The Longest Day Review (1962)
Directors: Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki
Writers: Cornelius Ryan (based on his book), with additional material by Romain Gary, James Jones, David Pursall, Jack Seddon
Starring: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sean Connery, Rod Steiger, Peter Lawford, Red Buttons, Eddie Albert, Robert Wagner
Release Date: October 4, 1962
They don’t make them like this anymore. Not because they lack the talent or the technology but because they lack the ambition (and would probably be an outrageous budge). The Longest Day cost ten million dollars in 1962, which adjusted for inflation is something like a hundred million today, and every cent is on the screen. This beast of a film has multiple directors, half a dozen writers, and a cast so stacked it reads like somebody bet they could fit every major Hollywood star of the era into a single film. The remarkable thing is it works.
The Longest Day covers June 6, 1944 — D-Day — from every conceivable angle. Allied commanders planning the invasion. German officers arguing about where the attack will come. Paratroopers dropping into Normandy in the dark. Rangers scaling cliffs under fire. French resistance fighters. British beach assaults. American beach assaults. The film jumps between all of it across nearly three hours, and what Darryl F. Zanuck pulled off as producer is staggering in retrospect. This could have been a complete mess. Instead it’s one of the most coherent and comprehensive depictions of the largest military invasion in human history.
The structure is built on the docudrama model, using captions to identify the different participants and locations as the film moves through them. It’s a smart choice that keeps you oriented without slowing the momentum, and it gives the film a historical weight that most war pictures don’t carry. You’re not just watching a story. You’re watching a document.
The cast is almost impossible to process on a first viewing because there’s so much of it. John Wayne as Lt. Col. Benjamin Vandervoort, commanding his paratroopers with a broken ankle because that’s the kind of thing John Wayne characters do. Robert Mitchum as Brig. Gen. Norman Cota on Omaha Beach, the man who looked at the carnage around him and reportedly said “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach, the dead and those who are going to die.” Henry Fonda as Theodore Roosevelt Jr., the oldest man on the beach and the only general who landed in the first wave. Richard Burton as an RAF pilot navigating the chaos from the air. A young Sean Connery, the same year he debuted as James Bond, in a small but memorable role as a British private. Rod Steiger showing up and being Rod Steiger, which is always a good thing.
What the film gets right that a lot of war movies miss is the sheer scale of organized chaos. D-Day wasn’t a clean military operation. Things went wrong constantly. Paratroopers landed miles from their objectives. Naval bombardment missed its targets. Communications broke down. Men died because of mistakes made by their own side. The Longest Day doesn’t shy away from any of that, and it doesn’t shy away from showing the German perspective either, which was quite unusual for a film made only seventeen years after the war ended. Erwin Rommel is depicted as a real military mind rather than a cartoon villain, and the scenes among the German high command show the confusion and indecision that contributed as much to the Allied success as any act of heroism on the beaches.
Is it perfect? No. At nearly three hours it earns a few slow patches, and the sheer number of characters means some of them barely register before they’re gone. But those are the trade-offs you make for scope, and the scope here is unlike anything else in the war genre. The battle sequences are impressive, especially considering this was 1962 and everything you see was done practically. No CGI. Just cameras, extras, explosives, and organization.
The Longest Day is old Hollywood prestige filmmaking at its absolute peak, and it’s as good a way as any to spend part of Memorial Day weekend thinking about what actually happened on that beach.
The Longest Day gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE
This review is part of my Top 10 Movies Worth Watching This Memorial Day countdown, where it sits at #7. For more World War 2, but from the Pacific theater, check out my review of Midway (2019). And of course, you can’t talk World War 2 without mention the great General Patton, or one of the best movies ever made Saving Private Ryan.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect Forums.
