MMG - Rate this movie.... The Longest Day

[Mudge]

IMHO...The movie tried to do too much in one sitting. If they made it today, it would be better done as a 3 or 4 part series. Of course, we can all see the actual footage three times a week on the Military Channel. Lots of actual footage but pitifully few people we actually recognize.

For those of you who have only seen the footage by the combat cameramen, you can't get a sense of the humongous magnitude of the logistics required to pull off D-Day. Flying to Paris, you overfly a lot of the battle area. From the air, you cannot believe the amazing amount of area covered by the battle. I know I sat there, staring out the window with my mouth open in amazement. A visit to the beaches is also surprising. On a map, it looks like the beaches are about as far apart as your neighbor a couple of doors away. Not so. From Utah, you can't even see Omaha. From Omaha to Sword is about 40 miles. Looking down at the beaches from the German gun positions, it's a miracle that the allies didn't lose 3 to 4 times as many men as we did.

Sorry about the rant, troops, but it's one of my favorite places to visit. We fell in love with Normandy. We even found a few "lottery" homes.

Mudge the verbose

[SPANNERmkV]

Fanx Jiggers- I saw that Bill Million passed away recently. God Bless Him!
And if I remember there was something from some German soldiers who said they purposely did not shoot him that day because they thought him to be mad.

One of the charming things about the movie was in between the "serious parts" they conveyed the sense of the British being eccentric, the French being full of "beau geste" and the American parts being what? Practical? I know they are stereotypes, but sterotypes got their start somewhere didn't they?


The actual quote from the movie was,

Pvt. Clough( Norman Rossinton) " There it is, he's at it again! Have you ever heard such a racket in all your life?
Private Flanagan ( Sean Connery) " Yeah, it takes an Irishman to play the pipes. "


By the way Bill Million who played the "Pipes in the Movie , was portraying himself on DDay

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituar ... illin.html[/quote]

And Mudge- Next you will be saying Cleopatra didn't look just like Elizabeth Taylor???
---I hope to visit Normandie soon.

take care ALL,

SPANNER

[Mudge]

Spanner...Actually, Cleo ( I always called her Cleo), looked a lot like Liz. Just a bit thinner. Great rack, though. Amazing ain't it.

Mudge the ancient

[Dave Homewood]

Bill Guarnere E 506th 1010st AB, landed in the SW corner of the square about 15 minutes before the 505th, 82nd heavy weapons platoon of the 505th jumped into it.
By then they were slaughtered by the alerted troops.

That is very interesting. I never had thought about it before but in the TV series Band of Brothers we the viewers never saw where any of the other main characters landed on the D Day jump, just Dick Winters. As Winters met up with Bill Guarnere soon afterwards I assume he too was not far from the village. As someone who knew nothing about the US paratroopers before seeing the series I always like to learn more about those guys who were portrayed in that extraordinary series.

As for The Longest Day, I like the film, but I do find a few things off-putting. I don't like the fact that they decided to make it in black and white, I think that's a shame. And I agree with others and have always thought that the stacking of the cast with big name Hollywood stars and pop singers of the day detract from it somewhat.

I really don't like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, their performances are so wooden and lacking in reality and conviction. I can never fathom why they became such big stars and the American audiences seem to adore them, they are very poor actors. Mind you the same goes these days with the likes of Nicholas Cage.

There are some great scenes in this film though. The attack on Pegasus Bridge was great. And the large sweeping scene of the troops attacking Ouistreham was great.

By the way it was Richard Todd who played Major John Howard. Todd was himself a paratrooper on D Day too.

[Pathfinder]

From the air, you cannot believe the amazing amount of area covered by the battle.

A few years ago I did a map overlay to illustrate this point. The linear distance encompassing the D-Day invasion beaches almost perfectly corresponds to the coastline of the STATE of Delaware....

[Mudge]

Bill Guarnere E 506th 1010st AB, landed in the SW corner of the square about 15 minutes before the 505th, 82nd heavy weapons platoon of the 505th jumped into it.
By then they were slaughtered by the alerted troops.

That is very interesting. I never had thought about it before but in the TV series Band of Brothers we the viewers never saw where any of the other main characters landed on the D Day jump, just Dick Winters. As Winters met up with Bill Guarnere soon afterwards I assume he too was not far from the village. As someone who knew nothing about the US paratroopers before seeing the series I always like to learn more about those guys who were portrayed in that extraordinary series.

As for The Longest Day, I like the film, but I do find a few things off-putting. I don't like the fact that they decided to make it in black and white, I think that's a shame. And I agree with others and have always thought that the stacking of the cast with big name Hollywood stars and pop singers of the day detract from it somewhat.

I really don't like John Wayne and Robert Mitchum, their performances are so wooden and lacking in reality and conviction. I can never fathom why they became such big stars and the American audiences seem to adore them, they are very poor actors. Mind you the same goes these days with the likes of Nicholas Cage.

There are some great scenes in this film though. The attack on Pegasus Bridge was great. And the large sweeping scene of the troops attacking Ouistreham was great.

By the way it was Richard Todd who played Major John Howard. Todd was himself a paratrooper on D Day too.

After having done the Band of Brothers tour, with two different guides, I found it quite amazing to see what Hollywood had done to the story. Yes, there were people there named Winters, Hefron, Guarnere, Nixon, Compton, etc. They even actually did a lot of the stuff portrayed in the series. They did not, in many instances, do it in the way it was portrayed in the series. Some of the stuff, in the series, wasn't even close to the actual actions of the group portraying it. But, like they say, "Never let facts get in the way of a good story."
If you want to get a real feel for what actually happened, read both of Winter's books and Guarnere and Hefron's books. There are a couple of others but the authors and titles escape me at the moment. Maybe "Jiggers" could enlighten us.

By the way...Dave...Don't be sitting down there bad mouthing an American Icon like the "Duke". I have people there and they know where you live.
And Mitchum was probably not more than half sober during his shoots.

Mudge the vindictive

[the330thbg]

I loved that movie as a young lad.., but slowly grew more and more disappointed in its portrayal of the ‘facts’ of war as I got older and began to delve more into the intricacies of the conflict.
Finally realizing what a conflagration it was.., they were so lucky, so lucky it do not fail. FUBAR operation that was able to be pulled off purely by the numbers they threw on the beach. Very few ops went as planned.
Just sad when you really learn about the absolute waste of all those lives. Bombing our own soldiers, bad drop zones, missed beach heads, bad recon.., list goes on and on and the end result is that it was a success.
Not belittling what these men did., I visited Pegasus Bridge and a few of the invasion beaches.., I did not realize how BIG the area was and realized I could not see it all in two days..,I ran up the beach from the water and sank up to my ankles and could barely walk and that was without an 80lb pack or being picked off.
Amazing tale, but agree Private Ryan and or B of B does a much better job of showing it..,but also CGI and much more advanced SFX certainly help that out.
I still love the movie for its genre and love the cameos of ‘who is who’ at that time.

[Pathfinder]

Not to go too far off topic here---but in my estimation the biggest gaff in Band of Brothers was the EDITORIAL MYTH regarding one of the central characters (real person) Albert Blythe in the Carentan Episode--hysterical blindness...severely wounded in the throat attacking the town....

The epilogue of that episode says (paraphrased) that he never recovered from his wounds and died in 1948

Minor fact---Blythe survived the war and served over 25 years in the US ARMY--all Airborne assignments. He died in 1967 while still in service. He is buried in Arlington.

[Mudge]

Not to go too far off topic here---but in my estimation the biggest gaff in Band of Brothers was the EDITORIAL MYTH regarding one of the central characters (real person) Albert Blythe in the Carentan Episode--hysterical blindness...severely wounded in the throat attacking the town....

The epilogue of that episode says (paraphrased) that he never recovered from his wounds and died in 1948

Minor fact---Blythe survived the war and served over 25 years in the US ARMY--all Airborne assignments. He died in 1967 while still in service. He is buried in Arlington.

Blythe rose to the rank of M/Sgt and was the 82nd Airborne Division's 1958 Trooper of the Year.
One other error in the series. At the end of the last episode, Maj. Winters says that "Bull" Randleman was the best soldier he ever had. In his book, he says that Sgt. Floyd Talbert was the best soldier he ever had. Oh well...

Don't know whether this has been mentioned before or not...here goes anyway.
We know that Speirs stayed in the Army and became the CO of Spandau prison. Rudolph Hess, while a prisoner there, said Speirs was the only man he ever actually feared.

Mudge the researcher.

Last edited by Mudge on Sat Sep 24, 2011 9:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

[JDK]

FUBAR operation that was able to be pulled off purely by the numbers they threw on the beach. Very few ops went as planned.

Partly (for the US forces) that was because the US planners rejected / ignored Hobart's "Funnies"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobart%27s_Funnies

Just sad when you really learn about the absolute waste of all those lives. Bombing our own soldiers, bad drop zones, missed beach heads, bad recon.., list goes on and on and the end result is that it was a success.

That's a good summary of the reality of war, as against the film myth of one or two key people who pull off a 'million to one chance' (something Terry Pratchett takes the mickey out of very well.)

http://wiki.lspace.org/wiki/Million-to-one_chance

Back to the film, I suspect personal preferences are as much a generational aspect as they are of specific quality.

Regards,

PS - Mudge - If Hess wasn't more scared of his 'friends' in the Nazi party, he was as truly stupid as he tried to make out at Nuremberg.

James the sceptical of pat claims...

[Dave Homewood]

Mudge wrote: "By the way...Dave...Don't be sitting down there bad mouthing an American Icon like the "Duke". I have people there and they know where you live."

They can come round and badmouth a kiwi icon if they like so we're even, and then we'll have a chat about aeroplanes.

Something ese I find disconserting about the film is Roddy McDowell. I have always found him so creepy, and he's even worse trying to put on an American accent. Not sure why I find him so creepy though. Maybe i saw him in something as a kid that scared me.

I find your information about Normandy very interesting Mudge, keep it coming. No matter whether or not certain aspects of the history were twisted for Band of Brothers I still consider it a masterpiece. Same goes for The pacific.

Did Spiers really shoot any prisoners or one of his own men? Is there any knwon facts about the rumours?

Also did Don Malarky really meet a German prisoner who came from just down the road from him? It seems unlikely but then life's like that, because my great uncle was a 2nd Lt in 21 Battalion, New Zealand Army in Italy, and in 1945 he took loads of prisoners - one of them happened to be a kiwi in the German Army! Amazingly he was from Drury, the same small village my uncle was from in south Auckland, and my uncle actually knew his father as he'd been to his engineering workshop several times before the war. It turned out that this chap was kiwi born to German parents who'd immigarated to NZ after WWI. He had gone to Germany before the war to study a particular course at a university. Wehnthe war began he got a letter form his parents in NZ saying that they had both been imprisoned on Soames Island as "aliens". He weighed up going home to imprisonent for the duration or staying in Germany studying where he'd have relative freedom. He stayed, but a few years into the war he was drafted and ended up being sent with the German forcs to Italy and ended up fighting against his own people, the kiwis. My uncle told me he really like dthe guy and had a really great chat with him, but goodness knows what happened to him after he was passed over to the guys who looked after POW's - I doubt many kiwis would have taken kindly to finding a kiwi in Nazi uniform. What an amazing co-incidence though that they came form the same place and met like that. It's even more unique than Malarkey's, as Drury would only ahve had a few hundred people then and is still tiny today.

Sorry for detracting so much from the actual thread topic.

[whistlingdeath77]

Really good movie. The cast is studded with everybody. My only gripe would be it really is a long movie

[Mudge]

Really good movie. The cast is studded with everybody. My only gripe would be it really is a long movie

Yeah...the cast was "studded with everybody" alright. Some of them were even actors.

Mudge the critic


ps. "I wonder what bitte, bitte means?"

[whistlingdeath77]

Really good movie. The cast is studded with everybody. My only gripe would be it really is a long movie

Yeah...the cast was "studded with everybody" alright. Some of them were even actors.

Mudge the critic


ps. "I wonder what bitte, bitte means?"

Mudge, I saw you in that movie too I think. Hard to tell though since it seemed like they used 45,000 people in it

[Mudge]

Really good movie. The cast is studded with everybody. My only gripe would be it really is a long movie

Yeah...the cast was "studded with everybody" alright. Some of them were even actors.

Mudge the critic


ps. "I wonder what bitte, bitte means?"

Mudge, I saw you in that movie too I think. Hard to tell though since it seemed like they used 45,000 people in it

You think? I'm shocked, hurt, and indignant! I had a starring role as Sgt. Kaffekanne. I was a bit heavier then.

Mudge the slender