Nine years ago, I had the honor of touring around several of the D-Day points-of-interest in Normandy, France. In one of the bougier sentences I’ve ever written, we were escorted from site to site by a private guide who my father hired. At one point during the tour, he asked which movies about D-Day we had seen. “Saving Private Ryan”, we all answered, to which he scoffed and grumbled about the film’s accuracy. “The Longest Day” he mentioned, ’is the film I recommend watching”, and he would refer back to it as he explained the events of the day.
“The Longest Day” is a documentary-styled portrayal of the hours before, during, and after the June 6, 1944 D-Day invasion. The film takes great care to reenact this pivotal moment in history from every perspective available: from Allied soldiers waiting in anticipation of battle, to the French hoping for liberation, to the parachutists, to the beach landings, to the cliff-climbing, to the village skirmishes, and the eventual Allied foothold in Europe. Additionally, the film makes certain efforts to share the German-side of the day, from their assumption of a calm, non-event week, to poor decisions by leadership, and their eventual retreat.
The film is like the “Avengers: Endgame” of old war films—it’s huge, it moves, and everyone is in it. Seriously! There’s John Wayne, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, Richard Beymer, and a whole fleet of character actors you’d definitely recognize. Hell, even Sean Connery shows up (one month before his debut as James Bond) to just be a charming Scottish guy who makes quips on the beach. The film employed 5 directors in order to shoot the different sequences (and in different languages). Editor Samuel Beetley cut the film from these different units in a manner that was fast paced and ever-evolving, with characters coming and going only as they suited the story.
Since I made the comparison, one critique of “Avengers: Endgame” is that if you haven’t kept up with the MCU, the character-moments are shallow; the film relies on audience knowledge to carry. This film suffers from that just a bit as well, with such an effort to tell a whole story that the audience is only afforded little vignettes into the characters’ lives. You didn’t get a sense of who they were—just that they were patriots. But I suppose that’s still a fair account for the Greatest Generation.