On Dangerous Ground (1951)

On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1951) Big city detective Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan) is a one-man "good cop/bad cop" shake-down. Of all the detectives on his night-time beat, he's the one who takes the work home, studying mug-shots, knowing the rules, keeping his nose clean.

One little problem—he's taking his work home with him. The job's weighing on him, poisoning his mind. All he sees are the mean city-streets, and the nighthawks who scurry through it. It's being noticed. "All we ever see is crooks, murderers, wino's, stoolies, dames—all with an angle." muses his new partner. "You get so you think everybody's like that. 'Til you find out different, it's kind of a lonely life...Jim just takes it harder than the rest of us." There's been a cop-killing recently—Wilson's partner, in fact—and it's gone unsolved. He knows why: "Everybody hates cops," he tells his captain (Ed Begley). "On either side of the law."

He's not helping the image: When a guy running down the street matches the description of a robbery suspect, he gets pulled over, gets cleared, he starts squawking about "Dumb cops" and Wilson's ready to take a poke at him before he gets held back by his partners; and when he finds an associate of the more likely cop-killers, he beats the information out of him. "Why do you make me do it?" he yells at the guy before laying into him. "You're know you're gonna talk. I always make you punks talk! Why do you make me DO it?"

Well, now the guy's got a ruptured bladder from the beating and Wilson's captain has an ulcer from another civil suit, not Wilson's first. And he's not showing any remorse or any inclination to change. He gets results. He's got a medal. "For being judge, jury and executioner?" grumps his captain. "Make up your mind to be a cop. Not a gangster with a badge." 

So, Wilson gets sent up-state for awhile—"Siberia" he calls it—as there's been a murder of a little girl up there. He needs the space. He needs to get out of the city. And, although he doesn't suspect it, he's going to be particularly well-suited for the job, as he has no pity. And he'll find himself in the odd position of not being the worst thing that could happen.

Once he gets to the county, he finds a scared populace with a mob mentality. Visiting the Brent family, whose daughter is dead, he finds few leads as the girl's sister is too traumatized to offer any help identifying the killer. And the victim's father, Walter Brent (Ward Bond, playing the role with all the reactionary fervor natural to the actor) finds the detective's presence and questions just a delay to vigilante action: "No trial by jury. No sob-sisters. I'm just gonna empty my gun into his belly. Anybody try to stop me'll get the same thing." Up there, Wilson actually finds himself a voice of reason.

A snowy chase into the back-country causes both cars to spin out and ditch. And Brent and Wilson must continue the pursuit on foot following tracks in the snow. The way leads to a cabin with only one light on. The inhabitant is Mary Malden (Ida Lupino) who welcomes the men into her house and it's a few minutes before Wilson realizes that Mary is blind and has been for some years. Brent is suspicious and goes out to track Danny, leaving Wilson and Mary alone in the cabin, where she gets tea for the two of them. Wilson just observes.

She notes this, suspecting she's not the first blind person he's known. When Wilson asks why, she says he didn't offer her help and there's no pity in his voice. She asks him what it's like to be a cop, and he says you get to where you don't trust anybody.

"You're lucky," she says. "You don't have to trust anyone. I do. I have to trust everybody."

For Wilson, out of his element and having to deal with nuance and honesty, the case becomes one of negotiation, between two individuals—without angles—who either want the culprit alive or the culprit dead, and his understanding the cases for both sides. The extremes must coalesce if justice must be served...if only one can trust.

On Dangerous Ground (it's original title was "Mad With Much Heart", as per the original novel by Gerald Butler) boasts a great script by director Ray and A.I. Bezzerides** (one of the better noir screenwriters), which was originally a three-act structure, with the upstate scenes bracketed by the city action with a downbeat ending. But Howard Hughes, in charge of RKO at the time, was in a tinkering mood, and moved the last episode, earlier in the picture, so any inspiring words have to be recalled in echoed memory, rather than told to him for the first time, making Ryan's Wilson a cop who doesn't listen too good. And a tacked-on happy ending doesn't help things as far as a consistent tone, which makes it tough for both Lupino and Ryan, who does some mighty subtle work on a character who doesn't go in for subtle. The film already treads the noir landscape of cynicism, paranoia and naive romanticism, but, in the ecstatic ending, it doesn't remain true to the characters and their core souls.

The film also has a great score by Bernard Herrmann which gives a hastily shot scramble up a bunch of rocks that are standing in for a mountain a sense of urgency and largeness; it foreshadows his work on North By Northwest. It elevates the film several notches above its roots and has the verve of another movie entirely.

Just the music from the chase scene On Dangerous Ground

** Bezzerides wrote the scripts for Thieves Highway and Kiss Me Deadly.

The Boy With Green Hair

The Boy with Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1948) So, I would expect you to take a look at the headline, then look at the poster, and then look at the director and go..."waitaminnit—Joseph Losey? That British director who made all those films with Harold Pinter?" Yeah, "that" Joseph Losey. This was his first film. And he was American, being born in La Crosse, Wisconsin. As for his reputation for being British, it's much the same story as for "French director" Jules Dassin (born in Middleton, Connecticut). The confusion comes because these American directors started their careers right before the 1950's.

Blame the confusion—all of it—on Joseph McCarthy (and put his minion, Roy Cohn, as an asterisk).

Losey (and Dassin) were caught up in the Communist hunt in the 1950's and left America to work—and wait for things to calm down and the industry "black-list" to be officially/unofficially ignored.

As for The Boy With Green Hair, it's not a bad start for a first film; I've been working on a post for one of Fred Zinnemann's early films, My Brother Talks to Horses, which is just plain weird, but one has to start somewhere.

There was a boy

A very strange, enchanted boy

They say he wandered very far

Very far, over land and sea

A little shy and sad of eye

But very wise was he

"Nature Boy" words and music by eden ahbez

Police find a silent and bald child (Dean Stockwell—he was 12) wandering the streets and bring him, calling on Dr. Evans (Robert Ryan) to find out what the situation is. Through coaxing—and some food—Evans learns that the boy's name is Peter Frye, that his parents are missing and have been since travelling to London during the second World War. The small Frye has been traded from relative to relative until being taken in by Gramps (Pat O'Brien), a retired vaudevillian who, it turns out, is not really his grandfather. Despite the lack of blood-ties, Peter found a stable life with the old man, who is genial and caring and has a boy's sense of play and wonder.

Peter has settled enough to be regularly attending a school, with its clique-mindedness and "new-kid" insecurities, and though he makes friends, there's also others who make school-life testing beyond what might be on a page. Much is made that Frye doesn't have any parents—any "real" parents, like a "normal" kid would have—and it becomes apparent (once others bring it up) that he might be considered a war orphan (as his class is setting up a collection at school for the European kid-survivors. This gets to young Peter and more and more, his thoughts turn to the war and its consequences on people...people like him. It doesn't help that there is much in the news about civil defense and the escalating tensions of nuclear proliferation. "Duck and Cover" sounds like a good idea until the shock-wave comes along. It puts a lot on Peter's mind about the consequences of the last war and the likely next one.

So, imagine the kid's surprise when he wakes up from one troubled night's sleep with GREEN hair! At first, he thinks it's funny—what a goofy thing to have green hair. Gramps is alarmed, but goes along with it. But, the kids at school—they consider Peter a freak and begin to regularly haze him and try to cut his hair off—him with his pacifist ideas and all. The fascists! And if they weren't bad enough, the parents are equally aghast. A BOY with green hair! What WILL happen to the neighborhood? And despite being a good-natured soul, Gramps feels the public pressure about this kid that stands out, and Gramps takes him to the barber to get his head completely shaved. A crew-cut wouldn't be good enough, not even in the 1950's.

A vision of European war-orphans explain it all to Peter.

It's a bit precious and more heavy-handed than it needs to be, especially with the intended audience of kids (hopefully accompanied by their intolerant parents, but—I dunno, I'll bet the folks just dropped the kids off and with any luck, picked them up later) and all the folks blarney provided by O'Brien. Ryan makes a tolerant father-figure, and Stockwell is everything you'd want in a child's performance—nothing mawkish or mugging (he seems more adults than a lot of the movie's adults). But whether the plot actually convinces that tolerance—in the midst of possible nuclear annihilation—is anything more than a good idea, especially considering the actions of the adults in the movie, I'm not sure. It feels like just a verification of kid-victimhood, without any recourse for rescue. And I don't think kid's "get" allegory.

One other interesting aspect of the film is its score—by Leigh Harline—making extensive use of one of the Summer of '48's music hits, "Nature Boy," a strange and haunting song that almost literally fell into Nat King Cole's lap. It lends the movie a touch of the exotic that makes it a bit more credible...and heartfelt.

And then one day

One magic day he passed my way

While we spoke of many things

Fools and Kings

This he said to me:

"The greatest thing you'll ever learn

Is just to love and be loved in return"

The Professionals

The Professionals (Richard Brooks, 1966) In this post-modern Western (post-A Fistful of Dollars and pre-The Wild Bunch), a ranching tycoon (Ralph Bellamy) hires three soldiers-of-fortune, late of the Mexican Revolution, to rescue his wife Maria (Claudia Cardinale), who has been kidnapped by a Mexican revolutionary-turned-bandit, Jesus Raza (Jack Palance), the ransom being $100,000. The wages are $10,000 per man for a 9 day job. The three are Henry "Rico" Fardan (Lee Marvin), Jake Sharp (Woody Strode) and Hans Ehrengard (Robert Ryan), all with different skill-sets and temperaments, for a job that will require stealth, intricate planning, and an assault on an extremely well-guarded encampment deep in Mexico.

Fardan is a weapons expert, Sharp, a former Apache scout and expert with a bow, silent and precise, while Ehrengard is a horse wrangler, with a regard for his charges, more than he does for human beings. 

There's just one man missing: Bill Dolworth (Burt Lancaster), explosives expert. Fardan wants him for that expertise, but also because he and Dolworth rode with Pancho Villa during the Revolution, alongside Raza. But, sentimentality aside, they've been hired for a job and will ride against their former band-mate, and their history with him may prove valuable in the task. It's a job, pure and simple. It won't remain either.

The four start tracking Raza's gang to get a sense of tactics and escape routes. Dolworth sets up explosives in a particularly tight cliff-pass for their end-game, that can be abetted by a train route, the government transport which they spy Raza's men commandeering, while slaughtering all of the Mexican troops on-board. The small troop of professionals don't interfere and Ehrengard is aghast, but Dolworth explains that those troops were dangerous cut-throats who had been responsible for the destruction of a village, killing Fardan's wife in the process.

But, the train will making a handy means of escape to the mountains after the attack on Raza's encampment, so the four take on Raza's men and take it over. Now, they have a quick way to retreat. But now, the tough part begins: an assault on Raza's stronghold under cover of darkness and try to take Maria back. Ehrengard stays behind with the train while Fardan, Dolworth and Sharp continue the rest of the way, three men against a well-armed fortress.

Raza's place is scouted, the sentries timed, dynamite placed, the two biggest targets being a water tower and a machine-gun placement. For Fardan and Dolworth, it's set and forget, giving them an opportunity to get to the area where Maria is being kept, while Sharp—with arrows tricked up with dynamite—provides cover and distraction. Dolworth has the explosives on timed fuses, so there will be ample explosions to send Raza's men scurrying, with Sharp given the opportunity to improvise.

But, when professionals plan, God laughs. There's always got to be a surprise and The Professionals turns on a single phrase: "We've been had, amigo..." Their mission turns out out to be made on a false premise, and it's then that the four have to make decisions of conscience, for which the time in the revolution has provided ample experience. "Maybe there's only one revolution since the beginning: the good guys versus the bad guys. Trouble is, who are the good guys?" And can good guys do inherently good, even when their job is bad...

Oh, and since they have the woman, they have to find a way to get her back...and stay alive while doing so. It won't be made any easier by the fact that the train they have in waiting has been taken back by Garza's men, who have taken Ehrengard hostage...and they're not interested in any ransom—but maybe a trade will do. Maybe.

Brooks' film (based on Frank O'Rourke's "A Mule for the Marquesa") is a nifty little variation on John Ford's The Searchers, but has nothing to do with that film's underlying motivation of family cohesion and race hatred or hysteria. Here, it's all business that sets the search in motion, not family, and in the course of the film, it happens to turn that film's premise on its ear. Things are done for convenience, things are done for commerce, things are done for compromise. There's no passion here, it's a transaction. But, passion wins out in the end.

It's another of those macho films with a woman at the center of it, and its focus—even when Cardinale's Maria isn't on the screen, the characters are always pondering "What makes a woman worth $100,000?" It finally succumbs to a rough-hided romanticism, as if any of the characters would admit to it (which they wouldn't as their credo is usually demonstrated by actions and not words) that might be revolutionary echoes or merely respect. The dialog does get a little too philosophical in intent, but it does have one heck of a clever come-back at the end. And it's an entertaining ride.

There'll be another of the Western genre's "Searchers spin-off's" next week.

Olde Review: The Wild Bunch

This was part of a series of reviews of the ASUW Film series back in the '70's. Except for some punctuation, I haven't changed anything from the way it was presented, giving the kid I was back in the '70's a break. Any stray thoughts and updates I've included with the inevitable asterisked post-scripts.

This Friday's ASUW films in 130 Kane are Masaki Kobayashi's Hara-Kiri and Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.

The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

"When you side with a man, you stay with him and if you can't do that, you're like some animal! You're finished! We're finished! All of us!"

This is the credo of the films of Sam Peckinpah. Throughout his film career--even before Peckinpah had William Holden speak those words in The Wild Bunch--it has been the thread that has bound his films together, formed their basis, given them a purpose. And this credo doesn't just apply to a band of outlaws as it does in The Wild Bunch, but also to employer and employee (as in The Killer Elite) or to husband and wife (The Getaway and Straw Dogs) and to former friends, even if they are on opposite sides of the Law, as in almost all of Peckinpah's films. In the realistic morality of Peckinpah's worlds, the combatants, though on opposite sides of their battlegrounds, are neither totally pure or totally evil. They are amoral, with aspects of both, and thus that credo--the credo of loyalty--is the only means we have of separating them and determining the better men.

"If they move, kill 'em"...right before Peckinpaw's director credit

Peckinpah has always been accused of being nothing but a "macho" film-maker, and though it may be true that he primarily focuses on the male world, I think the term macho is inappropriate. If "The Wild Bunch" are macho, they are blithely ignorant of it. They are not dedicated to their maleness as much as to their survival, and to the spirit of the credo.

Another thing that is popular to hit Peckinpah on is his use of violence--his explicit use of violence. And while The Wild Bunch is violent--even by today's standards**--it might be wise to keep in mind the work of a lot of hacks around these days*** who make more violent films and do so with less imagination and regard for anything. Peckinpah's uses of slow motion violence are not prolonged, they are quick vignettes of an individual confrontation with death, that much like the life itself, is here, then gone, leaving an impression in one's mind no matter how many deaths one sees.

Also, it might behoove you to keep in mind that Peckinpah doesn't just make Wild Bunch's and Straw Dogs'. He has made two recent films which I would urge you to see--Junior Bonner and The Ballad of Cable Hogue which are boisterous but gentle, apply Peckinpah's credo, but also celebrates life. Not only are they my favorite Peckinpah films, they are his, too. The reason he doesn't make too many films like them is that they don't make money.

The Wild Bunch has an all-star cast, uniformly excellent in their roles: William Holden, Robert Ryan, Ernest Borgnine,**** Ben Johnson, Warren Oates, Edmund O'Brien, Strother Martin, and L.Q. Jones (who, only incidentally, wrote and directed the film of A Boy and His Dog). These are just the stars, but this film is filled with people and faces that you will never forget. Nor will you ever forget the experience of The Wild Bunch.

Broadcast on KCMU-FM October 28 and 29th, 1975

The Wild Bunch (led by William Holden) and the motley crew that pursues them (led by Robert Ryan)

I'm still a big fan of The Wild Bunch and Junior Bonner and The Ballad of Cable Hogue, and Ride the High Country and Cross of Iron and Pat Garret and Billy the Kid, and Major Dundee, now that they've been released in versions that are closer to the way Peckinpah intended them. Producers had a habit of hiring him and then firing him and re-editing his films themselves (often into confusing plot-line dangling confusion), and I think that had a lot to do with The Peckinpah Credo about loyalty. He wanted them to know that if you hired him, you'd better trust him to make the film, but there's always disagreement about that when the red ink starts to flow.

I think Sam would crawl into a bottle if he saw how corporate loyalty invaded politics to create administrations of co-conspirators who couldn't think beyond their loyalty to their jobs and bosses. It goes to show that too much of anything can turn into a problem.

The Wild Bunch grows more interesting with age as a film about the old guard being unwilling to change in the face of the modern world, and convinced of their own transitory nature, while sticking to their code. It also shows layers of greed, between the outlaws and the members of Ryan's gang that have no moral hedge against body-robbing. There's a very fuzzy moral line there, but Peckinpah's morality could be very fuzzy. As fuzzy as the world lets it, I suppose.

The film was made part of The National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 1999.

** Not so true today. Nowadays, The Wild Bunch looks tame. But, this film came out after audiences had been prepped by the "Dance of Death" in Bonnie and Clyde—the sequence influenced the editing and blood-spatter of the "Battle of Bloody Porch" sequence in The Wild Bunch—and even the relatively tame Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

***Don't know who was thinking of here, but, at the time, maybe Tobe Hooper, and Paul Bartel. But, the era of bloody violence—with wounds that would take more than a band-aid to heal—were in such mainstream films as The Godfather, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, Dirty Harry, and other films that came out during the "ultra-violent" Christmas Season of 1971 (which included Peckinpah's Straw Dogs).

****I've become convinced that Ernest Borgnine played one of the atypical roles of his life when he played "Dutch" Engstrom--who, from the evidence I see in the film, is gay (Ernest Borgnine?!). Dutch doesn't join in with the Bunch's whoring activities, and his cries for Pike Bishop during the finale show a definite emotion more than loyalty. Of course, there have been gay sub-texts before in Westerns, and in the classic ones, long before Brokeback Mountain made it seem revolutionary (Well, yeah, if nobody was watching...) Peckinpah snuck it right by--that's why I like the director so much.

Crossfire (1947)

Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) Shadows of a fight splay out diagonally across one apartment wall. Then a body flies across the room, knocking out the one remaining light. Everything goes black until hands twist alight the bulb in the lamp on the floor, exposing only the lower part of the room. One man is dead on the floor, another is conked out in an over-stuffed chair. The third is busy: he checks the body for signs of life, runs for the chair and rousts the man out of it. Then, more light as a door opens and two back-lit figures rush into the corridor, and are gone. 

It's film-noir done by two of the best Hollywood had to offer in the genre, writer John Paxton and director Edward Dmytryk, making a scene of violence with no dialogue and an efficient way of shooting that tells you what's going on but not by who, keeping the mystery alive in that movie short-hand that seems to have gone out of fashion in an expositioned-to-death world. Paxton and Dmytryk had done the Dick Powell version of "Farewell, My Lovely" (retitled Murder, My Sweet in case anybody thought that it was another Dick Powell musical) and in this Dore Schary production for RKO, they were using the form in the call for social justice in the case of antisemitism. This B-movie was taking on the subject the same year as the A-list Gentleman's Agreement.

Except the book it was based on wasn't about anti-semitism. That novel, "The Brick Foxhole," written by future movie writer-director Richard Brooks, didn't have a Jewish murder victim. In it, the man was homosexual, but it would take a few more decades before Society and Hollywood would have the grit to tackle that, without putting its own derogatory coloring on it. But, Dmytryck was determined to make a statement out of it, especially in light—or dark—of the Holocaust of the recent war. And he couched it in a film noir with two separate investigators, three actors named Robert, and a whole lotta flashbacks.

That opening scene is a chiaroscuro portrayal of the murder of one Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene) and it's up to police Captain Finlay (Robert Young) to track down the culprit who beat Samuels savagely to death. The first to talk is Samuels' girlfriend who found the body. From her and a wallet found at the crime scene, Finlay finds out with whom she and Samuels had drinks with earlier. Then, a knock at the door reveals "Monty" Montgomery (Robert Ryan), who knows what the girl-friend is talking about and tells his side of the story, giving Finley leads...and three suspects. But, no motive.

What's different is that the three suspects are all pre-deployment soldiers in the U.S., not unlike Monty himself. And the most suspicion falls on Mitchell (George Cooper), who was there that night, and has had a rough time of it in the Army. His sergeant, Keeley (Robert Mitchum) explains: "He's homesick. He's wifesick. Maybe she said something in one of her letters that made him suspicious of her love life. I don't know. Anyway, he's got snakes. He's been nuts. But not nuts enough to kill somebody." Keeley's friends with Mitchell and has tried to get his wife to visit him to straighten him out. Instead, Mitchell's been going sweet on a bar hostess (Gloria Grahame), who may or may not be married, but is only interested in him for the booze he buys while she's keeping him company.

Sgt. Keeley starts his own investigation, trying to protect his pal, Mitchell, from Finley and the cops and to find out what happened that night in Samuels' apartment before Finley can find and arrest him. He finds Mitchell in a movie theater and is able to find out that Mitchell and two other soldiers had drinks with Samuels before going to the scene of the crime. And then murder happened. But why? Finley's interview with another soldier, Floyd (Steve Brodie) doesn't reveal any motive.

It's when Finley and Keeley's parallel investigations stop working at cross-purposes and they begin to collaborate that it becomes clear that it was a hate crime, and their interview with Grahame bar-hostess and another pertinent murder points them to the real culprit and his impulses which seem to run counter to what the war that was just won was all about, and that the underlying issues of that war have their own parallels imbedded inside the United States, as well. Finley sums it up in one of the tidy little speeches in the film: "Hating is always the same, always senseless. One day it kills Irish Catholics, the next day Jews, the next day Protestants, the next day Quakers. It's hard to stop. It can end up killing men who wear striped neckties. Or people from Tennessee."

The film was a wake-up call hidden inside a police thriller, with the dark hues of the grimier, more cynical post-war sensibilities that were the underpinnings of the film-noir genre. But, rather than cut-throat gangsters and the criminally-motivated, Crossfire hit closer to home. It garnered Academy Award nominations for Grahame and Ryan, as well as for director and screenplay. It also is one of the few films in the B-movie domain of the noir films to be nominated for Best Picture.

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.