The Longest Day (film) Revisited

The Longest Day (film)

June 2019: the remembrance of the invasion of Normandy in June 1944 – the D-Day landings (“D” stands for Day; as “H” in H-Hour (the moment of attack) stands for Hour).

I have been thinking of the 1962 film The Longest Day (henceforth TLD), certainly a very long film, about the invasion. It was supposed to be a faithful representation of principal events, and boasted, as military consultants, a long list actual participants  (the distance between event and film was only 18 years).

I remember seeing TLD on its release, taken to the cinema by my parents, or at least by my father, a military man himself. Childhood memories of it have remained quite vivid, from the opening scene, in which a French Resistance courier, carrying plans? codes?, is chased across a field by a carful of Germans (Gestapo? SS?) and gunned down; through the bizarre but grim tale of the paratrooper caught on a church steeple and feigning death whilst his mis-dropped colleagues are gunned down in the village square below (a kitsch memorial today adorns the church); to the end, when catchy martial  music accompanies the silhouetted procession of allied soldiers moving over the dunes off one of the landing beaches.

These memories resurfaced with persistence this month, demanding resolution though knitting the snatches into the whole. So I rented a download of the film recently (from Amazon alas) and sat and watched it through once more.

It was, of course, very familiar (had I seen at some point in the years since childhood? Perhaps). But it didn’t much grip this time of viewing. 

There are two main problems, plus a third, which is really a retrospective demur, not a fault contemporary to the film’s making.

To take the last point first. The D-Day landings involved a massive sea and airborne assault, which in terms of numbers of men, machines, planes and ships, has not been equalled. Modern filmic tricks  (I’m thinking of CGI) can go some way to presenting the illusion of the vastness of such an enterprise. 

TLD doesn’t manage this (I suppose the budget didn’t stretch to hiring a navy or two). It is largely a series of episodes, fairly close-up, of military activity. There’s one moment where a German defender suddenly sees what a moment before was empty ocean full of the menacing dots of an approaching armada – but the dots remain distant dots.

TLD does not capture the vast surge of forces across the Channel and, stutteringly, into France.

Of the other two problems, one may be forgivable given the date of TLD. It does not tell D-Day well. In this it falters in its documentary mission, especially from the allied point of view. Perhaps TLD’s makers assumed that its original audiences would know their recent history.

Historical structure is provided by the German narrative in TLD (there were a lot of veteran German consultants). The Germans were ignorant of the Allied strategy and tactics (in spite of TLD’s suggestive opening scene). So tension is generated by – first, their belief that the invasion would be near Calais, not Normandy; second, that the weather of 5/6 June would mean that nothing would happen, anywhere, during that 48 hours; third, by their “blindness”, in the sense of lack of communications though sabotage; and, fourth, their initial inability to assess the invasion as otherwise than a diversionary “commando” attack.

The modern viewer very much sees the unfolding of D-Day through the Germans’ uncertain eyes. This works well, as far as it goes, but the grandeur and risk of the venture is missing.

Meanwhile.. on the Allied side we mainly get anecdotes. Not just anecdotes: star-infested anecdotes.

The TLD production team enticed pretty much the entire contemporary galaxy of Hollywood male stars to do a military turn – John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, plus up and comers like Sean Connery. Each has to have a “Me! Me! Vignette. Much of TLD is knitted together series of cameos for the stars. This is not to say that the cameos are bad (they’re good) or historically inaccurate (they’re not). 

The effect is distracting, in more than one way. You can’t help playing “spot the star”. And the casting policy subtly undermines the achievements and sacrifices of the non-starry multitudes (but I do not forget that many of those stars were in the WW2 military themselves).

One of the most coherent episodes of TLD is, to my mind, the depiction of the assault by Free French commandos on the coastal town of Ouistreham. This is shown largely by a real time aerial shot of the scurrying, dodging troops as they move through the town. It was one of the memories I retained from my childhood viewing: the cool cinematic perspective on desperate, athletic courage.

June 2019