Secret Editing, Presidential Intervention and a Mother's Right to Know — How James Roosevelt's Appearance Kept Midway from Being Censored

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Secret Editing, Presidential Intervention and a Mother's Right to Know — How James Roosevelt's Appearance Kept Midway from Being Censored

The Battle of Midway (film) / John Ford & Robert Parrish / 1940s

Back in Los Angeles Ford feared that military censors would suppress the raw battle footage. To blunt that threat he quietly passed the material to editor Robert Parrish (who had worked with him on How Green Was My Valley) to splice into a tight 18-minute montage. In a calculated move to guarantee the film’s public release, Ford inserted scenes of James Roosevelt — the president’s son and a Marine officer — among the sequences of Midway’s defenders. When Franklin D. Roosevelt viewed the finished short in the White House he reportedly told Admiral William Leahy, "I want every mother in America to see this film," an endorsement that effectively protected Ford’s film from censorship and secured its distribution by 20th Century Fox. The finished short went on to win one of the inaugural Academy Awards for Best Documentary in 1942 and Robert Parrish later chronicled the clandestine editing and politics surrounding the film in his 1976 memoir Growing Up in Hollywood.