Spike Lee focuses on telling untold stories

By Steven Rea

The contribution of black soldiers in World War II hasn’t been acknowledged by Hollywood.

TORONTO — Early in Spike Lee’s World War II movie, “Miracle at St. Anna,” there’s a clip of John Wayne rallying the troops in the famous Hollywood D-Day pic, “The Longest Day.” There are no black actors to speak of in that film — although thousands of black soldiers landed on the beaches of Normandy in June 1944.

In fact, there are few black actors in most of Hollywood’s World War II accounts — a war in which almost 1 million blacks served. So when Lee was a kid growing up in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, and he and his brothers watched “The Dirty Dozen,” it was a revelation.

“Jim Brown!” Lee exclaims, remembering the sight of the football hero-turned-movie star on the big screen.

“My brothers and I were so happy to see a black man in a World War II film. Because even though we loved World War II films as kids, we knew — because my father’s older brothers were in World War II — that there were stories not being told.”

That’s a key reason Lee wanted to tell this one. In “Miracle at St. Anna,” four “Buffalo soldiers” — members of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division, the only segregated unit that saw combat — are trapped behind enemy lines in the hills of Tuscany. Lee’s film stars Laz Alonso, Michael Ealy, Derek Luke and Omar Benson Miller.

In “Patton,” Lee notes, the only black actor of consequence is James Edwards, who played the legendary general’s personal valet. But in reality, black soldiers, like the ones in the U.S. Army’s 761st Tank Battalion, “saved Patton ... during the Battle of the Bulge. No one knows about this,” he says.

“And there was the Red Ball Express, which was a caravan of black drivers whose job was to keep the supply lines open so Patton could advance. They were in German territory, driving at night without lights, the unsung heroes.”

And it wasn’t just blacks, Lee adds.

“The Nisei was a Japanese-American unit that fought side by side in the later stages of the campaign in Italy against the Nazis. Japanese Americans! No one knows about them either.”

Lee, 51, wearing tortoise-shell glasses and an Obama T-shirt as he sits for interviews in a Toronto hotel, hopes that “Miracle at St. Anna” will be the first of many films to bring these stories to notice.

“In the spring, George Lucas will do his Tuskegee Airmen film; it’s called ‘Red Tails.’ He’s producing it,” Lee says. “So, hopefully, these two films, back-to-back, will get the ball rolling.”

“Miracle” was shot last fall, mostly on location in Tuscany, and in the fabled Cinecitta Studios in Rome — “a studio built by Mussolini,” Lee notes with no little irony. One of the hardest scenes to watch is one depicting the Nazi massacre of hundreds of villagers in the piazza of the title town, Sant’Anna di Stazzema.

“It was very difficult,” Lee says. “We shot that at the actual place where the massacre occurred. In this small village in Tuscany, where on Aug. 12, 1944, the Nazis — specifically the 16th division SS — slaughtered 560 innocent Italian civilians, made up mostly of elderly men and women, and children.

“And we shot at the same exact place ... and it was spooky. Everybody, cast and crew, felt the spirits, the souls, of those people that were murdered.”

Lee has had a difficult time getting financing for his projects lately. Production on “Miracle” was announced in Rome in July 2007 as a fait accompli. “But we didn’t have one euro. Not a dime. We willed this film into being ...”