The Longest Day

Darryl F. Zanuck’s account of 6 June 1944 is three hours long, was shot by three directors, and puts most of the famous men of its year into uniform. It comes from Cornelius Ryan’s book and keeps the book’s method: no hero, no single thread, dozens of people on both sides of the Channel getting through the same day. It is a large, serious, handsomely made film, and almost nobody in it matters as a person. We admired it for most of its 178 minutes and were moved by it for perhaps ten.

The first hour is the waiting. Along the Atlantic Wall the German staff, Wolfgang Büttner’s Speidel among them, look at the weather and decide nobody would be fool enough to come. In England the paratroopers black their faces and Lt. Col. Vandervoort (John Wayne) briefs his men. The BBC reads poetry to the French Resistance. Ken Annakin directs the British, Andrew Marton the Americans, Bernhard Wicki the Germans, and the Germans speak German and the French speak French, with subtitles. In 1962 that was not the usual thing, and it still gives the film a seriousness the casting keeps trying to undo.

The casting is the problem. Wayne plays a lieutenant colonel of paratroops and moves like a man who has never been asked to jump out of anything. Robert Mitchum’s Brig. Gen. Cota chews a cigar on Omaha Beach and is good, because Mitchum was always good at appearing not to try. Henry Fonda plays Theodore Roosevelt Jr. with a cane and a decency that gets about four minutes. Then Richard Burton turns up as a downed pilot, Sean Connery grins his way through a turn as an Irish private, Peter Lawford leads his commandos ashore behind a piper, and Paul Anka is a Ranger for reasons that must have made sense to somebody. We kept spotting people, and every time we spotted one the film stopped being about the war and became a parade.

The spectacle is another matter. Walter Wottitz and Jean Bourgoin shoot in black and white in a flat grey light that lets the staged footage sit beside the real thing without a join, and the beaches look cold and huge and empty of cover. The assault on the casino at Ouistreham is done in one long shot from above, the camera drifting along the canal as the French commandos run under fire, and it is the best-directed minute in the film. The Rangers going up the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc on ropes, while the ropes are cut above them, is nearly as good. Samuel E. Beetley cuts between the fronts fast enough that the film never sits still, though he cannot make forty people into a story. Maurice Jarre’s march is heard less than you might expect; the beaches are mostly given surf and gunfire.

The moment that got us was smaller. A paratrooper’s canopy catches on the church steeple at Sainte-Mère-Église and he hangs there, playing dead, while the square below him is shot to pieces and the bell drowns everything, and he can only watch. It is the one place where the film lets a man be frightened long enough for us to be frightened with him. It lasts perhaps three minutes and we would have given up several generals for more of it.

By the third hour we had stopped feeling anything much and were keeping count. Every landing is introduced with a name card, every officer explains the plan to a subordinate who already knows it, and the German high command gets more time to be wrong than any private gets to be scared. Cornelius Ryan wrote the screenplay from his own book, with David Pursall, Jack Seddon, Romain Gary and James Jones also credited, and the result has the completeness of a report and the flatness of one.

Against the war films that came after, it has dated the way a well-kept monument dates. Other films have shown us how frightening the day was; this one shows us how big it was, and that is worth something. See it in a cinema if one will show it, where the beaches are the right size and the roll call is easier to forgive. At home it is an afternoon rather than an evening, and it wants a companion who knows which beach is which.