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Big Day on the Big Screen
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D-Day, the Allied landings in France that are said to have turned the tide of World War II, happened 60 years ago on June 6. Here is a lookback at three memorable Hollywood productions recreating the event.
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POPULAR HISTORY, mostly written in the U.S. or the U.K., has created a myth around D-Day, June 6, 1944, the day when Allied Forces led by American General (later President) Dwight Eisenhower launched a massive air and sea invasion of France then occupied by Hitler's Germany. With 1,30,000 troops, 5,000 ships, and 11,000 aircraft involved, it was without doubt the largest amphibious operation in the history of modern warfare. But was it the turning point of the war?
Many historians are questioning, all over again, the Anglo-American claim that their operation signalled the end of Nazi Germany. They point out that even one year before D-Day, the Russians had decimated 100 German divisions — and by mid-1944, Hitler was already on the run. D-Day only hastened the end. They call D-Day, Disinformation Day.
Be that as it may, Hollywood has had no problems in building its own myth atop the historian's hype. And over the years, dozens of films touched on the events of D-Day in varying degree. But to a hardcore movie fan, there are only three films over the last half-century that can be said to be truly D-Day stories. And thanks to the ready availability of CD or DVD versions, at least two of them can be picked off the shelf of any decent video or music store in Indian for Rs. 300 or so each.
The first film to firmly peg the events of June 6, 1944, was D-Day: The Sixth of June, one of the earliest films in the cinemascope format that was released in 1956. In fact, the title is somewhat misleading, because the film is in essence a lover story — yes, the eternal triangle! — with D-Day merely providing the backdrop. Robert Taylor is a U.S. staff officer in England who falls in love with a British Red Cross nurse (Dana Wynter). But she has already fallen for a dashing English commando (Richard Todd), fighting in distant Africa. In true filmi style, the two suitors come together on the same troop ship going to Normandy on D-Day, and their earlier stories are told in flashback. Which one will get the girl and which will conveniently die? The quintessential D-Day film was the 1962 big star production by Darryl Zanuck, based on the Cornelius Ryan non-fiction best seller, The Longest Day. Made in black and black to look like a documentary, it was a painstaking and faithful rendering of the events of D-Day that finely balanced both viewpoints: German and Allied. A whole procession of Anglo-American and German stars were requisitioned: John Wayne as the charismatic Colonel Vandervoort ("You can't give the enemy a break. Send him to hell."); Robert Mitchum as the cigar chomping Gen. Norman Cota who leads the final assault on the beaches using a clever weapon called the Bangalore Torpedo; Werner Hinz as the German Field Marshall Rommel ("Believe me, gentlemen, the first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive. For the Allies as well as the Germans, it will be the longest day"); Peter Lawford as the laid back Lord Lovat who strides into battle to the accompaniment of bag pipes...
Three different directors contributed to the end product shooting the British, American, and German sequences. The three-hour film has remained on most filmgoers' list of 10 all-time great war movies. It won two Oscars for cinematography and special effects.
Finally, after a gap of decades, Steven Spielberg returned to the events of D-Day in 1999 when he made Saving Private Ryan. The opening half-hour is one of the most dizzying and brutal experiences in cinema, as the director (he won an Oscar) recreates the hellish landing on what the Americans dubbed "Omaha Beach". Then he turns to the story — one of the strangest ever told — as Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is asked to take a small platoon and find a soldier named Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have all been killed in conflict. The U.S. Government wants to find him and restore him to his parents — alive — even if it has to see half-a-dozen other soldiers die in the process.
In Spielberg's hands, the theme is brought across with great power, and the final scenes are guaranteed to leave many hardboiled viewers in tears. His directing Oscar was joined by four others for sound, sound editing, cinematography, and film editing. From the syrupy romance of D-Day: The Sixth of June to the authentic feel of The Longest Day to the graphic gore and weird premise of Saving Private Ryan, D-Day has been refashioned in different ways by different filmmakers.
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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