4 takes on the biggest event ever
Screenings of D-Day movies mark 75th anniversary
The most important day of the most important event of the most important century in human history is about to turn 75.
D-Day, the turning point toward victory against Nazi Germany and its supporters during World War II, marks its anniversary on Thursday, June 6. But though it was such a consequential moment in history, D-Day has inspired surprisingly few movies, apart from the Big Two.
Think of how many World War II movies have been made and are still being made. Seems like millions, and from every country, and practically every month (“The Aftermath,” which came out in March, was the most recent). And yet, there were some 14 countries involved in D-Day, but most never made a film about it.
Of course, there’s Steven Spielberg’s “Saving Private Ryan,” which opens with a graphic, nearly half-hour reenactment of the invasion. The 1998 film became an instant classic, and it will be back in theaters nationwide through www.fathomevents.com, including 16 in the Bay Area, on Sunday, June 2, and Wednesday, June 5. And, to clarify, this is a film that should be experienced on the big screen.
Violent, at times disillusioned, but ultimately patriotic, “Saving Private Ryan” stands as a counterpoint to
20th Century Fox’s mega-epic “The Longest Day” (1962), a three-hour, rousing, undeniably entertaining extravaganza that took three directors, a cast of thousands and nearly every male Hollywood A-list star on the roster to make.
Unapologetically patriotic and sanitized (it is, believe it or not, rated G), “The Longest Day,” which is available for streaming on multiple platforms and will have its yearly showing on Turner Classic Movies on June 6, is nevertheless a film to marvel at. It is old-school mythmaking operating at a high level. The logistics alone are eye-popping.
But it remains a film of its era, made by people who lived the war, either in combat or the home front. One, Irish actor Richard Todd, participated in the D-Day invasion. At that time, nearly two decades after the event, they had a strong interest in massaging history in a way that put what they achieved in the best possible light, as free of the horror they actually experienced as possible.
But war, even a “good” one, is hell. “Saving Private Ryan” was made possible by the Vietnam War, a conflict that ended any romantic notions of war for many Americans. Vietnam taught us that all war is horrible, no matter the cause. Spielberg felt that the constant whitewashing of “The Good War” in films of the classic era ultimately undercut what the Greatest Generation accomplished.
“Saving Private Ryan” was intended to simultaneously honor their service and sacrifice, but also to correct the record by showing what that service and sacrifice entailed.
“I wanted the audience to be participants in the physical experience of battlefield combat as opposed to spectators as most of us are when we’re filmgoers,” Spielberg told me during the “Saving Private Ryan” press tour in 1998.
“I did a lot of things in ‘Schindler’s List’ that were very graphically realistic and true to the reportage of the survivors that talked to us before we made that story. I felt I had that kind of duty to those veterans of World War II, to finally acquit them of their experience in a non-Hollywood way.”
The film narrowly avoided an NC-17 rating, possibly because of Spielberg’s stature, possibly because of the historical importance of the subject.
But Spielberg certainly wasn’t the first to use the D-Day invasion to mourn loss and the nature of war.
One of the most unusual D-Day films ever made, “Overlord,” was a low-budget British indie written and directed by American actor and filmmaker Stuart Cooper in 1975. Cooper knew big-budget Hollywood World War II films well — he was one of “The Dirty Dozen,” one of the most popular World War II flicks of the ’60s.
As a filmmaker, he sought to deglamorize war by telling the story of a British infantryman on his way to the D-Day invasion (which was codenamed Operation Overlord), using flashbacks to tell his story: leaving home, his difficult training period, his shortlived romance, his death on Omaha Beach.
Cooper shot the film in black and white, using Stanley Kubrick’s cinematographer, John Alcott, to match the voluminous amount of archival war footage that becomes part of the story. Cooper also combed the archives of the Imperial War Museum for soldiers’ journals, letters and postcards to serve as the basis for his characters.
For Tom, the young hero of “Overlord,” which can be streamed on the Criterion Channel, rented on streaming platforms or seen on Turner Classic Movies on June 6, being a soldier is “like being part of a machine that gets bigger and bigger while we get smaller and smaller until there is nothing left.”
Tom (a wonderfully green Brian Stirner) is a bit of a cipher — he’s not a very interesting guy, even though he seems nice enough. But that might have been Cooper’s point: Here is a young man who has not had a chance to become a well-rounded, interesting person. His misfortune is to have been born when and where he was, which in this case means he is a pawn of history, another wasted life.
But maybe the last word on D-Day should be left to the great Samuel Fuller and Lee Marvin, two World War II vets who combined to make one hell of a war movie. A former newspaper crime reporter, Fuller was a decorated soldier who not only stormed the beach on D-Day, but also was in the infantry division that was the first into the concentration camps.
He pretty much saw the worst that war had to offer. And he didn’t glamorize it. His 1980 World War II film “The Big Red One” tells the history of the war through an infantry unit that fights throughout Africa and Europe. Of course, they hit Omaha Beach.
For Fuller and Marvin, who was wounded in the Pacific theater, World War II was a fight to the death between good and evil. It shouldn’t have had to happen, but it was necessary. Necessary as hell.
“The Big Red One,” which can be streamed on various platforms, stars Marvin as the gruff sergeant charged with keeping his young troops focused and ready.
One sensitive soldier, Griff, played by Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, says he’s conflicted because, “I can’t murder anybody.”
“We don’t murder. We kill,” Marvin replies. “It’s the same thing.” “The hell it is, Griff. You don’t murder animals; you kill ’em.”
Think that’s a little harsh? Fuller and Marvin didn’t think so. They were there.