DARYL'S D-DAY...........ZANUCK STORMS THE BEACHES IN "THE LONGEST DAY"

The Longest Day (1962)     BQ visitors.......enjoy a long sigh of relief......

              I swear to you......I'm not going to spend even 2 seconds comparing this movie to the opening D-Day sequence of "Saving Private Ryan".........

              As we speak there's most likely 7 million bloggers doing that right now.......so you folks can easily dive into that stuff, if you so prefer.......

               Let's deal with "The Longest Day", for better or worse, all by itself.....

              The best of it:   Daryl F. Zanuck's days as the Top Mogul of 20th Century Fox were numbered.....(all the moguls were on a slow but eventual march into the tarpits)......but "The Longest Day", his personal project, was a last, shining example of the kind of filmmaking only the Moguls could pull off.......

               .............huge, ambitious in scope, expensive as hell to produce.......and sprinkled with more Hollywood stars than the multi-colored jimmies atop your frozen yogurt cone.........

               And 57 years later, it still stands at the only Hollywood studio film to to expansively re-create the entirety of the battles and events of June 6, 1944.

               Even more impressive: the film's remarkable objective overview of the German high command, with those scenes filmed with their actors speaking subtitled German. The officers are presented in their entire range of humanity - intelligent, foolhardy, reckless, noble, frustrated and demoralized at the prospect of a war they're on their way to losing.......due to the whims and lunacy of their "Fuhrer"....

              All the many stars who pop up throughout the film ("Hey, isn't that....?") acquit themselves well in the brief amounts of time they're given........(and that even includes Zanuck's Girlfriend-Of-The-Moment, Irina Demick as a French Resistance babe distracting the German sentries by showing them  her....uh....credentials....)

              A few standout sequences that still resonate...........Red Buttons as the paratrooper dangling helplessly from a church steeple, watching his airborne unit slaughtered as they float down directly into the middle of a town square...........the extended, panoramic  aerial shot of a raging battle, a God's eye view of the carnage........and the long, brutal attempts to wipe out the Germans who control the high ground over the beaches, using that advantage to wipe out thousands of Allied soldiers.....

                  The flaws of it.......Of course, it's G-rated filmmaking, so it can't possibly depict the true graphic horrors of warfare and its toll on the men who put their lives in harm's way.

                   In retrospect, it does carry the burden of a major omission........as anyone can see on the news, the surviving veterans of D-Day are now well into their 90's.....

                   ........which means they fought this titanic battle for freedom and civilization as youngsters, barely out of adolescence.........boys in their late teens and early 20's.......

                    Unfortunately, that's the one key element missing from "The Longest Day"........with the exception of maybe Richard Beymer (of "West Side Story") and Sal Mineo, everyone else depicted in the film appears somewhere between 35 to 55........those thousands of very young, frightened but incredibly courageous kids who waded into withering enemy fire are only seen in abstract long shots as they fight and die....

                     To Daryl F. Zanuck's credit, he deliberately veered away from any typical Hollywood shmaltz.......no swelling romantic, overdone score - only a few bars of Beethoven, some drum snares and Paul Anka's catchy little theme song at the end. For three hours, the film maintains it strictly-business, documentary-like structure. ......

                     That's why, for all its flaws, BQ still considers it essential June 6th viewing.........no matter what year the D-Day anniversary totals up to........4 stars (****)

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