In the dog days of the second world war, John Huston travelled to the Mason general hospital in Brentwood, Long Island, to shoot a documentary about a group of wounded soldiers preparing to return to civilian life. Let There Be Light was the third commission in what sounds like an increasingly fraught partnership between the director and the US army signal corps. Huston’s first film (Report From the Aleutians) screened without incident, while his second (The Battle of San Pietro) sparked walk-outs among the military top brass during its Washington preview. But Let There Be Light hit the jackpot. It was immediately yanked and buried, and languished unseen for the next 35 years.
The servicemen at Mason general are all suffering from PTSD – what was known at the time as “shellshock” or “psycho-neurosis”. Shuffling down the gangplank of the troop carrier, they are farmed through eight to 10 weeks of intensive therapy before being released into their old communities. The film introduces us to a (presumably representative) cross-section of case studies: “the Man Who Could Not Walk”, “the Man Who Could Not Remember” and “the Man Who Could Not Talk”. Under hypnosis, the last of these patients recalls that he first began stumbling over the letter S because the sound stirred memories of the hiss of incoming German shells. The therapy unblocks him, like a plunger inside a backed-up sink. “Oh listen, I can talk!” he cries again and again in a rush, lying prostrate and near tears on the psychiatrist’s couch.
Huston and his crew spent several months at Mason general and shot over 70 hours of footage from the individual counselling sessions. He set up the two cameras as one would frame a traditional dialogue scene so as to give these exchanges a dynamic, performative quality. Huston later suggested that the patients who responded best to the treatment were the ones who agreed to be filmed; who were open to the experience and who learned to love the cameras. “It made me realise that the primary ingredient in psychological health is love,” he said. “The ability to give love and to receive it.”
The US army did not love Huston’s film. Intended to reassure prospective employers about the emotional state of America’s homecoming heroes, it was swiftly judged to be too alarming, too distressing to be brought out in polite society and was effectively banned until 1981. The director put its withdrawal down to the army’s rigid adherence to what he called “the warrior myth”: the insistence that men who went to war returned somehow stronger in body and spirit. Let There Be Light exposed the warrior myth for the corrosive lie that it was.
Viewed today, the film’s a fascinating timepiece. Treatments that would have looked sensitive and nuanced in the mid-1940s now seem spectacularly blunt, a hurried bodge job of Rorschach blots and drug-induced regressions that combine to cure what the film refers to as “the submerged lesions of the mind”. Tellingly, dubiously, the documentary ends with a bare-chested baseball game in the hospital grounds – the implication being that Huston’s casualties have been fixed up good as new.
Possibly the film serves as a timepiece in another way, too. Paul Thomas Anderson has cited it as a crucial touchstone for his 2012 drama The Master, in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a traumatised veteran bouncing around postwar America. But I wonder if – albeit indirectly – its influence stretches back still further. Because it’s not just the camera setups that make this documentary play like a drama. It is also the tics, mannerisms and vocal patterns of its subjects. The way they fidget and chain-smoke and pluck at their clothes. The way their eyes rake the room’s corners as though in search of escape. Their anguish is real and their struggles unfeigned. But they could also be workshopping a scene at the Actors Studio in New York.
At the time Huston was shooting Let There Be Light, the 22-year-old Marlon Brando was shaping up for his first lead performance, playing a troubled veteran in the stage production of Truckline Cafe (he’d later made his screen debut playing a similar role in The Men). On the other side of the country, 25-year-old Montgomery Clift was co-starring as the intense, sensitive foil to John Wayne in the western Red River. Both of these actors (along with James Dean, who came later) would go on to embody a new breed of American hero, one that was variously thwarted and vulnerable; at odds with authority and often primed to explode. Who knows? Perhaps this was a protagonist coloured and shaped by the men they had encountered on the streets of their neighbourhoods: the casualties of war, fresh out of Mason general and all the other hospitals, who would eventually find their way back in front of the cameras.
Let There Be Light is available on Amazon Prime and Netflix in the US and Netflix in the UK
