#292: The Longest Day
You know what’s long? This movie
This review was originally posted to Twitter on July 6, 2020.
Initial release: September 25, 1962
Directors: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki
The 1960s saw an array of World War II movies; two decades removed from the flames of Europe and the Pacific, Hollywood saw room in the market to tell stories of heroic action to a new generation. But The Longest Day stands as perhaps the biggest of the decade, a three-hour parade of almost every celebrity in Hollywood or England at the start of the 1960s in a lengthy, ostensibly facts-based reenactment of the D-Day landings. Directed by three separate people (one for the American perspective, one for the Germans, and one for the French and English) it nevertheless maintains a consistent directorial vision that still manages to make it feel like four movies crammed into one.
Make no mistake, this is not Saving Private Ryan. this is not an intimate examination of the violence of war; this is a bloodless, even detached, view of the invasion of Normandy that is shot almost always from a distance. Close-ups are rare. Character development is rarer. It’s a good example of what I’d call “midcentury realism,” a tendency in the 1950s and 60s to make war films short on intimate storytelling and big on large-scale epic reenactments, weaving many storylines together in such a way that there’s little room for them to breathe. So an early scene where a young American GI wins $2500 in a dice game (the equivalent of a whopping $36,419.60 today) never really goes anywhere; in the film’s ending he meets up with a downed RAF pilot last seen earlier in the film, and the money never comes up again.
That’s not to say it’s a bad film. On a technical level it’s quite impressive, with tightly choreographed battle scenes often filmed from a height as troops move their way across the battlefield, giving the scene a feeling of watching someone play a real-time strategy game. The four different nationalities all have their own unique voices in their scenes — literally so in the case of the French and Germans, who get to speak in their native language with subtitles, almost unheard of in early 1960s Hollywood. With celebrities like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum in leading roles, plus Sean Connery in his last film before he would don the James Bond tuxedo, the film becomes a who’s who of Hollywood, with even minor roles featuring celebrity cameos. But that’s a problem too — all these celebrities just kind of tend to get in the way of each other. The film just feels more episodic than fluid, a series of vignettes that might work in a serialized form but crammed into a three hour film feels a little over-compressed.
At the end of the day, it’s still a great film, a three-hour ride that, in spite of its low-intensity, even apolitical approach to one of the most important moments in World War II, manages to be engaging and exhausting in a good way.
