John Huston's 1945 documentary on the psychiatric treatment of shell-shocked World War II veterans recuperating in an army hospital - “together with Huston's The Battle of San Pietro...one of the greatest war documentaries ever made” according to film historian Georges Sadoul - though commissioned by the War Department, was confiscated on completion and has remained banned from public viewing for the last 35 years. Though the restriction was based on grounds that the film violated patients' rights, it is acknowledged by Huston and others that the confiscation in fact reflected the Army's recognition that the anguish suffered by these men as a direct result of their combat experiences would come to the public as a revelation and a shock, not only discouraging future recruitment but running counter to the Department's intended use of the film. Ironically, it was commissioned to demonstrate to potential employers the successful rehabilitation of veterans with histories of psychiatric problems. The Army ban remained in effect until November 1980, when a (still unauthorized) Los Angeles County Art Museum screening, part of a Huston retrospective, added to pressure already being put on the Pentagon by Motion Picture Association of America President Jack Valenti and producer Ray Stark.
Though the film is unrelenting in its description of the emotional effects of war, its deeply humanitarian, ultimately pacifist implications led Jack Valenti to report, “It is one of the most hopeful films I've seen for a long time” (in Variety). Huston has called the making of Let There Be Light “the most hopeful and optimistic and even joyous thing I had a hand in.... It gave me a sense of the reality of human behavior as against the conventions that the Hollywood screen rather cannibalistically had come to accept as behavior....” (in “The Cinema of John Huston”) (JB)