Home Front America and the Denial of Death in MGM's 'The Human Comedy'

The Human Comedy (MGM, 1943) belongs to a relatively small, loosely associated group of films produced during the Second World War--Happy Land (1943), Tender Comrade (1943), Since You Went Away (1944), and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944), to mention some of the most prominent--that concern themselves primarily with life on what was familiarly known as the "home front." These films are notable in part because in them the pressures, tensions, and ideological conflicts brought to the surface by the war necessarily found expression in ways more direct and more intense than in those films immediately concerned with the conduct of the war itself. At once highly characteristic of this subgenre while at the same time almost eccentrically distinctive, The Human Comedy manages, in its two-hour running time, to touch upon virtually every issue we would today identify with the home front, foregrounding some and at once alluding to and attempting to repress others. Very much a film about "America," if we define America as that familiar, idealized small town created and nurtured by the Hollywood myth-making apparatus itself, The Human Comedy, as a home front film, is at the same time centrally concerned with the disruption of that idealized world and in particular the disruption brought about by death. Before examining The Human Comedy in some detail, I would like to evoke a moment in Frank Capra's familiar postwar film It's a Wonderful Life (1946) which succinctly illustrates what we might term the "home front discourse."' At a critical point in the narrative, Capra employs a montage sequence to summarize various aspects of small-town America's participation in the Second World War. In quick succession, we are shown what Capra's angelic narrator also describes, most of the film's major characters aiding in the war effort: Ma Bailey and Mrs. Hatch sewing for the Red Cross; Mary Bailey (Donna Reed) having babies and working at the USO; Sam Wainwright manufacturing plastic hoods for planes; Old Man Potter heading the draft board; Gower the pharmacist and Uncle Billy selling war bonds; Bert the cop and Ernie the cab driver fighting in France and North Africa; Mary's brother, Marty, at the Remagen Bridge; Harry Bailey shooting down enemy planes just as they are about to crash into a transport full of soldiers; and George Bailey (James Stewart) himself