The Longest Day Took Two Nights

[silverscreenselect]

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.

[Bob Juch]

I bought it on Amazon Prime streaming for $4.99. I saw there's a one-hour documentary there that's free: D-Day at Pointe-Du-Hoc.

[SportsFan68]

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.

I'd like to watch it again just because of this. I thought they were all brilliant, especially Burton.

[Bob Juch]

Paul Anka wrote the martial music under the closing credits. Mitch Miller arranged it.

[mellytu74]

We recorded it and watched it the other night. It was informative to see it after touring the D-Day sights the week before.

We stood in the German bunkers and looked at the cliffs, walked Omaha and Utah beaches, saw the Pegasus Bridge. The tiny cafe near the Pegasus Bridge is run by the granddaughter of the couple who owned it then. No photos allowed inside - but she gets the pain du chocolates and croissants from a local bakery, so sitting outside and people-watching is delightful.

Watching families on Omaha Beach - kids with their kits, families walking along the water's edge - brought everything home in such contrast.

[silverscreenselect]

We recorded it and watched it the other night. It was informative to see it after touring the D-Day sights the week before.

We stood in the German bunkers and looked at the cliffs, walked Omaha and Utah beaches, saw the Pegasus Bridge. The tiny cafe near the Pegasus Bridge is run by the granddaughter of the couple who owned it then. No photos allowed inside - but she gets the pain du chocolates and croissants from a local bakery, so sitting outside and people-watching is delightful.

Watching families on Omaha Beach - kids with their kits, families walking along the water's edge - brought everything home in such contrast.

That must have been something, to see all the original sights. I'm guessing the landscape hadn't changed too much from 1944 to 1962 when they filmed the movie, but add another 60+ years and it's surprising to see anything resembling its earlier form.

[mellytu74]

We recorded it and watched it the other night. It was informative to see it after touring the D-Day sights the week before.

We stood in the German bunkers and looked at the cliffs, walked Omaha and Utah beaches, saw the Pegasus Bridge. The tiny cafe near the Pegasus Bridge is run by the granddaughter of the couple who owned it then. No photos allowed inside - but she gets the pain du chocolates and croissants from a local bakery, so sitting outside and people-watching is delightful.

Watching families on Omaha Beach - kids with their kits, families walking along the water's edge - brought everything home in such contrast.

That must have been something, to see all the original sights. I'm guessing the landscape hadn't changed too much from 1944 to 1962 when they filmed the movie, but add another 60+ years and it's surprising to see anything resembling its earlier form.

There are still craters and a bombed-out landscape - wildflowers growing all over. Really striking.

The bunkers were scary as anything - claustrophobic, stark. We saw part of the tunnel system that Germans used underneath.

At St. Mere-Eglise, there are stained glass windows in the church with paratroopers in commemoration. And, in one of the museums, we saw some of the dummy paratroopers - there were more sophisticated ones but there were many that were cruder, just bundles without features, just to give the sense of something/one falling.

[silverscreenselect]

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.

It's now going to be three nights. When I searched for the film on Thursday night, it didn't show up for free on any streaming service I had except for the one version without subtitles. However, I later learned that, not surprisingly, it aired on TCM that night, along with Saving Private Ryan (they very rarely show movies from the 1980s on). TCM puts the films it airs on its streaming service the following day, and they stay for about a month. So, as of June 7, I could watch on TCM with subtitles (I watched enough to verify this), so I've got some more viewing ahead of me.

Another interesting detail about the foreign speaking parts. When they made the movie, the French and German actors filmed two versions of their scenes. In one version, they spoke their native languages (and the studio inserted subtitles in post-production), and in the other they spoke English. Both versions were released theatrically at different times, although the native-language version is what you'll usually find today. It reminded me of the TV series Combat, which was also popular at that time. (The success of The Longest Day probably led to Combat and another WWII series The Gallant Men airing on the networks.) On Combat episodes, French and German characters spoke their native languages (even though the German characters were often played by American actors) without subtitles. So, unless the script for a particular episode called for a translator or another character that conveniently spoke English, most viewers at home had to guess what they were saying. Vic Morrow's squad, who were the main characters in many episodes, had a member named Caje, who was a Cajun from New Orleans and spoke French, so he was conveniently available to translate in conversations with the locals in many episodes.

[kroxquo]

That reminds me of my great-grandfather Claude Witmer who fought in WWI. He was in an engineer division and whenever they had German prisoners they would ask him to translate because he grew up speaking Pennsylvania Dutch ( a very low form of German) which was just similar enough that it allowed him to speak with them.