The 35th Academy Awards (1963)
Nominations: 5
Wins: 2
From Wings to Apocalypse Now to 1917 to All Quiet On The Western Front (twice), there have been a lot of war movies nominated for Best Picture over the years. So much so that there are plenty of war movies nominated for the big prize that have been lost to time or have been replaced by subsequent Best Picture winners as the definitive retelling of a particular chapter in a godforsaken war. Both of these categories feel like they apply to The Longest Day, as it’s a film I’ve been long aware of but have never really heard anyone ever talk about. Some of this probably has to do with the fact that Saving Private Ryan has more or less become the definitive D-Day movie, though this is a bit unfair considering The Longest Day takes a very different approach from that Spielberg film, which in many ways makes it even more impressive.
This approach I’m talking about is an all-inclusive one. Based on the non-fiction book by Cornelius Ryan (who is the sole credited screenwriter on the film despite a ton of writers working on it), The Longest Day aims to tell the story of D-Day’s mounting and execution from the perspective of pretty much every type of person who was involved in it. This means we get to see the perspective of the Americans, the British, the French, and the Germans, as well as the different factions and hierarchies of each country’s armies as this gargantuan offensive plays out. It makes for a plot so unwieldy and with so many different characters and threads that it’s nearly impossible to explain neatly, but the movie’s three-hour run time is more or less split up into three sections: the preparation of D-Day, the night-time fighting done by the paratroopers, and the various battles that happened at Normandy, Ohama, and the various other French beaches that the allied forces landed at.
In addition to the film’s ambitious sprawl in telling this story, it fittingly has a gigantic cast, filled with some of the biggest stars of its era, some great character actors, and a few early ’60s pop stars (like Fabian and Paul Anka) for some reason. Yet despite being a movie with several movie stars in it, including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, and Henry Fonda, there are so many characters that there isn’t ultimately a true star of the movie because none of these guys are in the movie for more than about 7 or 8 minutes. In fact, it felt a little strange to watch a movie that John Wayne is in so little of, while that fact that many of the more recent releases of the film have put Henry Fonda front and center of the poster art when he’s maybe in the film for 2 or 3 minutes is a little hilarious.
I could spend a lot of time just talking about how weird and fun this cast is (it has both Sean Connery playing a Scottish soldier as well as Goldfinger himself Gert Fröbe as a German soldier!), but I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily the most impressive thing about the movie. Really what makes The Longest Day a remarkable war picture is its audacity in using these famous faces to recreate this singular event from so many perspectives while embodying the immensity of this event. The movie was the brainchild of longtime Fox producer Daryl F. Zanuck, and in order to capture this mega-sized story while also being efficient with the movie’s budget and production demands, he employed three different directors of different nationalities to shoot the film. He also enlisted a ton of different former and then-current army personnel to serve as advisers on the film, while hundreds of actual U.S. soldiers were used as extras.
This all results in a film whose accuracy and grit gives it somewhat of a documentary feel, even if the amount of movie stars and widescreen polish makes it an unmistakable product of the last days of Hollywood’s Golden Era. And while the battle sequences may not have the visceral quality of a Saving Private Ryan or Dunkirk, the film still feels undeniably thrilling and terrifying for its era. There’s a memorable scene where an airborne division soldier is stuck by his parachute on top of a building, helpless to do anything but watch his buddies get mowed down. The scene proves that for all the film’s triumphant bluster, it’s also not afraid to show the horrors of war, even if its impact is blunted a little by the fact that it was made just a few years before more realistic violence was allowed in Hollywood films.
Unsurprisingly, the main reason it took me this long to get around to seeing The Longest Day was its length, the likes of which make the movie’s title all too literal. However, considering the scope and complexity it applies to telling this chapter of world history, this is the type of long movie that feels like it has to be long. That’s not to say that there isn’t stuff in here that probably could have been cut, since as spectacular as some of these battle sequences are, they do become a bit numbing after a while. I also could have used one less scene of characters talking about how “this is going to be a day people are talking about years from now”. Otherwise, it’s got to be one of the more epic war films ever made, helped by the fact that it was produced long enough after World War II to cast a more critical eye on these events, even if it’s more of a neutral war movie than an anti-war movie, if such a thing exists.