “liberated” from Fort Monmouth, New Jersey, when he was in the Signal Corps, then based at the fort. While passing a room housing a film library, Paul saw Let There Be Light on a shelf, recognized the title, and took the print home with him. He loaned it to Ron Haver for the first public showing.

In 1977, when the Fifth Annual Los Angeles Performing Arts and Folk Life Festival asked members of our Los Angeles Film Critics Association to list our ten favorite films for a brochure accompanying a series of screenings, I put Let There Be Light on my list, while noting, “no print avail.” And I wrote in my Daily Variety review on November 10, 1980, “Huston’s ‘Light’ Sees the Light After 35 Years of Suppression,” signed with my moniker Mac.,

In some cases, legendary “lost” films turn out to be overrated when they are finally rediscovered. But this is not the case with Let There Be Light. The film is a masterpiece, one of the greatest films ever made on the subject of war’s impact on the human spirit. And even beyond that, it is a profoundly moving meditation on the fragility of the mind and its ultimate powers of resilience. . . .

Depicting the men at Mason General Hospital in Brentwood, L.I., reliving their war traumas with the aid of hypnosis and drugs, the film contains several scenes of almost incredible emotional power. . . . [T]he authenticity of seeing an actual soldier revealing his deepest feelings under Huston’s compassionate but unsparing gaze gives the film a resonance beyond any fictional accounts of the war.

Particularly since it has been banned for so long, seeing the film, with its unique view of American fighting men, gives it an added fascination by contrast with the many romanticized and whitewashed depictions of war ground out by the Hollywood and Washington propaganda machines.

The viewer feels that here, for once, a film has not lied or avoided telling the whole truth about what war does to human beings; probably that is why it was banned. . . . Let There Be Light is slightly flawed by its tendency to overrate the powers of psychiatry – a fad at the time, especially in Hollywood – and by an uplifting group-cure ending that reportedly was imposed by the War Dept.

The genuine joy one feels at the end of the film arises from the cumulative power of feeling shared with the men on screen throughout and from the actual evidence of their painful individual recoveries.

Now that the film has finally been shown in public, perhaps the government can let it be seen more widely.

That such a magnificent humanitarian document has been banned for so long is a disgrace; that it was made in the first place reflects well on the government. If the film were distributed now, it would be a valuable contribution to our national history.

My article/review also ran in weekly Variety, in the same November 12 issue in which I reviewed Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. The headline read, “Suppressed 35 Yrs., Huston’s ‘Let There Be Light’ Is Great.” I had rejoined Daily Variety in 1980 after having been freelancing as a screenwriter since 1977. I asked myself, “What good can I do in the short time [one year] I plan to stay on the paper?” Since the Freedom of Information Act now existed – a response to the public’s discontent with not being told the truth about the Vietnam War, the assassination of President Kennedy, and other clandestine government operations – it occurred to me it might be possible to use FOIA to free Let There Be Light. I figured enough time had passed since 1946 that perhaps the film could be released, since it might no longer be regarded as so controversial. I saw my opening when Haver announced his Huston retrospective – in conjunction with the September 12 publication of the director’s autobiography, An Open Book – and included Let There Be Light on the program.

Advertising the film but not calling attention to the fact that it was banned or that this would be its first public screening, Ron scheduled it on an evening with, suitably enough, Freud (1962) and The Misfits (1961). Let There Be Light draws from the vogue for Freudian psychology during the war, and Huston wrote the film with Charles Kaufman, who also collaborated on Freud (there are no individual credits on Let There Be Light, as was the U.S. military rule on its films during the war, so the names of Huston and Kaufman do not appear on it). Ron told me he had been influenced, as I had, by James Agee’s spirited defense of Let There Be Light and his inflammatory call for its release. Agee wrote in The Nation in 1946, “Let There Be Light, a fine, terrible, valuable non-fiction film about psychoneurotic soldiers, has been forbidden civilian circulation by the War Department. I don’t know what is necessary to reverse this disgraceful decision, but if dynamite is required, then dynamite is indicated.” Agee lamented that “Huston’s intelligent, noble, fiercely-moving short film about combat neurosis and some of the more spectacular kinds of therapy, will probably never be seen by the civilian public for whose need, and on whose money [$150,000], it was made. The War Department has mumbled a number of reasons why it has been withheld: the glaring obvious reason has not been mentioned: that any sane human being who saw the film would join the armed services, if at all, with a straight face and a painfully maturing mind.”

I formulated my plan to free the film: Using the LACMA screening as a springboard, I would write an article for Daily Variety about Let There Be Light, including a review describing it as a masterpiece and calling for its release by the army. The review would be set in type and scheduled to run on the Monday morning following the Saturday screening at LACMA – presuming that this time the army wouldn’t stop the screening. This would be my opening salvo in what I planned as a sustained campaign in the press to get the film released through FOIA. I told the paper that if the film didn’t run as scheduled, we should hold the review; in that case, I would have written an article about why it was pulled, while making a similar case for its release.

When I arrived at LACMA on the night of the showing, one of our backshop workers at Daily Variety came up to Ron and me in the lobby and said he was excited to see the film because of the rave review I was giving it in Monday’s paper. Ron, suddenly faced with the prospect of widespread publicity over his bold action, became panicky and said he didn’t want to show the film; instead he offered to show it to us privately in the basement. I argued strenuously that he should show it publicly, as he had announced. After a lengthy debate, I prevailed, citing Agee and my other arguments that the time had come for the film to be made public. Let There Be Light went on with no introduction. The audience just sat there and watched it with no apparent reaction. That seemed a bizarre anticlimax, but now the film was out of the bag, and I figured once it was, the army would have a harder time justifying its continued suppression.

Two days later, on the morning my article ran, I received phone calls from Jack Valenti, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America, and producer Ray Stark, a friend and collaborator of Huston, telling me how much they liked the film and asking how they could help get it released. I told them they could give me interviews about it urging its release. They did so repeatedly, and others began supporting the cause as I continued writing follow-up articles. By a strange coincidence, Valenti said he had just seen the film for the first time on November 7 in his office after Stark had suggested he request a print from the Pentagon. Stark, then preparing Annie with the director, wanted to see if Valenti could persuade the Pentagon to lift the ban; Valenti had not known LACMA was going to screen Let There Be Light the following day. Stark’s passion for the film had led him to write Huston in 1963 to propose they remake it with actors playing the soldiers. It’s not clear if Stark knew the army had already made that mistake with an offensively sanitized, poorly scripted and acted training film called Shades of Gray in 1948. Its feeble copying of some scenes from Let There Be Light throws into relief just how authentic and powerful Huston’s film is (Paul Thomas Anderson’s muddled 2012 feature The Master also rips off scenes from Huston’s film).

Valenti told me in an interview for Daily Variety about Let There Be Light, “I was so moved by the film. I think it’s a really seminal documentary, and it’s one of the most hopeful films I’ve seen for a long time. It made me feel more hopeful for my country. I was in World War II, I flew 51 combat missions, and I know something about fear. This film is something I would want my son to see, because it shows that the government will care for him if he’s injured in serving his country.” The MPAA chief added, “I don’t think our Pentagon should make films and then place restrictions on their showing. Clifford Alexander is the kind of man to whom this kind of thing is anathema. Such restrictions are reminiscent of a more fearful age.”

I called the army’s head of FOIA, who proved sympathetic to the idea of releasing Let There Be Light. This officer doubted that after thirty-five years there would be much, if any, reason to withhold it. The stated reason for its suppression in 1946 was that public release of the film would constitute “an invasion of the right of privacy” of the men shown in the film. Written releases had been obtained from the men at the time, but the army maintained they were only for use of the film “in furtherance of the war effort.” Since the war had ended, that dodge was used to contend that “it is difficult to see how distribution of this film to the public at large or to groups other than military would be permissible.” Huston showed his print to Hollywood friends to help rally them to get the film released by making it a “cause celeb [sic]” and lobbied the surgeon general of the army, William C. Menninger, who wrote him on March 28, 1946,

I still feel that it is the best picture of psychiatry that I have ever seen. . . . There are, however, some very grave questions about it. . . . Anyone with legal experience knows that a patient in a psychiatric hospital who signed such a release is going through the motions. The paper he signs is really worthless and I think it would necessitate a statement from each of these men after they had recovered and left the hospital and also that they had had an opportunity to see the picture themselves. . . . I want you to know that I still feel it is a wonderful picture and we’re very much indebted to you for having created it.

Huston responded on April 15,

I most certainly did not know that the permit that the men signed only specified exhibition to a military audience. This seems rather fantastic inasmuch as the picture was specifically made for public distribution. . . . To my knowledge, no motion picture by the military for the military ever entailed the obtaining of signatures of individuals photographed. . . . Letters I have received from people who have seen this picture all voice an enthusiasm quite unique in my experiences in film making. . . My office is besieged by requests for information as to when and where the picture may be seen. In view of this almost unprecedented interest, it is my hope that the War Department will consider it a responsibility to carry out its original intention regarding this picture.

Arthur Mayer, who had tried to persuade Menninger to release the film, was hailed by Huston in a letter of April 30 as “the champion of Let There Be Light.” Huston told him,

Since writing the General I have had conversations with both psychiatrists and lawyers concerning the validity of a psycho-neurotic’s signature, and they are all in agreement that the p-n’s [sic] signature is as good as any other. Only the signatures of those who have been declared legally insane by a court of law are non-valid. . . . Could it be that the War Department is confusing the meaning of a phrase which I remember as appearing in the release, “. . . in furtherance of the war effort.” My years of experience with the Military incline me to think it could be.

The Under Secretary of War, Kenneth C. Royall, wrote Mayer on September 9 claiming that of the 122 people identified as being in the film, releases “for the purpose only of furthering the war effort” had been obtained from only 65, and that 57 had refused to sign them, including about 24 patients. Royall contended that “the War Department is under strong obligation to protect all individuals appearing in the picture, particularly those who were mental cases. It is felt that neither the individuals nor their families should be subjected to any form of pressure to grant further and broader releases, without which a public showing would not only be an invasion of the right of privacy of the persons shown, but would also, with respect to the patients, constitute a breach of faith.” But Huston writes in An Open Book that the original releases obtained from the soldiers “mysteriously disappeared” from the army files, and that when he offered to get new letters of clearance, he was denied. That was obviously something of a smoke screen for the army’s own need to cover up the film.

By August 14, Mayer’s effort to “contact all participants in the film and obtain new and fool-proof clearances from them” so the film could be released by a company in which he was involved, Mayer-Burstyn, had been stymied, in part because the army claimed, to his disgust, that it could not locate twenty-five of the people involved. “I am beaten,” Mayer told Huston,

and I write to say that you need a better man than I am to carry the torch. I will not attempt to tell you the whole gruesome story of setbacks, slight gains and slashing defeats. Minus bloodshed and world-shaking implications, it is a minor replica of your epic San Pietro. . . . The last, final hair-raising suggestion was, “If you think it such a fine and useful picture, Mr. Mayer, why not have it re-enacted in Hollywood by regular, well-known performers?” No doubt with Van Johnson, Clark Gable and Gary Cooper, and a nice little love story with Ingrid Bergman as one of the attending nurses, and Karloff as a villainous psychiatrist, we would have a smash box-office attraction, and Let There Be Light could be converted into Let There Be Utter Confusion.

Naturally, Huston was furious about the film’s suppression and remained so all through the intervening years. In his words, “I think it boils down to the fact that they wanted to maintain the ‘warrior’ myth, which said that our American soldiers went to war and came back all the stronger for the experience, standing tall and proud for having served their country well. Only a few weaklings fell by the wayside. Everyone was a hero, and had medals and ribbons to prove it. They might die, or they might be wounded, but their spirit remained unbroken.”

I made the argument to the FOIA officer that the men would have been so changed by time that they would not be identifiable if the film were released, and he agreed with me. I continued calling and quoting him as he was taking my request through channels. At one point he asked me, “How come you people always ask about Let There Be Light and never about Report from the Aleutians?” I had seen that 1942-43 Huston war documentary – a seemingly uncontroversial study of soldiers coping with the boredom of wartime service at a remote outpost – but had not known there was any problem surrounding it. The officer said Aleutians too had been banned. Huston had shown a classified bombsight, which caused the film to be withdrawn. No one had ever reported on the banning until I did so. The officer said if I just wrote him a letter asking for Report from the Aleutians to be released, he would do so, and it was promptly done.

The officer continued to be personally sympathetic as I continued my press campaign with a regular barrage of articles. But he told me there was growing resistance from some in the army. The objection still was on privacy grounds. He told me army lawyers continued to be concerned that the film showed soldiers in psychological distress, using the names of some of them, and that it could cause them embarrassment if it were released, even at that late date. I argued to the army and in print that the passage of time would have obscured the soldiers’ identities sufficiently to avoid any problems. The army eventually agreed, although when the film was released, they cut from the soundtrack four mentions of soldiers’ names and covered one name briefly visible on a soldier’s record file. But when the film was eventually restored, all the names were put back into the film. In hindsight, I can see that the army’s concern for privacy was not entirely misplaced; informed consent could hardly be given by men in such distress, and at least some of them might not have wanted to give further consent for the film to be shown soon after the war. Let There Be Light is not the kind of film soldiers had come to expect being made of training or combat but a record of psychological treatment of the most intimate kind. Still, it was unlikely the subjects would have been easily recognizable when the film was finally made public.

The delay in releasing it because of the legal objections was somewhat nerve-wracking. I knew that if Let There Be Light were not released before Ronald Reagan became president (he had been elected on November 4), it might never be released. So we came in just under the wire. Some agencies (notably the CIA) have been quite uncooperative with FOIA over the years. During the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime, new restrictions were placed on the release of government documents, and some documents that had previously been declassified were reclassified or removed from archives. I never spoke with Clifford Alexander, but I always thought it was fitting that the first African American secretary of the army had been the man to free Let There Be Light, whose virtues include Huston’s free mingling of black and white soldiers onscreen, well before the army was officially integrated by President Harry Truman’s executive order in 1948. The black soldier named Griffith who struggles to maintain his dignity before breaking down and carefully explaining to a psychiatrist, “I believe, in your profession, it is called nostalgia,” is perhaps the most powerful presence in the film. Griffith talks about how his “sweetheart” was the only one who gave him “a sense of importance”; when we see them together in one of the joyous concluding scenes, Huston shows them kissing in an extreme closeup; such scenes were never seen in Hollywood films during that era. (It was fitting that Clifford Alexander’s daughter, Elizabeth, read her poem “Praise Song for the Day” at the inauguration of our first African American president in 2009.)

When I began teaching screenwriting at San Francisco State University in 2002, I decided to assign the students to adapt short stories about soldiers with PTSD, Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River” and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.” I did this partly because I wanted to focus the students’ attention on the fact that we are a nation involved in endless wars that too seldom have the direct impact on the home front that the mass mobilization of World War II compelled. And I use Let There Be Light as a teaching tool to show the students the reality of PTSD, that it is not a minor neurosis or affliction but a soul-shattering experience. As the film says, these were men who were raised in peace and taught not to kill, but when you train people to kill and send them into combat, everyone has a “breaking point.” Ken Burns’s documentary about World War II, The War, points out that soldiers then had to be rotated out of combat every two months or they would go insane. Sam Fuller, who made the truest war films, took it one step further: Sam always said it was wrong to show soldiers going insane in combat, because war itself is insane.

I was unpleasantly surprised that after Let There Be Light was released at the Thalia, following such herculean efforts, some reviewers were cynical about it. They beat up on it as too Hollywoodized, too enthralled with the 1940s vogue for films about complexities of human psychology (e.g., Citizen Kane, Kings Row, Spellbound, film noir). Although some reviewers recognized and honored Huston’s psychological acuity and emotional power in presenting the soldiers’ torment, some dismissed Let There Be Light for being too optimistic and propagandistic about the prospects for veterans’ recovery. As I acknowledge in my review, the film is propaganda and slanted toward an upbeat conclusion. Its compressed portrait of recovery and the omission of any cases of utter failure does seem too miraculous (editor William Reynolds trimmed seventy hours of footage, shot over a three-month period, to one hour of vicarious experience; footage Huston recalled shooting of soldiers going through electroshock therapy is not in the film). Even though the film takes pains to point out that deep psychological problems take a long time to heal (Huston discusses that in his book too), the fact that it shows all the men being released in a happy and seemingly cured state seems somewhat facile. Huston admitted in his 1960 interview, “Well, there is certainly some point to that. . . . But they were put back on their legs again – which was a wonder and a miracle, so far as I was concerned.” I agree with Huston. The film’s upbeat feeling stems from genuine optimism about human resilience and healing, and that feeling comes across movingly and endearingly at the end. As Huston writes, the film is “almost like a religious experience.” He was especially moved by the man who stuttered and regained his voice under hypnosis, shouting ecstatically, “O God! Listen! Oh, listen! I can talk! O God, listen! God, I can talk.”

I have also heard people criticize Let There Be Light for allegedly staging events, even though an opening title assures us that nothing was staged and no evidence of staging has been found. I think people are distracted by the film’s elegant cinematography (by Stanley Cortez, who had shot parts of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons and would go on to shoot The Night of the Hunter) and by the use of camera movements and other devices not common in the later vogue for cinéma-vérité documentary, which many people today have been conditioned to regard as the only valid documentary style. These “Hollywood” elements in Let There Be Light (which also include the music by Dimitri Tiomkin and the narration delivered by the director’s father, Walter Huston) show the background of the filmmakers in dramatic filmmaking. But I see nothing wrong with that. Let There Be Light has a gut feeling of raw authenticity unlike anything I have ever seen, with an emotional intensity that goes beyond even Ingmar Bergman’s tearing-away of his actors’ facades. Of course, in any documentary, some “directing” is involved, and the presence of cameras (as pointed out to the men in the film itself) always tends to change human behavior at least in subtle ways. But as Huston noted, and we can see for ourselves, the men are often oblivious of the cameras, since they are in such distress, at least in most of the scenes before they start getting better. These men’s recovery, as Mark Harris notes in his 2014 book Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War, was partly attributable to the special attention they received during the filming. It would take a heartless viewer indeed to believe that Griffith is faking his breakdown during his intake interview.

Scott Simmon observed in a 2012 article on the film,

In the 1980s, critics and academics were quick to condescend to what struck many as Let There Be Light’s sadly old-fashioned documentary form. But such critiques may have dated more rapidly than Huston’s film. In that decade, authenticity in documentary was still judged by resemblance to the gritty, handheld look of cinéma vérité. Now that more elegant interview styles have returned to documentary — most inventively those from Errol Morris — Huston’s work can be judged by broader standards. The Hollywood gloss of Let There Be Light honors the service of psychologically wounded soldiers of World War II by giving their life stories all the careful attention of a studio production.

Richard Corliss’s January 19, 1981, Time magazine feature, “The Disasters of Modern War,” on Huston’s war films and the release of Let There Be Light, recalled Agee’s defiant proclamation:

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 McBride, whose barrage of articles in Variety cast light on the film’s splendid achievements and sorry history.

A friend of mine, screenwriter and critic F. X. Feeney, suggested to me in the ’90s that we do a documentary called And Then There Was Light, a follow-up to Let There Be Light, seeking out and interviewing the afflicted soldiers to see what impact the film had on their lives and how they were faring. A good idea, and I wish we knew what happened to them, but we never did it. What remains is what we see of them in Huston’s indelible film.

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Note: At this writing, Report from the Aleutians, San Pietro, and Let There Be Light are all available for streaming on Netflix. They may also be on Fandor, YouTube, and other sites at any given time.