I visited a number of Army hospitals during the research phase, and finally settled on Mason General Hospital on Long Island as the best place to make the picture. He later described how he went about the project:
What World War II soldiers still called “shell-shock” was variously labeled “psychoneurosis” or “neuropsychosis” by physicians, and it was under the working title of The Returning Psychoneurotics that the assignment was given in June 1945 to Huston, then a major in the Army’s Signal Corps.
The subject of Let There Be Light is what we’d now label PTSD-post-traumatic stress disorder-among returning soldiers, and if the term is of more recent invention than Huston’s film, that’s in good part precisely because such sympathetic examinations of the condition were swept under the rug until after the Vietnam era.
And then there was light the movie full#
This new restoration finally reveals the film’s full force. However, by the time the film was first allowed a public screening-in December 1980-its remarkable innovations in style and subject, which in the 1940s were at least a decade ahead of their time, could be taken as old hat, especially because of the poor quality of then-available prints. Army in 1945, it pioneered unscripted interview techniques to take an unprecedented look into the psychological wounds of war. John Huston’s World War II documentary Let There Be Light is so legendary for its censorship controversy that its sheer power as a film has been easy to miss. Transfer Note: Transferred from a 35mm B&W negative preserved by the National Archives and Records Administration. Editors: William Reynolds and Gene Fowler, Jr. Photographers: Stanley Cortez, John Doran, Lloyd Fromm, Joseph Jackman and George Smith.
Writers: Charles Kaufman and John Huston.