Forced to make changes, Burns makes "War" better

If you own a Macintosh computer, you may know about the Ken Burns Effect. That’s what they named the Mac feature that allows the user to zoom in and pan slowly across a still picture — a fitting tribute to the man who popularized that technique on the way to becoming America’s best known documentary filmmaker.

There’s another Ken Burns Effect, one that is cultural rather than technological. It’s unfolding now, in the days leading up to next weekend’s world premiere of “The War,” his latest multi-part PBS epic.

Three hundred public television stations have spent weeks trumpeting the arrival of Burns’ World War II project. With groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars promoting it, the telecast may draw record audiences for PBS, rivaling the record 17 million who watched Burns’ breakthrough film, “The Civil War,” in 1990.Afterward, copies of the film will be sold to thousands of schools and libraries across the land. Families will plan pilgrimages to the World War II Memorial in Washington, D.C., after seeing “The War.”

Each Burns film is a tide that lifts all boats. Kansas Citians, in particular, know this.

After all, it was Burns’ massive “Baseball” project that introduced America to a sweet-talking old Negro Leaguer named Buck O’Neil and made him a national hero.

But Burns, who’s virtually a one-man division of PBS, learned that the Ken Burns Effect has its limits. It was during a long standoff earlier this year with Latino and Native American groups who were outraged that he did not find a single veteran of either descent to interview for “The War.”

Rather than acknowledge these glaring oversights in his 14  1/2 -hour project, Burns claimed that the film was “locked” (more than a year before its broadcast date) and that making any changes to please an interest group would “destroy the film.”

He agreed to shoot new footage only after 21 members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met with Burns’ corporate sponsors to tell them they supported the protest and to suggest a boycott might result if amends were not made.

As someone who has watched about half of “The War,” let me address Burns’ most serious concern: Not only has the added material featuring Native American and Latino war stories not “destroyed” his handiwork, it has unexpectedly strengthened and enhanced it.

To tell the story of World War II, Burns and co-producer Lynn Novick chose four archetypal towns and cities: Sacramento; Mobile, Ala.; Luverne, in southwest Minnesota; and Waterbury, Conn.

Many of the film’s talking heads either entered the armed forces from one of these towns or stayed behind in them while loved ones went off to war. The four-town construct gives “The War” a distinctively American perspective, though it also gets the film off to a sluggish start.

There is far too much scene-setting in the first hour, too much foreshadowing. Only as 1942 arrives does “The War” find its rhythm. If Burns has learned one thing over his long television career, it’s that you can show or tell anything to your audience. You can tell how the armed forces were segregated down to the blood supply. You can show a gruesome photo of a beheaded American soldier. You can tell them what SNAFU and FUBAR stand for (though your PBS station might bleep it).

The only thing the audience asks is that you release the pressure at decent intervals, and this Burns does with a jazzman’s timing.

Perhaps better than at any time since “The Civil War,” Burns demonstrates his ear for the felicitous description. He quotes liberally from the wartime writings of Al McIntosh, the longtime editor of Luverne’s daily paper, the Rock County Star Herald. McIntosh’s home-front columns (read here by Tom Hanks) are revered in Minnesota and will soon be cherished elsewhere.

Whether making readers smile by telling about the local woman who sold $56,000 in war bonds in minutes or breaking their hearts with the story of the father who greeted the telegram delivery person with the words, “Which one?” — for he had two sons — McIntosh had an ability, uncanny even among journalists, to paint memorable scenes with few words.

And then there is the signature Burns pairing of image and sound. In the fifth episode, which covers the dark days of late 1944, he uses big-band music to accompany the newsreel of paratroopers landing behind enemy lines, then switches to a doleful Western duet as other paratroopers are spotted by German forces and shot out of the sky.

After watching a dozen of Burns’ films  over the years, I still find juxtapositions like these surprising and strangely moving.

Many times in “The War,” when Burns is searching for an emotional crescendo, he departs from his four-town rule and brings in oracles from elsewhere. The historian Paul Fussell has poignant recollections about his experiences in the infantry. Sam Hynes, a Marine pilot with a gift for words, supplies the first night with its most memorable quote: “I don’t think there is such a thing as a good war. There are sometimes necessary wars.”

Burns is very mindful of some ethnicity — specifically of Japanese-Americans who were rounded up in mid-1942 and shipped off to camps, then later given a chance to prove their valor in combat; and of African-Americans who served bravely despite ongoing racism in uniform.

Willie Rushton, a Marine from Mobile, supplies wonderful plain-spoken commentary about his tour of duty, which included fierce fighting at Peleliu Beach in late 1944. The Japanese, he observed, “didn’t make no difference if you was black or white, they didn’t care.” In the next scene, Rushton is wounded and taken to a hospital ship where, as the only black man aboard, he is refused a haircut by the ship’s barber.

These, of course, are indispensable stories. Burns is right to highlight them. But at times I think he forgets that history is not just for people who lived America’s past. It’s for those who live in America’s present.

And at a time when Latinos are fighting and dying in large numbers in an unpopular war that many people have grown indifferent toward, it’s unconscionable that they should also be invisible during this seven-night broadcast event.

In the end, Burns had to agree. Stubbornly, though, he kept the original film intact. So, tacked onto the end of three nights’ episodes are a total of 29 minutes of material featuring 94-year-old Joe Medicine Crow, a Crow Indian from Montana; and two Latino Marines, Bill Lansford and Pete Arias, interviewed with the help of Hector Galan, a Los Angeles filmmaker.

Burns’ decision means that we meet Lansford and Arias after the opening episode seems to be over. Norah Jones sings a ballad, “American Anthem” (commissioned for “The War”), over a slow-moving montage of images while the screen fades to black … and then suddenly this text appears: “More than sixteen million American men and women would serve in uniform during the War. They came from everywhere and each had a story to tell.”

Arias and Lansford served with Carlson’s Raiders, an elite force that carried on a bold campaign of harassment behind Japanese lines. “It was like a mini United States,” Lansford says. “You got Jews, you got Italians, you got Indians — and they all learned to live together.”

And of course, they died together. When the two men are done with their grim tale, and the credits begin, this time without the salve of Jones’ music, the emptiness is palpable. And you’re reminded that whether a war is later judged to be necessary or a pointless expenditure of human life, there is no good war.