'Miracle at St. Anna': Spike Lee's WWII Drama

Image credit: David Lee

Lee may have succeeded in making a WWII film about black soldiers. But that did not lessen his irritation at the lack of African-Americans in other war movies. Far from it. A few months after the shoot in Harlem, Lee berated Clint Eastwood at the Cannes Film Festival for not featuring black actors in his 2006 WWII movies, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. ''Clint Eastwood made two films about Iwo Jima that ran for more than four hours total, and there was not one Negro actor on the screen,'' Lee declared at a press conference. ''If you reporters had any b---s, you'd ask him why.'' (While no African-Americans appear in Letters, several can be seen as extras in Flags; none have speaking parts.) Eastwood, who was at the festival promoting his October film Changeling, subsequently told the London Guardian that Lee ''should shut his face.'' Lee responded by informing abcnews.com, ''The man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either.'' Today, Lee says that ''the people at Disney'' would be happy if he kept any more negative thoughts he might have about Eastwood to himself. ''I get the thing, 'Well, Mr. Eastwood, Mr. Eastwood is so well beloved,' and this might have ramifications at Academy time,'' says Lee. ''But it's over. I said what I had to say. He believes what he believes. And that's that.'' (Eastwood declined to comment for this story.)

What the two directors share, of course, is the real challenge of getting war movies seen by audiences in the first place. Eastwood's were rather tepidly received — Flags grossed $34 million domestically; Letters earned less than half of that. Perhaps the public simply has no desire to see an out-of-fashion genre, one that concerns soldiers in peril at a time when America is fighting a real war abroad. People didn't exactly rush to see last year's tranche of Iraq movies, either. Lee, on the other hand, thinks the current political climate might actually help his film. Specifically, one possible event that, like the existence of his film, could be regarded as something of a miracle. ''With an African-American about to become president, anything is possible,'' says Lee. ''There's a whole new dynamic in the air.''