It’s one of the great scenes of cinema. Major Werner Pluskat scans the sea from his bunker overlooking Omaha Beach. Suddenly, he stops. Out of the early-morning mist, hundreds of ships appear on the horizon, accompanied by the fate motif from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “Mein Gott!” Hastily, he telephones his superior, Oberstleutnant Ocker.
“It’s the invasion! There must be 5,000 ships out there!,” he yells.
“Get hold of yourself, Pluskat,” the foppish Ocker replies. “The enemy doesn’t have even half that many.”
“Well, dammit! Come and see for yourself, you fool!”
A few minutes later, the phone rings, and the dirt-covered Pluskat reaches for the receiver, his bunker all but destroyed by the Allied naval bombardment.
“Pluskat! Pluskat! Do you hear me? What is going on?”
“Those 5,000 ships you say the Allies haven’t got … Well, they’ve got them!”
Film is not reality. But some films make an effort to be more real than others, and those wanting to know about D-day—the 80th anniversary of which takes place next week—could do worse than watch the 1962 Hollywood classic The Longest Day.
More than a decade before Richard Attenborough tried to cram every British and American star into A Bridge Too Far (1977), Darryl F. Zanuck had assembled a no-less-glittering constellation for his adaptation of Cornelius Ryan’s account of the events of June 6, 1944. Indeed, with a cast that includes Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Richard Todd, Kenneth More, Rod Steiger, Eddie Albert, Robert Wagner, Red Buttons, Steve Forrest, Robert Ryan, and John Wayne, The Longest Day ranks among the most A-list films of all time. “I wanted the audience to have a kick,” Zanuck later told his biographer. “Every time a door opened, in would come a famous star.”
Some of the casting is controversial. Wayne, who comes close to overacting but nevertheless gives a commanding performance, plays Lieutenant Colonel Ben Vandervoort, of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division. Vandervoort was 27 when he jumped out of an airplane in the early hours of D-day, but Wayne, who beat Charlton Heston for the role, was 55. Likewise, Albert (of Roman Holiday fame) looks far too old to be flailing around on Omaha Beach.
And Connery, in his last cinematic appearance before assuming the mantle of James Bond, gives an embarrassingly hammed-up performance as Private Flanagan, an enraged Scot who yells at the Germans to come out and fight, before toppling headfirst into the surf.
Elsewhere, however, the casting could hardly have been more appropriate. Todd, who was Ian Fleming’s first choice to play Bond, took part in the real airborne assault to capture Pegasus Bridge over the Caen Canal. Offered the chance to play himself, Todd joked that he did not feel he could accept a part so small. Instead, Todd played Major John Howard, the commander of the operation, who succeeded in taking and then holding the crucial crossing until relieved by British forces coming in off the beaches.
As a 22-year-old U.S. Army Ranger, Joseph Lowe scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc on D-day, and then repeated the feat 17 years later, while John Robinson, who plays Admiral Bertram Ramsay in the film, took part in the landings as part of the Reconnaissance Corps. Christopher Lee, on the other hand, was rejected for a part on the grounds that he did not look like a “military man,” this despite having served in the Royal Air Force (R.A.F.) and Britain’s Special Operations Executive.
The film has the feel of an epic docudrama, with multiple stories being told and characters introduced with their name and role appearing on-screen. Shot in black and white, it incorporates real footage of the invasion.
“I wanted the audience to have a kick. Every time a door opened, in would come a famous star.”
Not that Zanuck was looking to cut costs. Thousands of real American, British, and French soldiers took part in the filming. (The fact that this coincided with the 1961 Berlin Crisis—culminating in the partition of the city—caused members of Congress to criticize the use of U.S. troops for entertainment purposes.) Out-of-commission Spitfires were fitted with new Rolls-Royce engines for the movie, while the firm that manufactured the original gliders for the airborne assault was commissioned to make duplicates. “I believe I have a tougher job than [Eisenhower] on D-Day,” Zanuck joked at the time. “At least he had the equipment. I have to find it, rebuild it, and transport it to Normandy.”
To ensure that each national story received sympathetic treatment, a British director directed the British scenes, a German director took charge of the German ones, and an American director oversaw the American ones. The result is an evenhanded treatment of the battle, with German officers appearing as rational military men rather than Nazi stereotypes.
Indeed, the film leans into the idea that the Allies could have been defeated had Hitler not kept the reserve panzer divisions under his personal command and then slept through the early hours of the invasion. “We are going to lose the war,” comments General der Infanterie Günther Blumentritt, played by Curd Jürgens (one of two future Bond villains in the film), “and all because our glorious Führer has taken a sleeping pill.”
The Free French and the Resistance are also included. In one of the early scenes, the beautiful Irina Demick—Zanuck’s then lover—distracts German soldiers while a cart containing crashed R.A.F. pilots passes a checkpoint. Later, we see her and fellow Resistance members blowing up a railway bridge—one of myriad acts of sabotage that slowed the arrival of enemy reinforcements on the day.
“I believe I have a tougher job than Eisenhower. At least he had the equipment. I have to find it, rebuild it and transport it to Normandy.”
Indeed, the only major nationality not to be included, as is so often the case in Hollywood war films, are the Canadians, who lost more than 1,000 men on Juno Beach and in fighting behind enemy lines.
To be sure, not everything is historically accurate. The casino at Ouistreham—the setting for one of the crucial skirmishes between the Free French and the Germans—had been destroyed two years before D-day by the R.A.F.
Some accounts suggest that Lord Lovat, the debonair commando leader and Scottish aristocrat, was not the first person to reach Pegasus Bridge and relieve Major Howard’s paratroops. In the film, Lovat and his men walk calmly toward the bridge, accompanied by the clan chief’s personal bagpiper. “Sorry I’m late, old boy,” Lovat says. “Better than never, sir,” Howard replies. In fact, the first person to reach the bridge may have been a lowly private called Stan “Scotty” Scott. No polite badinage for him—meeting a wounded paratrooper, he was greeted with the words “Where the fuck have you been?”
Yet The Longest Day achieves a remarkable verisimilitude. Although the beach scenes may be lacking in gruesome horror—the most memorable aspect of Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan—the film succeeds in conveying the scale, the planning, the heroism, and the chaos of the day.
The fact that it does so without sensationalizing or sentimentalizing the story of June 6, 1944, is particularly praiseworthy. Realizing that he was dealing with one of the greatest battles in human history, Zanuck made the wise decision to let the multiple stories speak for themselves. “I am not interested in making a film that is only historically accurate,” he explained. “I am interested in following the brave, funny, bewildering, human and tragic events of the day.”
Released in the U.S. on October 4, 1962, The Longest Day brought in around $50 million at the box office and won two Academy Awards, for cinematography and special effects. It also saved Twentieth Century Fox, which was on the point of bankruptcy, thanks to massive overspending on that other mountain of celluloid, Cleopatra. It’s a worthy legacy for a brilliant film depicting a great event.
Tim Bouverie is the author of Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War