The Longest Day Took Two Nights
Posted: Sat Jun 08, 2024 8:38 am
I watched The Longest Day the last two nights (it's a three-hour film so I split the viewing). The movie still holds up very well as drama and an action film and gives viewers a good idea of what went on in the D-Day invasion. Unfortunately, the version I saw on a streaming channel that shows a lot of bootlegs didn't have subtitles. All the German and French characters speak their native language, so when two German generals were talking to each other, I had to kind of guess what they were saying. The Omaha Beach landing lacks the scope and graphic intensity of what was depicted in Saving Private Ryan, but technology wasn't that far advanced and censorship standards of the time prevented them from showing really graphic imagery.
What's really amazing about the movie is the cast, which you couldn't assemble today. There were a lot of big names like John Wayne, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, and Robert Mitchum. And a lot of up-and-coming young actors, many of who I couldn't identify. I did recognize a few, like Robert Wagner, Sal Mineo, Roddy McDowall, Stuart Whitman. Sean Connery is in the movie (the last he made before filming Dr. No), as is Goldfinger, Gert Frobe (they don't share any scenes). One cast member, Richard Todd, had actually been a paraglider during D-Day who was involved in a battle depicted in the movie. He played his real-life commanding officer, while a lesser-known actor played Todd himself, who was depicted in a few scenes. The producers were able to assemble this cast because almost everyone worked for scale because they felt the movie was important. And in many cases, the actors had cameo roles and could film their scenes in a day or two. Richard Burton flew in from the set of Cleopatra to film his scenes in one day. They actually had four directors on the movie, an American director, a British director, a German director, and a second unit director to help with the action scenes. That allowed them to shoot different scenes with different casts on the same day.
One scene that is depicted in the movie was the attack on Pointe du Hoc, where Biden gave a speech yesterday. It's a 100-foot-tall cliff overlooking Omaha Beach which couldn't be attacked from the air because the gun emplacements were so heavily fortified. So a group of Rangers used grappling hooks and ladders to climb the cliff, while the Germans were shooting at them and trying to knock over the ladders. Ironically, they didn't even need to climb the cliffs, because the Germans had already removed their artillery before the invasion. Equally ironically and much sadder is that the Germans counterattacked the Rangers who were relatively defenseless on the top of the cliff. Reinforcements didn't arrive for two days from the beaches, and most of the Rangers died on the clifftop, not during the climb itself. They ran out of ammunition and had to use the weapons of dead Germans.
The movie is very good and fairly accurate to Cornelius Ryan's best-seller. He wrote the screenplay and many of the bits of business in the movie actually occurred, including a scene in which a group of French nuns walk through the middle of a firefight to provide medical attention to the French resistance forces in one of the buildings.
What's really amazing about the movie is the cast, which you couldn't assemble today. There were a lot of big names like John Wayne, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, and Robert Mitchum. And a lot of up-and-coming young actors, many of who I couldn't identify. I did recognize a few, like Robert Wagner, Sal Mineo, Roddy McDowall, Stuart Whitman. Sean Connery is in the movie (the last he made before filming Dr. No), as is Goldfinger, Gert Frobe (they don't share any scenes). One cast member, Richard Todd, had actually been a paraglider during D-Day who was involved in a battle depicted in the movie. He played his real-life commanding officer, while a lesser-known actor played Todd himself, who was depicted in a few scenes. The producers were able to assemble this cast because almost everyone worked for scale because they felt the movie was important. And in many cases, the actors had cameo roles and could film their scenes in a day or two. Richard Burton flew in from the set of Cleopatra to film his scenes in one day. They actually had four directors on the movie, an American director, a British director, a German director, and a second unit director to help with the action scenes. That allowed them to shoot different scenes with different casts on the same day.
One scene that is depicted in the movie was the attack on Pointe du Hoc, where Biden gave a speech yesterday. It's a 100-foot-tall cliff overlooking Omaha Beach which couldn't be attacked from the air because the gun emplacements were so heavily fortified. So a group of Rangers used grappling hooks and ladders to climb the cliff, while the Germans were shooting at them and trying to knock over the ladders. Ironically, they didn't even need to climb the cliffs, because the Germans had already removed their artillery before the invasion. Equally ironically and much sadder is that the Germans counterattacked the Rangers who were relatively defenseless on the top of the cliff. Reinforcements didn't arrive for two days from the beaches, and most of the Rangers died on the clifftop, not during the climb itself. They ran out of ammunition and had to use the weapons of dead Germans.
The movie is very good and fairly accurate to Cornelius Ryan's best-seller. He wrote the screenplay and many of the bits of business in the movie actually occurred, including a scene in which a group of French nuns walk through the middle of a firefight to provide medical attention to the French resistance forces in one of the buildings.