The story that Huston and others told, however, wasn’t true. Subsequent scholarship has chipped away at the myth, revealing that the supposed documentary was just another piece of narrative fiction. In his 1989 article for the Southwest Review, the English professor Lance Bertelsen suggested that the “bulk of the action” was staged. The film historian Mark Harris was more damning. In his 2014 book Five Came Back, he called the documentary “a scripted, acted, and directed movie that contained barely two minutes of actual, unreconstructed documentation.”
The film was sold to the public as the real thing, and audiences were successfully duped for years. But even as the truth has come to light, filmmakers and fans have refused to write off the documentary that never was—or the man behind its camera. Huston had just begun establishing himself as a director when America entered World War II. The son of actor Walter Huston, John first became a screenwriter, receiving credits for films such as Jezebel and High Sierra, as well as an Oscar nomination for his work on Dr. Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet. His directorial debut, The Maltese Falcon, arrived mere months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
He was in uniform the following year, creating films for the Signal Corps. As Harris details in his book, many prominent directors took on these assignments, bringing their individual style and technique to what was ultimately, no matter how you shot it, propaganda. Huston’s first documentary short was Report from the Aleutians, a dispatch from foggy islands of Alaska. The Battle of San Pietro was his second.
Huston always maintained that he shot the film on the fly as the battle unfolded, but historians have poked holes in his timeline. Bertelsen refers to accounts from Eric Ambler, the British spy novelist who collaborated with Huston on the shoot. Ambler claims they didn’t even make it to San Pietro until the final day of fighting, when, Bertelsen writes, “they saw plenty of dead and were mortared by the retreating Germans, but got little in the way of useable footage.”