Movie review: ‘The Longest Day’ (1962)

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I recently reviewed the World War II movie “Fury” starring Brad Pitt (click here to read my review) and was reminded again of “The Longest Day,” considered among the best-ever war films. So, today I’m turning my attention to “The Longest Day” and its gargantuan cast, where the trivia game is to find out which stars of the day didn’t take part in it. However, “The Longest Day” is also long(est) film – nearly three hours – because it takes time in its telling of so many individuals’ stories. It was nominated for five Oscars and won a pair, including for special effects.

‘The Longest Day’
(1962; 178 minutes; rated G; directed by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marten plus two other situational directors and starring John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Eddie Albert, Robert Ryan and dozens more … )

A FILM EPIC TELLING AN EPIC STORY

Unlike the motion picture “Saving Private Ryan” (click here to read my look at that one), “The Longest Day” doesn’t offer a narrow focus such as the story of a single squad of men on a singular mission or on a specific slice of the war. “The Longest Day” tells about D-Day in World War II on a huge cinematic canvas for the stories of U.S., British, French and German troops and officers involved with that fateful and instantly legendary day. Filmmakers bit off a bit chunk to chew when they decided to tell so many stories in one movie and managed a classic from the effort.

Unfortunately, “The Longest Day” is so vast in its scope that individual stars, with the exception of as the film’s ostensible headliner in John Wayne as an American officer, get only a short time on screen, but you can enjoy each one because the actors gave their best. Big screen, big cast epics limit the actors’ time and “The Longest Day” is as good an example as you’ll find.

For example: Richard Burton, who played a British flier shot down on D-Day, has a very impressive scene speaking to a U.S. soldier after killing a German officer; Robert Mitchum’s work as an American general rallying his troops on the sand of Omaha Beach is quite solid; and there’s an interesting interlude on a troop ship where a soldier tells his tale of marital woe to another, but it turns out the two didn’t even know one another. All could have used more screen time, although Burton does have time on-screen before the invasion begins.

“The Longest Day” presents individual stories that made up the lives of those involved in the war, from the Allied troops (U.S., British, Canadian and French) preparing for the invasion to the French resistance fighters awaiting the word that the invasion was at hand to the Germans tasked with stopping it when the invasion began. The storytelling is seamless as it shifts between the people, even as it cuts over to the German side.

Humor is not left out as you’ll see the beachmaster directing traffic with his bulldog named “Churchill” and he whacks a gun carrier that won’t start with his shillelagh and then the machine starts.

As far as the combat sequences go, “The Longest Day” is OK, but not as expertly detailed as “Saving Private Ryan” with the visual of explicitly bloody wounds, gory dismemberments and cold-blooded killings in that one.

The usual action of being shot and killed in “The Longest Day” was an actor grimacing, clutching the wound or throwing his arms up as he was hit and killed by a bullet, but that was more of the limitations of technology on special effects in 1962 than filmmakers choosing less-violent imagery. After all, “The Longest Day” won an Oscar for its special effects, which used nice aerials in which it is obvious there was tremendous coordination with actions of soldiers and explosions on the ground

Now, let me take a look at just a few individual actors …

  • An Oscar winner and two-time nominee and three-time Golden Globe winner, Wayne is at his formidable, stoic best here as the toughest of the tough soldiers, even though he plays an officer. As Col. Benjamin Vandervoort, Wayne is injured in the parachute drop and stays with his men and is trundled about in a cart. His character exudes toughness and he plays it to the fullest. Wayne won his Oscar and one Globe for “True Grit” and he is best known as an actor in westerns. He was in “The Alamo” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” I liked his effort in “The Shootist” (click here to read my review), which was his last film before his death in 1979 at 72 of cancer and respiratory arrest.
  • An Oscar and Golden Globe winner and two-time Globe nominee, Red Buttons plays John Steele and he’s the paratrooper whose parachute got hung up on Sainte-Mère-Église church steeple. Buttons, who was a vocal member of his unit before the jump, shows good emotion to killing of his fellow paratroopers (the landed right in the middle of a German-held position) and makes a poignant comment about the effect of combat on soldiers at the end of the film. Buttons won for “Sayonara” with Marlon Brando and was nominated for Globes for “Harlow” and “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?” Buttons died at 87 of vascular disease in 2006.
  • Jeffrey Hunter plays John H. Fuller and has the most action of any character getting good screen time. Hunter, who was billed as Jeff Hunter for the film, easily shows the bravery and leadership of Fuller, who died on Omaha Beach after getting a battlefield promotion to lieutenant. Hunter’s character is at the center of the action getting troops off the beach. Hunter is probably best remembered as the first captain of the original “Star Trek” series on TV as he played “Capt. Christopher Pike” in the pilot episode called “The Cage.” (William Shatner was “Capt. James T. Kirk” with the first episode of the first season of the show.) He was also in “King of Kings” and “The Searchers” with Wayne before dying young at 42 in 1969 of a stroke.

I don’t have time to single out any other actor, although Irina Demich, who later spelled her last name Demick (she died of breast cancer at 67 in 2004), is the ostensible female lead as Janine Boitard, the resistance fighter afraid of no man and who is in the thick of the action. Along the way in “The Longest Day” you meet …

… screen legend Henry Fonda, Sean Connery, Peter Lawford, Eddie Albert, Sal Mineo, Steve Forrest, Robert Ryan, George Segal, Rod Steiger, Mel Ferrer, Edmund O’Brien and Robert Wagner. Actors appearing but in uncredited roles are Gary Collins, Richard Dawson and Bernard Fox. You even had the music industry contributing with singers Paul Anka, Tommy Sands and Fabian in the cast.

Whew!

Although the film is nearly three hours long, it is nice that the story is never rushed so that the audience comes to believe the story plays second fiddle to just moving on to the next combat scene (a problem common to too many films about war). The pace is deliberate, even in combat scenes and this makes the film more enjoyable.

Some believe that one of “The Longest Day’s” four directors, Ken Annakin, was the inspiration for the name of “Anakin Skywalker” in the “Star Wars” franchcise who becomes “Darth Vader.” “Star Wars” creator George Lucas has refuted that rumor.

“The Longest Day” was the No. 1 film in U.S. theaters in 1962, with $15.2 million in ticket sales, according to Wiki. The No. 2 film was “Lawrence of Arabia” at $15 million, while “The Music Man” was third with $8 million. Also out that year in the Top 10 were two films that became classics: “Mutiny on the Bounty” with Marlon Brando at No. 5 with $7.4 million and “To Kill a Mockingbird” with Gregory Peck at No. 6 with $7.1 million. “The Longest Day” is the first movie from 1962 that I’ve reviewed for my blog.

BTW … (from a previous blog post) … D-Day began the U.S. military’s most deadly campaign. “As a campaign, more U.S. soldiers died in the Normandy landings and subsequent battles to break out from the invasion area (29,204) than any other single campaign. It was 3,000 more fallen than from Meuse-Argonne offensive in World War I (26,277) or the Battle of the Bulge in WWII (19,276).”

Assorted cast and film notes (via IMDb.com and Wiki):

  • Buttons’ birth name was Aaron Chwatt; and, you probably already know, Wayne’s was Marion Robert Morrison.
  • With a budget of $10 million, “The Longest Day” was the most expensive movie to be filmed in black-and-white until 1993 with “Schindler’s List.”
  • Former U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was the overall commander of Allied forces in the west, was considered to be asked to be in the movie as himself, but makeup artists told filmmakers they couldn’t do a convincing job of making him appear younger to fit his age in 1944.
  • “The Longest Day” was the final film for Connery before he became “James Bond.” Also, two of future archvillains in the “007” world were in “The Longest Day” – Gert Fröbe plays German “Sgt. Kaffeekanne” (a comical, fat figure who is mocked behind his back and his name translates to “coffee pot” in German) and, of course, he was the cruel, murderous “Auric Goldfinger,” while Curt Jurgens plays German Gen. Günther Blumentritt and was “Karl Stromberg” in “The Spy Who Loved Me.” Jurgens spelled his first name Curd in “The Longest Day” and would later change it to Curt by the time of filming of the “James Bond” flick.
  • At the time, it was estimated that 23,000 troops were used in the film and were allow to participate by U.S., British and French authorities. German soldiers of the day did not participate as the only Germans were actors with speaking parts. France allowed 1,000 of its troops to participate.
  • Production members unearthed a British tank when clearing the Normandy beach near Pointe du Hoc. The tank was cleaned up and used during the filming of the movie.
  • “The Longest Day” was intentionally filmed in black-and-white so that archival footage could be incorporated into the movie. Also, the cinematography unit noted that black-and-white would make the older actors appear a little bit younger.
  • At the time of filming, Wayne, at 55 at the date of filming, was 28 years older than Vandervoort, was on D-Day. However, that wasn’t the only age-specific inaccuracy in the film. Ryan was 51 when the film premiered in 1962, but Maj. Gen. James Gavin was the youngest U.S. officer to make general rank at 37 in 1944 by D-Day and therefore was 14 years younger than Ryan.
  • Kenneth More, who played Capt. Colin Maud, carried the shillelagh that Maud had used in the actual invasion, which had been loaned to him by Maud.
  • Directly from Wiki: “Bill Millin was the piper who accompanied Lord Lovat to Normandy with his bagpipes, and it is a common misconception that he played himself in the film, while he was actually portrayed by Pipe Major Leslie de Laspee, the official piper to the Queen Mother at the time of filming.”
  • Burton and Roddy McDowell were on a break from filming “Cleopatra” in Rome and wanted to be in on the “The Longest Day.” They called producer Darryl F. Zanuck and flew in to film their respective scenes – and did it for free.
  • Finally and directly from IMDb.com: “One of the first World War II films made by an American studio in which the members of each country spoke nearly all their dialogue in the language of that country: the Germans spoke German, the French spoke French, and the Americans and the British spoke English. There were subtitles on the bottom of the screen to translate the various languages. There were two versions of the film, one where all the actors spoke English and the other (the better known one) where the French and German actors spoke their respective languages.”

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