The Longest Day (1962)

The Longest Day (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, Gerd Oswald, Darryl F. Zanuck, 1962) Darryl F. Zanuck's mega-production based on Cornelius Ryan's 1959 best-seller documenting the D-Day invasion which occurred on this day seventy five years ago. It was Zanuck's last big production (although he had a hand in Tora! Tora! Tora!) in a career where he supervised production on countless pictures while he was the head of production and and 20th Century Fox Studios. Filmed in European locations (Corsican beaches substituted for Normandy), the film's budget (competing for the studio's funds with the over-budget Cleopatra), part of which was taken on by Zanuck himself when 20th board members limited him to $8 million, was off-set by casting it extensively with audience-attracting star-power represented by an international cast of box-office draws and pop-icons. Ryan wrote the screenplay (with episodes supplied by Romain Gary, James Jones, David Pursall, and Jack Seddon) to create a scenario of, like the war, many fronts, each overseen by its recognizable movie star or personality so that audiences could keep track of the progression of each story-line. I would list them, but it would take more time to create links than to write this.

The movie follows the efforts of the Allies—American, British, Canadian—and members of the French resistance attacking by foot, sea and air, while the Germans pace around their pristine offices and board-rooms studying maps and disbelieving incoming reports. It's one of those "dry" war movies with a lot of strategizing, sub-titles scrupulously used in the German and French scenes (but not Scottish—although a version was shot entirely in English) and rare opportunities to see the grand scale of things—except for a couple of notable shots—a plane's perspective (shot by helicopter) of Normandy and a continuous crane shot of the French assault on German troops in the port city of Ouistreham.

The filming is definitely old-school—scenes are shot in long-takes with inserts, the youngest actors are Richard Beymer, Paul Anka and Fabian (Fabian?), while the rest of the actors are in their forties or fifties (far older than their real life counterparts during the actual battle) and are well-established actors, all of whom had previously worked for Zanuck in some capacity. This also proves beneficial besides navigating through the various incidents, as the characters have little character depth besides the job at hand and the actors provide an over-arching persona that fills in some of the character gaps. 

I've seen it several times—once in a theater, sometimes in piece-meal fashion where you can walk away and pick up the thread of the story later, always managing to make it through the long introductory sequence waiting for the weather to clear, and remember mostly Red Buttons' parachutist and his horrific night mare hanging from a steeple watching his fellow soldiers being shot down in mid-flight, John Wayne and his "cricket" designed to signal to a friendly (sorry, Sal Mineo), Richard Burton's morose performance filmed during a break in Cleopatra, and Sean Connery's wise-acre grunt filmed in a hurry so he could fly to Jamaica to become a star as James Bond in Dr. No.

It was a herculean effort in movie-making, almost quixotic in scope. It could not show the carnage that Ryan described in his book—a depiction that wasn't fully realized until Spielberg made Saving Private Ryan in 1999 and somewhat eclipsed The Longest Day as a representation of the assault.

But, it pales in comparison to the real event. The D-Day invasion was a "Hail Mary" pass, a make-or-break maneuver that turned the tide of the war against a German government that was refusing to hear bad news, even while it was stretching itself thin on all fronts. They were entrenched, established and confident in their superiority. And we threw men at them, knowing full well that vast numbers would die...but some would make it through, enough, hopefully, to overcome a complacent enemy, a European enemy who disrupted the established order of things and bullied their way across the continent.

What film could do justice to that? For that matter, what memorial or ceremony could?  What words can you say? The landings at Normandy were something of a miracle, albeit one awash in blood and horror and viscera—a Hell on Earth, born of desperation.

I had a grandfather-in-law who went through it, and I asked him "What was that like?" He paused—long pause—"Welll," he said "I'm here." I left it at that. That was enough. And so, too, are we all, thanks to him and everybody else and it.

Thank you.