. . . if they first took 44 minutes to watch this SALUTE TO COURAGE. Let's be clear: SALUTE is NOT an exercise in film criticism--it mentions NONE of the things that make THE LONGEST DAY the most Tediously Boring War Flick of All-Time. Since SALUTE is a product of the History Channel, it focuses on how DAY distorted the facts for virtually every poorly-executed scene of this snooze fest, due to the perverse political agenda of Fox founder Darryl F. Zanuck. In other words, DAY is to World War Two what that current travesty Fox "News" is to News. Though DAY is supposedly based upon Cornelius Ryan's book of the same name, SALUTE makes a point of emphasizing that Ryan hated Zanuck at first sight. (Most military guys get pretty good at detecting Bull$hip artists during boot camp; Zanuck liked to parade around as some sort of "colonel," like that Kentucky Chicken Sanders guy.) Zanuck saw DAY as his ticket back to America after a sex scandal had forced him into a French exile. (I'm pretty sure that the current director in a similar situation--Roman Polanski--will never stoop to denigrating U.S. service members, even it that means that Sharon Tate's widower never returns to America.) On the other hand, Zanuck had no compunction in depicting our brave Army Rangers as failing at D-Day's #1 objective (they actually obtained it ahead of schedule), and then--out of frustration--committing War Crimes such as machine-gunning surrendering enemy soldiers (never happened here; future GOP President-General "I-Like-Ike" Eisenhower waited until Hitler was dead to engineer the up-to-one-million-man German detainee kill-off AFTER V-E Day). Zanuck also gets the battle of Omaha Beach dead wrong, and made many veteran paratroopers die laughing at his ridiculous against-the-Laws-of-Physics scenes showing them firing rifles as they descend. Heroic Steven Spielberg made SAVING PRIVATE RYAN the right way, but the only excuse for the LONGEST DAY farce was to save "Colonel" Zanuck's bacon (or chicken, as the case might be).
History vs. Hollywood (TV Series)
The Longest Day: A Salute to Courage (2001)
User Reviews
Review this title2 Reviews
It's hard to believe that ANYONE would devote 3 hours to THE LONGEST DAY . . .
oscaralbert2 January 2016
Warning: Spoilers
Informative comparison of "The Longest Day" and the actual events of D-Day
BrianDanaCamp6 June 2014
"The Longest Day: A Salute to Courage" (2001) is a 43-minute TV documentary (shown on The History Channel) which chronicles Darryl F. Zanuck's return from self-imposed exile from 20th Century Fox to devote two years of his life and some of his own considerable resources to the making of THE LONGEST DAY (1962), an epic recreation of the historic D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944. Key interview subjects include: Victoria Ryan, daughter of war correspondent Cornelius Ryan, whose book formed the basis of the movie; Elmo Williams, the film's associate producer; Darrilyn Zanuck, Zanuck's daughter; Richard Zanuck, Zanuck's son and a Fox executive in his own right; Douglas E. McCabe, curator of the Cornelius Ryan Collection; Rudy Behlmer, author of "Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck"; and Ken Annakin, director of the British sequences of the film. Two actors from the film are interviewed: Richard Todd, a war veteran who was a paratrooper on D-Day, and Red Buttons.
Most importantly, we hear from six actual veterans of D-Day: Robert M. Murphy, Paul R. Sands, Leonard "Bud" Lommel, William Friedman, and Noel A. Dube, all from the American armed forces, and one German war veteran, Rudy Meyer. They provide testimony as to what actually happened on D-Day and what exactly THE LONGEST DAY got wrong. For instance, in the actual parachute landings, the paratroopers were physically unable to wield a weapon as they landed, whereas the movie shows paratroopers firing machine guns as they came down. On Omaha Beach, the movie shows the engineers blowing a hole in the sea wall and the troops triumphantly pouring through, whereas in real life the path through the breach was slow and painstaking and took hours to get through. As William Friedman points out, "Nobody went charging up the hill."
Robert Murphy, one of the Rangers who climbed Pointe du Hoc, acknowledges the accuracy of the depiction of the storming of the cliff, but was upset at the film's implication that the Rangers' mission was in vain, since the guns they set out to disable at the top of the cliff were gone from the bunkers when they got there. In real life, the Rangers kept searching and soon found the guns they were looking for and disabled them, saving countless lives. Murphy also took issue with the scene where German soldiers come out of a bunker with hands raised, saying "Bitte! Bitte!" ("Please, please!") only to be shot dead by an uncomprehending soldier. He says he never heard of anything like this happening.
While I like the movie a great deal and have been a fan of it since I saw it in a neighborhood theater as a ten-year-old some 50 years ago, it's important to research the actual events and learn the truth of what happened from the men who were there. This documentary adds a lot to my own reading on the subject.
The veterans' interviews are intercut with archival photos and scenes from the film. Burt Reynolds provides lively and enthusiastic narration. This film was included as an extra on a special DVD edition of THE LONGEST DAY. I am posting this review on the 70th anniversary of D-Day.
Most importantly, we hear from six actual veterans of D-Day: Robert M. Murphy, Paul R. Sands, Leonard "Bud" Lommel, William Friedman, and Noel A. Dube, all from the American armed forces, and one German war veteran, Rudy Meyer. They provide testimony as to what actually happened on D-Day and what exactly THE LONGEST DAY got wrong. For instance, in the actual parachute landings, the paratroopers were physically unable to wield a weapon as they landed, whereas the movie shows paratroopers firing machine guns as they came down. On Omaha Beach, the movie shows the engineers blowing a hole in the sea wall and the troops triumphantly pouring through, whereas in real life the path through the breach was slow and painstaking and took hours to get through. As William Friedman points out, "Nobody went charging up the hill."
Robert Murphy, one of the Rangers who climbed Pointe du Hoc, acknowledges the accuracy of the depiction of the storming of the cliff, but was upset at the film's implication that the Rangers' mission was in vain, since the guns they set out to disable at the top of the cliff were gone from the bunkers when they got there. In real life, the Rangers kept searching and soon found the guns they were looking for and disabled them, saving countless lives. Murphy also took issue with the scene where German soldiers come out of a bunker with hands raised, saying "Bitte! Bitte!" ("Please, please!") only to be shot dead by an uncomprehending soldier. He says he never heard of anything like this happening.
While I like the movie a great deal and have been a fan of it since I saw it in a neighborhood theater as a ten-year-old some 50 years ago, it's important to research the actual events and learn the truth of what happened from the men who were there. This documentary adds a lot to my own reading on the subject.
The veterans' interviews are intercut with archival photos and scenes from the film. Burt Reynolds provides lively and enthusiastic narration. This film was included as an extra on a special DVD edition of THE LONGEST DAY. I am posting this review on the 70th anniversary of D-Day.
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