The Longest Day (film)

The Longest Day is a 1962 epic war film based on Cornelius Ryan's 1959 book The Longest Day (1959) about the D-Day landings at Normandy on June 6, 1944, during World War II. The film was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, who paid author Ryan $175,000 for the film rights. The screenplay was by Ryan, with additional material written by Romain Gary, James Jones, David Pursall, and Jack Seddon. It was directed by Ken Annakin (British and French exteriors), Andrew Marton (American exteriors), and Bernhard Wicki (German scenes).

The Longest Day was made in black and white and features a large international ensemble cast including John Wayne, Kenneth More, Richard Todd, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Steve Forrest, Sean Connery, Henry Fonda, Red Buttons, Peter Lawford, Eddie Albert, Jeffrey Hunter, Stuart Whitman, Tom Tryon, Rod Steiger, Leo Genn, Gert Fröbe, Irina Demick, Bourvil, Curd Jürgens, George Segal, Robert Wagner, Paul Anka, and Arletty. Many of these actors played roles that were essentially cameo appearances. In addition, several cast members had seen action as servicemen during the war, including Albert, Fonda, Genn, More, Steiger, and Todd; Todd was among the first British officers to land in Normandy in Operation Overlord, and he participated in the assault on Pegasus Bridge.

The film employed several Axis and Allied military consultants who had been actual participants on D-Day, and many had their roles re-enacted in the film. These included Günther Blumentritt (a former German general), James M. Gavin (an American general), Frederick Morgan (Deputy Chief of Staff at SHAEF), John Howard (who led the airborne assault on the Pegasus Bridge), Lord Lovat (who commanded the 1st Special Service Brigade), Philippe Kieffer (who led his men in the assault on Ouistreham), Marie-Pierre Kœnig (who commanded the Free French Forces in the invasion), Max Pemsel (a German general), Werner Pluskat (the major who was the first German officer to see the invasion fleet), Josef "Pips" Priller (the hot-headed pilot), and Lucie Rommel (widow of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel).

The film won two Academy Awards and was nominated for three others. A colorized version of this film was released on VHS in 1994, the 50th anniversary of the invasion.

Plot
The film is shot in the style of a docudrama (with subtitles identifying the different participants), beginning in the days leading up to D-Day. It concentrates on events on both sides of the channel, such as the Allies waiting for a break in the poor weather and anticipating the reaction of the Axis forces defending northern France. The film pays particular attention to Gen. Eisenhower's decision to go, as Supreme Commander of SHAEF, after reviewing the initial reports of bad weather and reports about the divisions within the German High Command as to where an invasion might happen or what their response should be.

Numerous scenes document the early hours of June 6 when Allied airborne troops were sent in to take key locations inland from the beaches. The French resistance is also shown reacting to the news that an invasion has started. The Longest Day chronicles most of the important events surrounding D-Day, including the British glider missions to secure Pegasus Bridge, the counterattacks launched by American paratroopers scattered around Sainte-Mère-Église, the infiltration and sabotage work conducted by the French resistance and SOE agents, and the response by the Wehrmacht to the invasion and the uncertainty of German commanders as to whether it was a feint in preparation for crossings at the Strait of Dover (see Operation Fortitude), where the senior German staff had always assumed that it would be.

Set-piece scenes include the parachute drop into Sainte-Mère-Église, the advance inshore from the Normandy beaches, the U.S. Ranger Assault Group's assault on the Pointe du Hoc, the attack on Ouistreham by Free French Forces, and the strafing of the beaches by two lone Luftwaffe pilots. The film concludes with a montage showing various Allied units consolidating their beachheads before they advance inland to reach Germany by crossing France.

Development
French producer Raoul Lévy signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to purchase the filming rights to Cornelius Ryan's book The Longest Day: June 6, 1944 D-Day on March 23, 1960. After finishing The Truth, Lévy set up a deal with the Associated British Picture Corporation and got director Michael Anderson attached. Ryan would receive $100,000, plus $35,000 to write the adaptation's screenplay. Lévy intended to start production in March 1961, filming at Elstree Studios and the English and French coasts. But the project went into a halt once ABPC could not get the $6 million budget Lévy expected. Eventually, former 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck learned about the book while producing The Big Gamble, and in December purchased Lévy's option for $175,000. Zanuck's editor friend Elmo Williams wrote a film treatment, which piqued the producer's interest and made him attach Williams to The Longest Day as associate producer and coordinator of battle episodes. Ryan was brought in to write the script, but had conflicts with Zanuck as soon as the two met. Williams was forced to act as a mediator; he would deliver Ryan's script pages to Zanuck, then return them with the latter's annotations. While Ryan developed the script, Zanuck also brought in other writers for cleanups, including James Jones and Romain Gary. As their contributions to the finished screenplay were relatively minor, Ryan managed to get the screenplay credit after an appeal to the Writers Guild arbitration, but the four other writers are credited for "additional scenes" in the closing credits.

During pre-production, producer Frank McCarthy, who had worked for the United States Department of War during World War II, arranged for military collaboration with the governments of France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Zanuck also realized that with eight battle scenes, shooting would be accomplished more expediently if multiple directors and units worked simultaneously, so he hired German directors Gerd Oswald and Bernhard Wicki, British director Ken Annakin, and Hungarian-American director Andrew Marton. Zanuck's son Richard D. Zanuck was reluctant about the project, particularly the high budget.

Filming

 * The film was shot at several French locations including the Île de Ré, Saleccia beach in Saint-Florent, Haute-Corse, Port-en-Bessin-Huppain filling in for Ouistreham, Les Studios de Boulogne in Boulogne-Billancourt, and the actual locations of Pegasus Bridge near Bénouville, Calvados, Sainte-Mère-Église, and Pointe du Hoc.
 * During the filming of the landings at Omaha Beach, the extras appearing as American soldiers did not want to jump off the landing craft into the water because they thought that it would be too cold. Robert Mitchum as Gen. Norman Cota became disgusted with their trepidation. He jumped in first, at which point they followed his example.
 * The Rupert paradummies used in the film were far more elaborate and lifelike than those actually used in the decoy parachute drop (Operation Titanic), which were simply canvas or burlap sacks filled with sand. The dummies dressed in American jumpsuits were used in filming the Sainte-Mère-Église sequence. In the real operation, six Special Air Service soldiers jumped with the dummies and played recordings of loud battle noises to distract the Germans.
 * With a budget of $10 million ($82 million in 2019 dollars), this was the most expensive black-and-white film made until 1993, when Schindler's List was released.
 * In the scenes where the paratroopers land, the background noise of frogs croaking was incorrect for northern French frog species and showed that the film probably used an American recording of background night noises.
 * Colin Maud lent Kenneth More the actual shillelagh that he carried ashore in the invasion. (More had served as an officer in the Royal Navy during World War II, albeit not as a Beachmaster.) Similarly, Richard Todd wears the beret that he actually wore on D-Day, although he changed the cap-badge to that of Maj. John Howard's regiment, the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry.
 * In the film, three Free French Special Air Service paratroopers jump into France before British and American airborne landings. This is accurate. Thirty-six Free French SAS (4 sticks) jumped into Brittany (Plumelec and Duault) on June 5 at 23:30 (operation Dingson). The first Allied soldiers killed in action were Lt. Den Brotheridge of the 2nd Ox & Bucks Light Infantry as he crossed Pegasus Bridge at 00:22 on June 6, and Corporal Emile Bouétard of the 4th Free French SAS battalion at the same time in Plumelec, Brittany.
 * The United States Sixth Fleet extensively supported the filming and made available many amphibious landing ships and craft for scenes filmed in Corsica, though many of the ships were of newer vintage. The USS Springfield (CL-66) and USS Little Rock (CL-92) were World War II light cruisers extensively reconfigured into guided missile cruisers, and both were used in the shore bombardment scenes.
 * Gerd Oswald was the uncredited director of the parachute drop scenes into Sainte-Mère-Église. Darryl F. Zanuck said that he himself directed some uncredited pick-ups with American and British interiors.
 * Elmo Williams was credited as associate producer and coordinator of battle episodes. He later produced the historical World War II film Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) for Zanuck. It depicted the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, also using the docudrama style.

Casting

 * Charlton Heston actively sought the role of Lt. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort, but the last-minute decision of John Wayne to take the role prevented Heston's participation. At 55, Wayne was 28 years older than Vandervoort at the time of action (and 10 years older in real life). All the other major actors accepted $25,000 as payment, but Wayne insisted on $250,000 to punish Zanuck for referring to him as "poor John Wayne" regarding Wayne's problems with his lavish film The Alamo.
 * Zanuck hired more than 2,000 serving soldiers for the film as extras.
 * Sgt. Kaffeekanne's (Gert Fröbe) name is German for "coffee pot", which he always carries.
 * Bill Millin was the piper who accompanied Lord Lovat to Normandy with his bagpipes, and it is a common misconception that he played himself in the film. He was actually portrayed by Pipe Major Leslie de Laspee, the official piper to the Queen Mother in 1961.
 * In Sainte-Mère-Église, Pvt. John Steele from the 82nd Airborne (played by Red Buttons) has been memorialized by the local population with a dummy hanging from a parachute from the church tower on which he accidentally landed.
 * Richard Todd played Maj. John Howard, leader of the British airborne assault on the Pegasus Bridge, and Todd himself took part in the real bridge assault on D-Day. He was offered the chance to play himself but took the part of Maj. Howard instead.
 * Joseph Lowe landed on Omaha Beach and scaled the cliffs at Pointe du Hoc on D-Day. He repeated the climb for the cameras 17 years later as a serving member of the 505th Airborne Battle Group who provided US Army extras.
 * Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower was considered for the role of himself in the film, and he indicated his willingness. However, it was decided that makeup artists couldn't make him appear young enough to play his World War II self. The role of Gen. Eisenhower went to Henry Grace, a set decorator with no acting experience but who had been in the film industry since the mid-1930s. He was a dead ringer for the younger Eisenhower, though his voice differed.
 * The film marked the last film appearance of Sean Connery before he was cast in the role of James Bond. Gert Fröbe (Sgt. Kaffeekanne) and Curd Jürgens (Gen. Günther Blumentritt) later played Bond villains Auric Goldfinger (Goldfinger (1964)) and Karl Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me) respectively. Connery played Maj. Gen. Roy Urquhart in the 1977 film A Bridge Too Far, which was also based on a book by Cornelius Ryan. Likewise, Wolfgang Preiss played Maj. Gen. Max Pemsel in The Longest Day and Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt in A Bridge Too Far.
 * Mel Ferrer was originally signed to play the role of Gen. James M. Gavin but withdrew due to a scheduling conflict.
 * According to the 2001 documentary Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood, Richard Burton and Roddy McDowall were so bored having not been used for several weeks while filming in Rome that they phoned Zanuck begging to do "anything" on his film. They flew themselves to the location and each did a day's filming for their cameos for free.

Release
The film premiered in France on September 25, 1962, followed by the United States on October 4 and 23 for the United Kingdom. Because Fox was suffering with the financial losses of Cleopatra, the studio intended that The Longest Day should have a wide release to reap quick profits. Zanuck forced them to do a proper Roadshow theatrical release, even threatening to sell distribution to Warner Bros. if Fox had refused to do so. The Longest Day eventually became the box office hit Fox needed, with $30 million in worldwide rentals on a $7.5 million budget.

There were special-release showings of the film in several United States cities. Participants in D-Day were invited to see the film with their fellow soldiers—in Cleveland, Ohio, this took place at the Hippodrome Theater.

Uniquely for British- and American-produced WWII films of the time, all French and German characters speak in their own languages with subtitles in English. Another version, which was shot simultaneously, has all the actors speaking their lines in English (this version was used for the film's trailer, as all the Germans deliver their lines in English). However, this version saw limited use during the initial release. It was used more extensively during a late 1960s re-release of the film.

The Longest Day was released on DVD on November 6, 2001.

Reception
The day after the film opened at the Warner Theatre in New York City, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times declared: "The total effect of the picture is that of a huge documentary report, adorned and colored by personal details that are thrilling, amusing, ironic, sad ... It is hard to think of a picture, aimed and constructed as this one was, doing any more or any better or leaving one feeling any more exposed to the horror of war as this one does." Variety described it as "a solid and stunning war epic" that "emerges as a sort of grand scale semi-fictionalized documentary concerning the overall logistics needed for this incredible invasion." Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post called it "a tingling, eye-gripping, fantastic picture" that "must rank as the screen's most massive battle epic." His only criticism was "the lack of perspective in depicting the German belief that the Normandy landings might not have succeeded had Hitler not taken a sleeping pill ... 'The Longest Day' should have taken infinitely more care to put this German belief, however strongly held, into proper proportion." Brendan Gill of The New Yorker called the film "a tour de force of audio-visual verisimilitude," but confessed that "my emotions were hardly ever engaged, and I ended, rather to my embarrassment, by being bored." He went on, "Mr. Zanuck made it all the harder for me to take this mock-documentary seriously by stuffing it with innumerable celebrated actors, most of whom make such fugitive appearances that the audience finds itself engaged in a distracting game of instant identification." The Monthly Film Bulletin stated, "The Longest Day is a monument split down the middle by compromise. At its best, what comes across very strongly is the feeling of immense and careful organisation that went into the whole D-Day operation, the sheer crippling weight of noise, the simple fact that a lot of people died, and the sense of personal confusion and dismay of soldiers wandering alone through the countryside ... But the film is, first and foremost, a spectacle, and therefore it has stars—a multitude of them, often with barely a line to speak, and usually with no real part to play."

The film holds a score of 87% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 23 reviews.