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Summary: D-Day Epic
Review: The Longest Day is an epic World War II film that details the night leading up to and including the D-Day invasion. The film is directed by three directors (Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton & Bernhard Wicki) with each filming the story from the US, UK and German point of view. The film is authentic as it includes actually military leaders and the German actors speak German (with subtitles). The fact that the film is in black and white adds to the starkness of the mission that Allied Forces are about to embark on. The film is tension filled and riveting. Since the movie was released in 1962, the war sequences are not realistic (certainly nowhere near the graphic nature of Saving Private Ryan) due to violence restrictions that were in place at the time. That doesn't take away the film's griping nature. The cast is a who's who of actors and musicians including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Eddie Albert, Richard Burton, Red Buttons to just name a few.
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Summary: The grandfather of "Saving Private Ryan"
Review: This may be the best war movie ever made. In scope, detail and accuracy it is unsurpassed. At almost forty years old it stands up to any modern film about war or combat. The cast of this movie defies description, I could write thousands of words about the various members without ever talking about the movie. The cinematography is superb, and makes excellent use of actual combat footage. Finally, while capturing the grand scope of the D-Day invasion, "The Longest Day" also recounts countless acts of individual drama and heroism with great skill and emotion.A wonderful film!
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Summary: The Longest View
Review: Unlike Saving Private Ryan, The Longest Day was filmed to dramatize the true, unfolding story of the invasion of France beginning several days before the invasion, which was documented for all time by journalist Cornelius Ryan. Ryan did something few historians have successfully accomplished since the end of the war. He compiled thousands of interviews and wrote a realistic account of the invasion which reads like a suspense and action novel. The movie seeks to combine many characters taken from Ryan's book, and is therefore fiction as well as history, but it is masterfully done and is otherwise true to history. Stereotypes of incompetent German officers and troops, so common in film and television of the early 1960's was not a problem in this movie, nor is the graphic violence of Private Ryan observable. The true story is the focus of the movie, and it was made primarily for veterans who had seen the real violence and had fought tough, intellegent and brave Germans, and had no need to be reminded of those horrors. They did have a desire to see their sacrifices and trials acknowledged alongside the background of historical context. It is a gripping movie. A side note for those who might want to compare The Longest Day with Saving Private Ryan. These should compliment each other, not be compared with each other. The audience for The Longest Day was primarily the veterans, their peers and children. The audience or Saving Private Ryan is primarily the grandchildren of the veterans, young people who are in the main, quite ignorant of history. There is no doubt that Saving Private Ryan is more accurate a portayal of historical American and German weapons and villages, but this was not even attempted in the Longest Day. If you will read The Longest Day before watching Saving Private Ryan, you will see that the sites and sounds remembered by many of the interviewed veterans who were at Omaha and Utah beaches somehow happened at the same time and place in Saving Private Ryan. That makes Saving Private Ryan as inaccurate for what it shows, as is The Longest Day, for what it doesn't show. Both movies are excellent, and both are moving.
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Summary: Excellent war flick!
Review: Although "The Longest Day" doesn't have the sheer visceral punch of 1998's "Saving Private Ryan", but it's still a heck of a film, and it's a pretty accurate telling of the D-Day story. Some of the moments worth noting in this film include: 1) The sweeping, aerial view of the landing beach, told from the point of view of one of two German pilots assigned to strafe it. 2) A German officer is told repeatedly by his superiors that the Allies aren't coming, but scans the ocean with his binoculars anyway. What does he see? Thousands of Allied ships, punctuated with the first four notes from Beethoven's Fifth. Nice! The all-star cast is also fine, though in the context of the cynical 21st century, their unabashed flag-waving is a little corny. But what else could guys like John Wayne do? Producer Darryl F. Zanuck basically bet the 20th Century Fox studio on this film, and it shows. It's extremely well-made, and great care was taken to accurately recreate some of the pivotal D-Day battles. True, the film doesn't accurately portray the sheer carnage of the battle, but this film was made in 1962; the kind of filmmaking technology (and permissiveness on the part of censors) that made "Saving Private Ryan" so viscerally violent simply didn't exist then. But it's worth noting that, gore aside, both films' renditions of D-Day are remarkably similar. This is also one of the first WWII films to portray Germans as something other than Hitler-loving Aryan wannabees; watching the general in charge of the Normandy beaches complain about Hitler's military incompetence, you know you're seeing a new type of WWII film.
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Summary: One Of The Greatest War Films Ever Made!
Review: This carefully reconstructed and scripted movie version of famed author Cornelius Ryan best-selling depiction of D-Day on June 6, 1944 has a unique and appealing way of showing the massively construction of the largest single sea borne assault in modern history. The movie powerfully chronicles the events surrounding the fabled Allied sea-borne assault in Normandy on that stormy day that will live forever in history. The total cost of the invasion in terms of human life and destruction is a cautionary lesson for history. This is a story powerfully retold at every level, but concentrating on the faithful recollections of the actual participants in the action. Thus, the viewer is quickly swept into the action as we get a voyeur's view of the moment-to-moment development of the story as the Allies begin to prepare and then execute the attack in all its horrific detail. There is a virtual cornucopia of information presented here, and director Darryl Zanuck's approach is scrupulously faithful to the facts, all of them, regardless of the particular source. Having already read the book on which it was based before seeing the movie, I was struck by the brilliant way in which the transformation from the book to the screen was accomplished. Therefore, there is a great deal of attention paid not only to the recollections and experiences of the Allied assault troops, but to German defenders and French civilians caught in the terrible crossfire of the opposing forces. This movie wonderfully illustrates the man-on-the-ground perspective that has been subsequently used to such advantage in more recent movies like "Saving Private Ryan" and "The Thin Red Line". There is little apparent effort here to color the results and make the Allies more circumspect and less provocative in making and activating their star-crossed assault. One gets the sense that this is the whole story as best it could be visually recreated, and Zanuck makes an extraordinary effort to bolster a comprehensive picture of the battles as they unfolded all over Normandy and its environs. Of course the movie is crammed full of everyone who was anyone in Hollywood at the time, and the fact that each is so believable in his or her individual parts in spite of their status is a tribute to Zanuck's uncanny ability to create a product that oozes of believability. This movie memorably shines the light of truth on one of the greatest moments in modern history, when the Allies stood fatefully in the breach, about to take the European continent back by force of arms from the terrible totalitarian forces that had stolen it so cruelly and violently four years before.
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Summary: An Unforgettable Overview of an Epic Battle!
Review: 'The Longest Day' is perhaps the greatest dramatic record of one of the defining moments in world history. After the intimacy of 'Saving Private Ryan', many critics have accused it of being a 'sanitized' version of the Normandy Invasion, but it is a different kind of film, entirely! While Steven Speilberg's aim was to personalize the horror facing the first wave of troops to hit the beach, Producer Darryl F. Zanuck, a D-Day vet, himself, wanted to create a mosaic of the myriad of personalities, events, and experiences that shaped the day. It is a film that looks objectively at all the forces who fought this epic battle, wisely casting major stars of each country to portray actual and fictitious characters. This is a bold move, as subtitles are used extensively, and the film has a uniquely international flavor. This is not your usual war film with 'American actors doing funny accents'! There are many standout performances; a few that deserve particular recognition are Richard Burton's war-weary RAF pilot; Dietmar Schönherr as one of the last Luftwaffe pilots, facing an impossible order; Jeffrey Hunter, a young sergeant who is 'Dear John'ed and faces the horrendous Omaha landing; Sean Connery (before James Bond) as a cocky Irish infantryman; Sal Mineo, a doomed foot soldier; and John Wayne (himself a war film icon), as Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin Vandervoort, the Airborne commander, whose forces survive a disasterous predawn parachute drop. Filled with drama, humor, and pathos, 'The Longest Day' works on many levels, and is never dull! Nearly forty years after its initial release, it is still seems as fresh and engrossing as ever, and works equally well viewed by itself, or paired with 'Saving Private Ryan'. It should be an essential part of your film library!
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Summary: Gripping war movie
Review: The Longest Day is, without question, one of the greatest and most gripping war movies ever made. The acting, for the most part, is superb and the fact that it was made at a point in time when many of the D-Day veterans of both sides were still alive lends a degree of realism to the movie that would be virtually impossible for one made today. More than being a "blood and guts", "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" movie like so many are, The Longest Day portrays the soldiers as the real people that they were -- real men with wives, girlfriends, children, mothers, fathers, not just cardboard cutout figures that are so prevalent in so many war movies.
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Summary: Own the tape, own a lifetime of information
Review: The Longest Day is full of information for today's force planners and Army leaders who can play segments and use as starting points for tactical discussions! The glider scene where actor Michael Todd (who actually was there as an enlistedman) plays his former CO, Major Howard teaches us that there is a need to bring back the assault glider in high tech-form (NOT towed, but released from B-52 inboard wing pylon and/or as an Air-Mech-Strike Future Transport Rotorcraft pod) so we can seize important objectives like bridges by SILENT coup de main. There are authentic tracked Bren Gun carriers rumbling off the beaches, Commandos with bicycles who link up with Howard's Paratroopers in time to "hold until relieved". The French commando scene is an awesome non-stop flow of action from the air showing how light troops need armored vehicle fire support to overcome enemies with heavy weapons in an urban environment (re: Gen Grange's Air-Mech-Strike book proposes these vehicles be organic to light units). Notice how the French Commando leader doesn't keep rushing the enemy with his men, he goes back at great personal risk and gets a tank and personally directs it to demolish the hotel where a German rooftop anti-aircraft gun and an anti-tank gun at ground-level hold up their advance. WOW. Impressive film making. In contrast to the British who employed lots of armored vehicles with engineering attachments to overcome obstacles, the U.S. at Omaha beach hand-carries its engineer tools and suffers heavy casualties trying to blast open a way to move inland. Its too bad with the retirement of the U.S. Combat Engineer Vehicle we are about ready to repeat Omaha beach's mistakes in the next war. The Paratrooper drops that set the Germans in disarray to include dummy Paratroop decoys shows how in war, TIME is a critical element that can mean the differance between victory and defeat and how the seemingly little things (decoys) and the extreme (Airdrop operations) can result in the big pay-off of "da-da-da-duh!" (Beethoven's 5th symphony)or VICTORY. Suggest watching American Movie Classics (AMC) on cable tv and viewing the behind-the-scenes of the making of "The Longest Day", WWII Army veteran Darryl Zanuck put everything he had into the picture in order to get it released. Cornelius Ryan, book author wrote the movie screenplay! Wonder if we couldn't find lost scenes and add them to a DVD version, and (don't go beserk), we colorized the movie.
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Summary: "Well, gentlemen, there it is . . .it's a go!"
Review: "The Longest Day" is one of the greatest war films of all time, and one of my personal favorites! Produced and directed by Darryl F. Zanuck, it was originally made to save the Twentieth Century-Fox studio from the financial ravages of the over-budget "Cleopatra," which was being shot at the same time. "The Longest Day" set a standard of excellence in war films that is unsurpassed even now, thirty-eight years after its theatrical release. It remains one of the most popular and successful war movies of all time. This is the story of D-Day, June 6, 1944. Based on Cornelius Ryan's book of the same name, the film accurately chronicles the strategy, tactics, frustrations, triumphs, and failures of both the Allied and German sides on the day that marked the turning point of World War II in Europe. There are excellent performances all around by a star-studded international cast headed by John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, (a young) Sean Connery, Robert Ryan, and Eddie Albert. Occasional snippets of silliness rear their head throughout the movie, but are not distracting. Filmed in black-and-white, "The Longest Day" has a documentary flavor and a wonderfully authentic feel that made it a film to view and savor time and time again.
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Summary: CLASSIC...MUST SEE!
Review: Based on the book by Cornelius Ryan of the same title, this movie is a "must own" for any World War II historian. Although it suffers from some typical "Hollywood hokiness" prevalent at the time the movie was made...(corny lines from John Wayne, tidbits of "hokey" humor, etc.) it is by far one of the best war movies out there. Hours of enjoyment from a very well done adaptation of one of the most critical battles in American/European history. A cast of 1,000's literally...you will have fun just recognizing all of the "young" actors in the movie that have become some key thespians of our times. Highly recommended!
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