Sam (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about the film The Longest Day, which came out in 1962. It was produced by Darryl Zanuck, directed by Ken Annakin for the British and French exteriors, Andrew Marton for the American exteriors, and Bernhard Wicki for the German scenes. It was written by Cornelius Ryan with additional material written by Romain Gary, James Jones, David Pursall, and Jack Seddon.

The film was nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, and won awards for Best Cinematography (Black and White) and Best Special Effects. It’s based on the book of the same name, a nonfiction account of D-Day, June 6, 1944, by Cornelius Ryan, which was published in 1959. The book has sold tens of millions of copies, and Ryan has been described as the man who invented D-Day.

The title comes from a comment that German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel made to his aide on April 22, 1944. “Believe me, Lange, the first twenty-four hours of the invasion will be decisive. The fate of Germany depends on the outcome. For the Allies as well as Germany, it will be the longest day.” What did you think of this movie?

Maartje (01:20)
I thought it was long. I did enjoy it, although I did tell you halfway through that I was kind of bored, and I was. There are a lot of names in this, like commanders and decision makers and Germans not agreeing with each other. And I did enjoy parts of it more than others. I thought the acting was kind of janky from some of the actors, because there are a lot of big names in this who only have a cameo, like a couple of scenes, and not all of them are very good. I didn’t enjoy John Wayne very much. I thought he was kind of clunky.

But it does really rise to show you the scale of the invasion of Normandy, and it shows you different perspectives, and it almost makes it hard to believe that this is actually how it happened. I enjoyed that about it, and I enjoyed particularly the French civilian who’s in it, who made me laugh quite a bit. But I think I tried to compare it to A Bridge Too Far, which I enjoyed a lot more. So it’s not my favourite. How about you?

Sam (02:31)
I enjoyed this movie, I will say. It’s in black and white, and the reason for that primarily is that they wanted to include real footage from D-Day, which had been filmed on the day and was obviously in black and white. And I think they integrate it really seamlessly. This movie is a docudrama style, kind of like Tora! Tora! Tora! or The Battle of Britain, but where I think it really benefits is from Ryan’s innate knack as a historical storyteller, his ability to build a narrative around historical events. And I watched a talk about him by the Library of America, and they describe his writing style as telling you not only what happens, but what it was like. And I think that’s huge as a way to connect to people.

Even Ryan says in the foreword of his book that this is a story about the people who were at D-Day. And I do think we get that in the movie, this brilliant array of characters, some of whom are momentous decision makers and some of whom are just enlisted guys whose names we don’t even really learn. And I actually went into this movie prepared not to like John Wayne, and I liked him better than I was expecting.

Maartje (03:47)
Yeah, I will agree that they did try to get all of Ryan’s characters into the movie. I just think, having read maybe a third of the book — I didn’t finish in time — the book is better at it, which makes sense because you have so many characters to introduce in a long movie, but it’s not long enough to introduce all of them in the same way.

But I did try, so I give them an A for effort. I don’t think I would necessarily want to watch this one again, whereas A Bridge Too Far I probably would watch again.

Sam (04:26)
I think I would watch this one again if I were in the mood for a really good battle scene, because there are quite a few of them in this movie.

Maartje (04:31)
Yeah, I also liked when they scale the rocks at Pointe du Hoc. I thought that was quite exciting, and basically all the battle scenes in the second half of the movie are really fun and exciting. So I will say I liked the second half of the three-hour movie a lot more than the first half. Although I did find the Germans more entertaining than the Americans and the Brits.

Sam (04:58)
Yeah, there were some good Germans in here. I’m excited to talk about them. And some good character acting, I would say, by a lot of these background people who only appear for maybe a minute or two but you’re solidly entertained by their presence.

Maartje (05:11)
Yes, agree.

Sam (05:13)
Just briefly about Ryan. Obviously, he wrote A Bridge Too Far, so we talked about him somewhat when we did that episode, but he was born in 1920, so he was a young man when World War II was going on, and he was a war correspondent. He was a journalist by trade before he ever wrote history books. And he actually covered the Eighth Air Force, which we’ve discussed in our Masters of the Air episode.

So he flew 14 bombing runs, including one on D-Day. He was actually there. And he returned to Normandy five years later and he was on the beaches, seeing this debris that was still left from one of the most momentous battles in history. And it inspired him to start work on his first World War II book. It became kind of an obsession for him.

The Longest Day was the first World War II book that he published. And I think you can tell, having read The Longest Day and A Bridge Too Far, that his writing style is more developed in A Bridge Too Far, which is fair enough — there’s about fifteen years between the publishing dates. He originally planned to write five World War II books, and he published three: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, and one about the Battle of Berlin at the end of the war.

But unfortunately, while he was writing A Bridge Too Far, he was less than 50 pages in when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. And so he cranked out the rest of the book in about five months, knowing he was running out of time. He had this really in-depth process where he would place ads reaching out to veterans and civilians and people who were at these various historical events, asking things like, “Did you see anything really courageous or really stupid at D-Day? I want all the interesting stories you don’t normally see in a history book.” He ended up doing thousands of interviews. You really see that come to fruition in the book, where you get this extraordinary panoramic view of events. And his wife was a successful editor. She supported the family when he took time off to write. I thought that was pretty badass.

Such a giant in the world of popular history writing. I really think there’s no one better than him.

Maartje (07:25)
What a shame that he didn’t get to finish his work. Makes me so sad — for anyone to get a terminal cancer diagnosis is terrible, but to have such a talented storyteller not finish what he set out to do is really sad.

Sam (07:41)
Yeah, definitely.

Maartje (07:43)
Shall we get into the movie, because it’s a long one?

Sam (07:46)
It sure is.

Maartje (07:55)
The movie is bookended by a shot of a lone helmet lying upturned on the beach. We hear the very typical BBC broadcasts — the famous “London calling” messages, which is relevant since this is how the Allies communicate with the French Resistance. Everything is quiet in the sleepy French villages along the Normandy coast. For now.

Sam (08:17)
Fun history tidbit: the song “London Calling” by The Clash takes its title from these wartime dispatches.

Maartje (08:24)
Yeah, I would play it in the podcast, but I think I would get sued.

Sam (08:27)
Ha! Probably. I don’t think Joe Strummer would be mad. He’s long since passed away. He seems like a chill dude.

Maartje (08:34)
He won’t come back to haunt us, then, I guess.

Sam (08:36)
Yeah. So some context for the Germans: they’re not losing the war yet, quote unquote, but things are not looking great. The Soviets are in Poland. The Allies are at the gates of Rome — I believe Rome was taken on June 5th, a day or two before D-Day. So the Germans know that an Allied offensive is coming in northwestern Europe. They don’t know when exactly and they don’t know where, but most of them assume it will be at Pas-de-Calais, not at Normandy. The main reason for this is that Pas-de-Calais is where the English Channel is narrowest — if you land there, that’s your quickest route into Germany from the coast. Nobody really thinks the Allies are going to attack at Normandy, because it’s just not very convenient. There’s not really any ports there.

And meanwhile on the Allied side, plans for the invasion — as you can imagine — have been a massive undertaking. They’ve been ongoing for over a year.

What I enjoyed in this movie: in Morse code, a V is dot-dot-dot-dash, and people noticed this had a similarity to the beginning of Beethoven’s Fifth, which is da-da-da-daa. So that was quite a famous little motif during World War II, and they use it as the basis for the score in this movie. I quite like it.

Maartje (09:53)
It’s fun, and they never get around to the actual conclusion of the song. They never finish the theme of Beethoven’s Fifth — it’s always just a tiny hint of it. Ha.

Sam (10:08)
Yeah.

Maartje (10:09)
We will gradually be introduced to all of the major figures on both sides. There are a lot. We haven’t named all of them, but we do name the biggest ones. So on the German side, we begin with Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, played by Paul Hartmann. He’s in charge of all German forces on the Western Front. Then there’s Major Rainer Pluskat, played by Hans Christian Blech — what a great name. He was the CO of the 352nd Infantry Division and was stationed at the beach fortifications in Normandy. You see him later in a bunker on the beach. He’s very funny. And we also get — and this is also where the book opens — Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, played by Werner Hinz, who’s the CO of Army Group B, and he’s inspecting his beach fortifications.

In the book it actually starts with him planning to leave, which I thought was funny.

Sam (11:06)
Yes. So Rommel developed many of the beach fortifications himself. You see them in the movie — there are these long sticks poking out of the mud with a mine on top. He was basically thinking, “How can I create as many ways as possible to make a beach landing really bloody and difficult for the Allies?”

The Germans had not begun work on their Atlantic Wall fortifications until late 1942, because initially they thought they might be the ones invading Britain. Hitler did not think they would need to defend “Fortress Europe.” They started work in late 1942, and people got the sense that the Atlantic Wall was almost complete — Rommel certainly had that sense — and then he arrived in France in late 1943 and was flabbergasted by how incomplete it was. There were places with no fortifications at all, and nowhere was anywhere near his specifications. So he immediately came up with a plan to make improvements.

Just before D-Day, he had set a deadline of June 20th for completion of the anti-invasion obstacle program. He figured the Allies hadn’t invaded in May when the weather was perfect, so they probably weren’t going to invade until the Soviets started their summer offensive. The Soviets were going to attack maybe in July. He figured they’d probably try to time it so both invasions happened simultaneously. As we know, he was not correct about this.

Von Rundstedt and Rommel disagreed fundamentally on how Germany should respond to an Allied invasion. Von Rundstedt thought the Atlantic Wall was more of a propaganda exercise for Hitler than anything practical — he didn’t think it would do more than temporarily obstruct the Allies. But he thought it would allow the Germans time to gather, regroup, bring in reinforcements, and attack the Allies while they were still getting organised. Rommel believed any Allied attack needed to be smashed back into the sea immediately: “We don’t have time to wait. We cannot bring up reinforcements. We have to stop them on the beach.” He actually said, “The war will be won or lost on the beaches. We’ll have only one chance to stop the enemy, and that’s while he’s in the water.”

Maartje (13:42)
Who do you think is right?

Sam (13:44)
I think it’s difficult to say, to be honest. Von Rundstedt was the one at the beginning of the war who essentially manoeuvred around the French Maginot Line, so he had seen that stationary fortifications in modern warfare don’t work.

Maartje (14:05)
Yeah.

Sam (14:07)
But on the other side, the Germans were so slow to react to the Allied invasion that they really let the Allies get a foothold they probably shouldn’t have been allowed to get. So maybe there’s a happy medium here.

Maartje (14:22)
I’m inclined to agree. Can I just say — from Ryan’s book, I enjoyed Rommel’s correspondence to his wife so much, where he’s guessing about when the Allied invasion will be, and it’s all over the place. It’s so funny. But also, Rommel was the Desert Fox, known to be this really cunning man, and yet at this point in the war, men who knew him said he looked tired. He’d seen so much war that he’d kind of lost his edge a little. But it’s really through no fault of his own, I think, that he left when he did.

Sam (15:00)
Yeah. And Rommel doesn’t live very long after this. He gets strafed by an enemy plane in the summer of ’44, I want to say July or August. And then while he’s recuperating, Hitler believes Rommel was involved in the July 20th plot to assassinate him, and so suggests to Rommel that he kill himself.

Maartje (15:11)
He’s encouraged to kill himself.

Sam (15:25)
Yes. But Von Rundstedt, if you check out A Bridge Too Far, you will see him again.

Maartje (15:31)
He lives. Unfortunately — not if you’re German, I guess. Then it’s fortunately.

Sam (15:36)
The Germans hear a broadcast from the BBC containing the first part of a fateful message — a line from the Verlaine poem that they know places the French Resistance on standby. The second line of the poem being broadcast will mean that the Allied invasion is due in 24 hours. The German high command is dubious about this, however, because the weather is so bad: it’s storming, pouring down rain, the waves in the Channel are crazy high. And a number of German commanders leave to participate in a war games exercise at Rennes. Meanwhile, Rommel himself leaves for Berlin. He says a line in the movie that made me laugh: “Can you think of a better time for me to go?”

Maartje (16:15)
Yeah. I have to mention something that made me laugh really hard, very early in the movie. They shot a plate of the Normandy beach and placed the actors in front of it, and Rommel’s one of them. And in one shot he just disappears from the plate. He just vanishes. I laughed so much.

Sam (16:35)
He’s the Desert Fox. He’s sneaky.

Maartje (16:38)
You can’t see him. He’s just sneaking.

Sam (16:41)
Maybe he was wearing his best camouflage that day.

Maartje (16:44)
Blue sea-blue camouflage, yes. I can see it.

Sam (16:47)
Yeah. So in the movie they focus on the fact that Rommel is going to see his wife, and it’s true that his wife’s birthday was June 6, 1944 — but he also wanted to speak with Hitler personally. The reason for this was the reserve Panzer divisions. Rommel thought that if they wanted any chance of driving the Allies back into the sea, they needed those Panzer divisions ready to respond within a couple of hours. They couldn’t wait. And unfortunately, these Panzer Reserve divisions were under Hitler’s personal command. You needed his personal say-so before they could be moved anywhere. So Rommel decided to go speak to Hitler in person, because as he says, “the last man who sees Hitler wins the game.” Which really makes me think of a certain world leader today.

Maartje (17:37)
Oh my god, Sam, don’t make it so real.

Sam (17:42)
Yeah. The last guy who whispers in Hitler’s ear is the guy whose opinion he has.

Maartje (17:48)
What amused me — and I’m sure it was like this in real life — is that all of the German commanders are starting to doubt Hitler at this point. They’re kind of talking amongst each other, and Hitler is asleep and no one can get in touch with him and he’s not responding to things, and they’re thinking he’s doing the wrong thing. It’s funny to me in hindsight. It wouldn’t have been funny at the time because there was a war on, but in hindsight it is.

Sam (18:16)
Yeah, there’s a real through line with Von Rundstedt in this one and in A Bridge Too Far where he cannot be bothered. He really thinks Hitler is this jumped-up little man. He keeps referring to him as “that Bohemian corporal.” He’s like, “Why should I have to beg for reinforcements from that Bohemian corporal?” He’s this old-fashioned military man who thinks Hitler just doesn’t know what he’s doing.

And Von Rundstedt and Hitler had a falling out after this — Von Rundstedt got removed from his assignment. Then right before Market Garden he got reinstated, because Hitler was like, “Yeah, we actually need someone who knows what they’re doing.”

Maartje (18:56)
He’s the guy that says in both movies, “Have you ever seen me…”

Sam (19:02)
Well, he’s a little pissed off too, right? Because he’s in charge of the Western Front, and then Hitler sends Rommel to come and look at the Atlantic Wall. And Rommel says, “We need to overhaul everything.” Von Rundstedt obviously disagrees with Rommel about the value of the Atlantic Wall — he thinks it’s using up resources they don’t need. And he thinks Rommel is being primed to be his replacement. So he’s not very happy that he has to deal with this young upstart.

Maartje (19:31)
Yeah, he’s being undermined, clearly.

Sam (19:34)
Yeah.

Maartje (19:34)
Across the channel, it is spitting rain on three million men waiting to find out if the invasion will be postponed for a second time due to the weather.

Sam (19:43)
There’s this exchange between two British soldiers. They’re sitting in the rain eating some gross slop out of a little bowl. And one of them says, “Yeah, I’m really worried about my wife. She’s having a baby.” And the other guy says, “Are you excited to be a father?” And he says, “Well, it’s not mine. I’m just worried about her.”

Maartje (19:58)
Yeah. Some of these scenes are really separate from the rest of the movie, but they do add a little flavour to the otherwise quite serious commanding officers we see all the time. It’s quite nice.

Sam (20:15)
The dialogue really gives it a vitality, I find. There are quite a few little exchanges that really made me smile, or made me sad. I really felt that the dialogue was well done.

Maartje (20:18)
Yeah.

Yeah. There are also men already aboard ships being sick as dogs. And this is when we see Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin H. Vandervoort, played by John Wayne — who Sam apparently liked more than I did. He’s a battalion CO in the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. He was training his men extra hard because he was worried about their landing zone. I did like this whole bit about the landing zone.

Sam (20:52)
Yeah, well, this was an issue on D-Day because the Germans knew the Allies would probably need to cross that terrain at some point, so they flooded a lot of the low-lying area. A lot of the paratroopers landed in places where the water was much deeper than expected, and some of them drowned.

Maartje (21:13)
And they did it again for The Forgotten Battle. And with Market Garden, the landing zones were also a problem. It’s just problem after problem. Makes you think, didn’t they learn anything? But maybe they didn’t have a choice. I’m not in the army. I don’t know how it works.

Sam (21:26)
Right.

Maartje (21:32)
We also meet Brigadier General Norman Cota, played by Robert Mitchum. He’s assistant CO of the 29th Infantry Division, and he just wants to go already. He’s sick of waiting.

Sam (21:43)
Yeah. D-Day had already been postponed once, and for the guys already on the ships, by the time D-Day gets going they’ve been on a ship for two or three days. There’s even one scene in the movie where two guys are sitting next to each other and one says, “We’ve run out of buckets, we’ve run out of bowls, we’ve run out of everything” — he’s like, “The only thing left to throw up in is our helmets.”

Maartje (22:06)
I think that’s the same guy who was talking to the guy whose baby it’s not. It’s the same dialogue pair. It’s really funny.

Sam (22:13)
Ha ha.

We also get lots of enlisted men in this movie. I specifically made a note of Private Arthur “Dutch” Schultz, played by Richard Beymer, who does get mentioned in the book. He was a real guy. He has just won $2,500 at dice against his fellow soldiers as they wait for D-Day, that classic soldiering game of gambling. But he gets superstitious about it and quickly tries to lose the money, because he’s convinced that if he goes into battle broke, he won’t die.

Maartje (22:41)
Yeah, because he’d had a similar thing where he had a little bit of luck before a battle and then got wounded. So now he’s thinking, “Can’t have that again.” I enjoyed this character as well, and we see him again later in the movie. Thankfully.

Sam (22:55)
Yeah.

Maartje (22:55)
There’s a quick cameo by Richard Burton playing a sad-sack Flight Officer David Campbell of the RAF. He’s not as much fun as the Germans, who are much funnier. In particular, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Priller, played by Heinz Reincke, who is very displeased that there are all of two German fighter planes on the whole of the Western Front.

Sam (23:17)
Yeah, and this is real. When the Allies flew cover at D-Day — bombers and fighter planes and everything — they encountered almost no resistance, because the Germans had moved all of their fighter planes back away from the front. They didn’t want the Allies bombing their planes while they sat on the ground. The unfortunate result was that on D-Day the Germans only had two fighter planes to strafe the beach with.

Maartje (23:41)
I felt for these guys. The dialogue for the Germans is so much more fun than for the Allies. I don’t know why, but it’s just so funny.

Sam (23:53)
I really enjoyed Priller just hollering at his superior over the phone. I was chuckling the whole time.

Maartje (24:01)
Yeah. There’s plenty of hollering at people in this movie, to be honest.

Sam (24:06)
It’s true. Everyone is getting really mad on the phone.

Maartje (24:10)
And it’s always the Germans being mad on the phone. I don’t know what that says about Germans.

Sam (24:14)
Well, I guess they have a lot of reason to be mad on the phone.

Maartje (24:17)
Ha!

Sam (24:18)
And Richard Burton supposedly was not even supposed to be in this movie, but he was filming something in Rome and he was bored. So he called the producer and said, “Can I come be in your movie?” And they said, “Yeah, if you can come today, and we’re not paying you.” And he said, “K, I’ll be there.”

Maartje (24:33)
I’ll add a quick note about pay, because John Wayne was paid ten times more than his co-stars. Apparently the director had called one of his earlier movies a flop, and he got mad and said, “I can be in your movie, but only if you pay me ten times more than everyone else.”

Sam (24:54)
Yeah, John Wayne kind of sucks as a person, to be honest. Not a great dude. And when World War II was actually happening, John Wayne was already older than the character he’s playing — so by 1962 he’s just way too old.

Maartje (24:56)
Ha ha ha.

To be precise, he’s over two decades older than the actual Vandervoort he’s playing.

Sam (25:16)
Yeah.

Group Captain J. Stagg, played by Patrick Barr, whom we will see in the upcoming movie Pressure — he’s the meteorologist monitoring weather conditions for D-Day. He reports to General Dwight D. Eisenhower, played by Henry Grace, but dubbed by Alan Swift, because Henry Grace wasn’t really an actor. He was more of a behind-the-scenes guy who was cast because he looked a lot like Eisenhower.

So Stagg is doing this presentation to Eisenhower and the other top brass. Eisenhower has already postponed the invasion one day. What they need is good weather, but they also need a late-rising moon because they’re dropping paratroopers and want to drop them in the dark. And they need a low tide in the morning. If all those factors have to come together and they postpone one more day, they have to go June 7th, otherwise they can’t go until the beginning of July. He’s like, “We can’t postpone that far.” It’s a huge undertaking. So he eventually decides that even though the good weather window is pretty short, they’re going ahead with the invasion.

Maartje (26:30)
Another fun fact about the movie: they considered casting Eisenhower as himself, but he was too old to play himself at the age he was supposed to be. He apparently was very keen to be cast as himself.

Sam (26:52)
That’s kind of cute.

Maartje (26:53)
He was like, “Can I bring my big forehead down for the day?”

Sam (26:56)
Ha ha.

Maartje (26:53)
I’m going to drop some more names because we also meet Brigadier General James Gavin, played by Robert Ryan, who’s the assistant commander of the 82nd Airborne. He explains the Pathfinder role to the paratroopers. And there’s also Brigadier Simon Fraser, Lord Lovat, played by Peter Lawford. He’s the commander of the 1st Special Service Brigade, and he gets to show off his fancy paratrooper dummies. I have some more details about these dummies in a moment.

Gavin, if you remember, is also part of Market Garden — so if you want to learn more about him, go listen to the A Bridge Too Far episode.

But these dummies, they were called Ruperts. In the movie they look like actual paratroopers, but in real life they were kind of sacks of sand on parachutes, rigged to explode on landing so the Germans wouldn’t figure out they were dummies. And with these Ruperts, six SAS men jumped, playing recordings of gunfire. So what we see in the movie as actual fireworks wasn’t what happened — there were just guys playing recordings of gunfire, which is such an SAS thing to do. But they did exist. They just didn’t look as cool as the ones in the movie.

Sam (28:25)
Well, it’s funny too because they dropped these dummies so that the Germans would assume an attack was happening over there. But it had the amazing secondary result that some Germans found the dummies and thought, “Oh, it’s just diversionary. There’s not even a real attack happening. They’re just dropping dummies.” So if anything, it actually made the Germans take the invasion less seriously.

The French Resistance gets their secret messages via BBC broadcast — a bunch of nonsense words, and one of the ones they hear is “John has a long mustache.” When they hear that, they know to go and carry out their activities to help get France ready for the Allied invasion. So they’re going out cutting telephone lines, blowing up railroads, trying to make it hard for the Germans to bring up reinforcements.

There’s a character called Janine Boitard, played by Irina Demick. She’s helping two downed Allied pilots to escape, and has to leave them to help with the sabotage activities. And of course, because she’s one of the only women with any dialogue in the movie, she has to be a complete smokeshow. Janine Boitard was a real person, but I don’t think she looked like this. Anyway, German retaliatory measures were such that by the time of D-Day, the life expectancy of a French Resistance fighter was less than six months, and women represented anywhere from fifteen to twenty percent of the French Resistance. So it’s pretty cool that Ryan interviewed a lot of these people for his book, and I liked that they included one of the women in the movie.

Maartje (29:54)
It just made me laugh that they made her almost have her tits out in the very first scene, on her bike, looking like an absolute model — which she would not have done, because she would not have tried to draw attention like that. But it made me laugh. They kind of get away with it because she’s the only woman besides French locals who are old and grey. But it just made me laugh.

Sam (30:20)
Yeah, for sure.

Maartje (30:23)
The Germans receive the second Verlaine message, but they are very slow to act on it. General Marcks, played by Richard Munch, who is the CO of the 84th Army Corps, is even enjoying a birthday party. But don’t expect him to eat a cake.

Sam (30:43)
I just need to comment on the fact that when I wrote the words “birthday party,” it is the most solemn affair. All these guys are standing around. They very soberly drink a shot of something. And then they cut this cake just so quietly and slowly. I’m like, you guys aren’t excited for cake?

Maartje (31:03)
Nope. And he doesn’t even want to eat it.

Sam (31:06)
Well, that’s how you know Nazis are bad dudes. He doesn’t even like cake.

Maartje (31:10)
Yeah, he can do no good if he doesn’t like cake.

Sam (31:13)
General Marcks is heading to the war games at Rennes. And they say, “Well, this time you have to be Eisenhower.” And he says, “Easy. I know how to defeat us.” And they say, “How would you do it?” And he says, “I’d invade Normandy, because nobody expects it.” And then later in the movie, once they find out that the Allies have in fact invaded Normandy, you just see him being like, “Well, I was right.”

The real Marcks was the one who drafted the initial plan for the attack on the Soviets in June 1941, Operation Barbarossa. He was actually wounded there and lost his leg. And then six days after we see him in this movie, he died in an Allied air attack.

Maartje (31:47)
By eleven past midnight on June 6th, British paratroopers are on gliders en route to the Orne River, where their objective is to capture and hold a bridge — Operation Pegasus — led by Major John Howard, played by Richard Todd.

Richard Todd was actually a part of Operation Pegasus in World War II. He was offered to play himself, but he didn’t want such a small part in the war, so he plays Major Howard instead.

Sam (32:19)
That’s really cute. He was like, “I admire this man. I would like to play him in a film.”

Maartje (32:23)
He was part of the forces that came up as reinforcements, so he could just as easily have been in the movie. He could have replaced — I guess — Sean Connery. But Sean Connery also had to be in it. Sean Connery actually filmed this while he was just starting to work on James Bond, so he wasn’t a big actor yet.

Sam (32:49)
He’s not in this movie too much, but there are so many recognisable faces — if you’re familiar with actors from the 1960s, there’s barely a non-famous face among them.

Maartje (32:59)
Very true. You know who else is in it? Paul Anka.

Sam (33:03)
I know. I didn’t put him in the notes either, but yes, he is also in this.

Maartje (33:07)
He’s at the end of my notes about the movie. We’ll get to it when we get to it.

Sam (33:12)
So now we’re in Caen, a town in Normandy. It’s 1:07 AM. The Germans are running around in a tizzy as the fake paratroopers are dropped. Janine, our resistance fighter, is helping to guide paratroopers in the darkness. She ends up in a battle with a patrolling German but succeeds in yanking him off a bridge so that he can’t stop a train coming through. And of course the train hits the sabotaged track and derails. I really enjoyed that scene — the train is coming, all blacked out in the dark, and it just goes right off the rails. Man, I love a good train derailment. You just don’t see good train derailments in movies these days.

Maartje (33:55)
No, and all the stunts are so neat. All the battle scenes and explosions are fairly practical, I think. And obviously all practical effects. I miss the times when everything was practical.

Sam (34:07)
Yeah, me too.

Maartje (34:08)
Major General Max Pemsel, played by Wolfgang Preiss — who’s also in A Bridge Too Far — is the chief of staff of the Seventh Army. He’s finding all of this very suspicious. He’s not buying the line he keeps getting about how this is clearly just a diversion, because everyone knows the Allies would never attack at Normandy in this weather.

However, he’s having difficulty reaching anyone or convincing them of his point of view. The Germans were really their own worst enemy at this point. And the phone lines have been cut, which doesn’t help either.

Sam (34:46)
Yeah, it’s really not helping. It’s funny because they keep saying, “Look, every other time the Allies have attacked — if you look at Sicily, if you look at Operation Torch in North Africa — they always wait for a nice day. So they certainly wouldn’t attack during this storm.”

Maartje (35:02)
And it’s always at dawn. They’re like, “They will not attack in the dark.”

Sam (35:06)
Yeah.

Unfortunately, a group of paratroopers land right in the town of Sainte-Mère-Église. Because of poor visibility and other factors, the paratroopers ended up scattered all over Normandy. A lot of them were not where they were supposed to be. You definitely see that in Band of Brothers, where guys end up having to fight with small groups of soldiers who aren’t part of their unit, improvising as they go because they’re nowhere near their objective. So these guys land right in town, and unfortunately the whole village is awake because they’re battling a fire, and the local German troops are all out keeping an eye on everyone. This results in many casualties.

Although Private John Steele, played by Red Buttons from the 82nd Airborne, survives, dangling from a church steeple by his parachute. I really got a kick out of this guy. In the plane before the drop, he’s mouthing something, and you get closer to him and he’s saying “Bonjour mademoiselle, je suis Américain” — he’s just practising how he’s going to talk to the French ladies when he gets on the ground.

Maartje (36:09)
This guy’s a whole vibe. And Steel was in so much shock that he never even heard the church bells. In Sainte-Mère-Église there’s a dummy of him on the church today. I’ve seen it and it’s so funny — it’s probably just a mannequin or something in battle dress. It’s so funny.

Sam (36:31)
Yes, I really get a kick out of the fact that they still commemorate it to this day. This poor guy was dangling there for quite a long time. He ended up playing dead after a while because he didn’t want to just be shot while he was hanging. And the church bells are just ringing and ringing. And later he said he didn’t even register them — he was so keyed up that he just didn’t hear the church bells.

Maartje (36:56)
We also see the mayor of Sainte-Mère-Église in the film. When I visited, I actually met the son of the mayor, who still lives there today. They talked about this fire going on in the town — that’s also another reason so many paratroopers dropped in the middle of town. Some of them thought the Pathfinders had set the fire to indicate the drop zone, which was not true, obviously.

Sam (37:26)
It’s pretty grim. Obviously these guys are drifting out of the sky and the Germans are just — it’s a turkey shoot.

Maartje (37:34)
Yeah, a lot of them died. It’s horrible to watch. But at the same time you get the comic relief of Steele hanging on the tower, so it’s hard for it to feel entirely serious. He also gets shot in the foot, which is no fun.

Sam (37:47)
No. And I do think Ryan does a good job of that in his book too — adding in these little moments of humour, because sometimes funny things do happen unexpectedly even in really serious situations. He effectively drops those in here and there so you’re reminded that these are still people, and sometimes things don’t go as expected, and sometimes it’s funny.

Maartje (38:10)
And it also makes the drama and tragedy even more tragic, because you have a guy hanging from a tower, which is a ridiculous thing to have happened. I don’t recall how he even gets down from there.

Sam (38:18)
You don’t see it in the film, but in real life the Germans came up and got him. They took him prisoner.

Maartje (38:32)
Shame. I would have liked him to escape. But there’s really no chance.

Can I say, Red Buttons — what a great one to have as an actor.

Sam (38:41)
Definitely great. And he gets such a fun character role in this movie.

Maartje (38:45)
Yeah.

There are British, American, and Canadian paratroopers scattered all over Normandy at this point. Schultz, alone in the dark, runs into another group of paratroopers, and this is when we see the cricket they introduced earlier, the little clicker. They spent a lot of time playing with it in the movie.

But this group passed right by a German patrol in the dark, which I found so confusing. I was like, why aren’t they responding to each other? They should have been able to see each other. But then — wait, those were Germans, and nobody responds.

Sam (39:18)
This comes straight from the book. It actually happened, supposedly. This group of American paratroopers are walking along the road and they see a group they think are Americans. By the time they get close enough to realise they’re Germans, the same thing is happening to the Germans — they think these are other Germans, and then they get close and realise they’re not. And both groups are so surprised that nobody makes a move, and they just walk right past each other.

Maartje (39:46)
I wonder how many of these guys just didn’t want to kill another human being at that point. They’d just gotten there. They were like, “We’re not starting this war when we don’t have to.”

Sam (39:59)
Yeah, and I think you’re just in this weirdly surreal situation. You’re in the dark countryside at night and you walk past these people, and as soon as you’re past them you’re like, “Did that really happen?”

Maartje (40:09)
Yeah.

Another thing I found really heartbreaking: Schultz has a buddy whose landed somewhere near a farm. He hears something and takes his clicker and clicks once — the reply should be two clicks. And you think you heard two clicks. But then it turns out it was a German loading his rifle. And it sounds exactly like the clicker. It’s so heartbreaking.

Sam (40:34)
Yeah, there are a couple of little moments like that in this movie. There’s another one too I wanted to mention, from the book, where some Americans are clearing out a machine gun nest and the Germans are yelling, “Bitte, bitte!” — and the Americans shoot them all, and then one turns to the other and says, “What do you think ‘bitta bitta’ means?”

Maartje (40:50)
Yeah.

If you’re not taking the movie too seriously you could find that funny — the comedic timing on it is quite good. But it is obviously very tragic at the same time.

Meanwhile, Vandervoort, our fearless leader played by John Wayne, has a broken ankle. But he’ll press on. What a badass the actual real-life man was.

Sam (41:20)
Yes, I pulled a quote about Vandervoort from the book where Ryan says: “Bad luck had dogged Vandervoort. He had always taken his job seriously, sometimes too seriously. Unlike many another army officer, Vandervoort had never had a popular nickname, nor had he permitted himself the kind of close, easy relationship with his men that other officers enjoyed. Normandy was to change all that, and more. It was to make him, as General Matthew B. Ridgway later recalled, one of the bravest, toughest commanders I ever knew. Vandervoort was to fight on his broken ankle for forty days, side by side with the men whose approval he wanted most.”

Maartje (41:57)
How do you go on with a broken ankle like that?

Sam (42:01)
Just imagine it. Ryan mentions it in the book too — the bit where the medic comes up to him and says, “Yeah, it’s broken.” And Vandervoort says, “K, lace up my boot really tight.”

Maartje (42:11)
This can’t be healthy for your leg. I feel like this will not have healed well.

Sam (42:17)
Right. I don’t know what happened to Vandervoort after the war, but I can’t imagine that ankle was in great shape for the rest of his life.

Maartje (42:25)
Pluskat is in his bunker on the beach, passing increasingly urgent messages up the line about all the planes passing by overhead. He knows something is up, but no one else seems to believe him. Von Rundstedt tries to get the two reserve Panzer divisions up to the beach, but no one wants to wake Hitler up. Apparently Hitler had taken a sleeping pill and actually slept through the first half of the invasion.

What do our favourite navigator and Hitler have in common? Just the fact that they slept through D-Day.

Sam (42:58)
Ha ha ha ha!

Maartje (43:00)
Pluskat soon actually sees the Allied armada for himself on the horizon, and this is when he starts yelling at his commanding officer. Just absolutely yelling: “Can’t you hear what’s going on?” Everybody else starts saying, “Wait, what’s happening?” And at the same time as he sees the armada coming, there’s a French villager with a house on the coastline who is so excited that he’s waving a little French flag around — while his house is being shelled by the Allies. It’s so funny.

Sam (43:37)
Yeah, his house is being extremely shelled. The windows are all blown out, it’s rocking, his poor wife is screaming, and he’s just running around like, “Yeah, the Allies are here!” Pluskat really cracked me up. The part where he says, “I see five thousand ships,” and the other guy says, “Don’t be ridiculous, they don’t even have five thousand ships.” And he’s just so mad that he’s not being taken seriously.

Maartje (44:04)
Also the way he tries to get back on the phone while there’s barely any of the bunker left.

Sam (44:09)
Yeah. I did read somewhere that Pluskat may have slightly embroidered his role in D-Day and that apparently he was not at the beachfront bunker — he was at the rear command post. Nevertheless, apparently the men who were in that bunker essentially shot at the Allies until they ran out of ammunition.

Maartje (44:22)
Some other people said of Pluskat that he was not at all in a command position. He was instead at the bar having a drink with some ladies.

Sam (44:41)
Well, listen, can you blame him?

The landings began just after 6:30 AM on Omaha Beach and at 6:44 AM on Utah Beach. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., played by Henry Fonda — friend of the pod, we’ve seen him in other stuff — is the son of President Theodore Roosevelt. He’s the assistant commander of the 4th Infantry Division, and he has insisted on being on Utah Beach with his men, even though this is highly irregular for a general.

They’re on the beach and he realises they’re actually in the wrong landing spot. But he’s basically like, “We’re going to start the war from here.” No point getting all their equipment and moving to where they’re supposed to be — the reinforcements will figure it out.

Meanwhile, Priller, our German fighter pilot, gets his two planes going to strafe the beach, and he survives the day. That really cracked me up. It’s literally just the two of them. His buddy is like, “I’m trying to get some sleep.” And he’s like, “Well, the invasion has started. Your prospects for getting some sleep are excellent.”

Maartje (45:51)
Yeah, these two crack me up. There’s no one else there. It’s kind of sad.

Sam (45:57)
I’m going to read the Ryan passage from the book about Omaha Beach, because he’s a popular historian — the goal of some of his writing is to be stirring. He liked to write about courage and acts of valour.

The guys are approaching the beach. There are all these obstacles everywhere, Rommel’s big obstacles. If you’ve ever seen photos of D-Day, you’ll know those big metal things on the beach to keep the boats from coming in. And it says: “Back of the defenses, the beach itself was deserted. Nothing and no one moved upon it. Closer and closer the boats pressed in, five hundred yards, four hundred and fifty yards, still no enemy fire.

“Through waves that were four to five feet high, the assault craft surged forward, and now the great bombardment began to lift, shifting to targets further inland. The first boats were barely four hundred yards from the shore when the German guns, the guns that few believed could have survived the raging Allied air and sea bombardment, opened up. Through the din and clamor, one sound was nearer, deadlier than all the rest.

“The sound of machine gun bullets clanging across the steel snout-like noses of the boats. Artillery roared, mortar shells rained down. All along the four miles of Omaha Beach, German guns flayed the assault craft. It was H-hour. They came ashore on Omaha Beach, the slogging, unglamorous men that no one envied. No battle ensigns flew for them, no horns or bugles sounded, but they had history on their side.

“They came from regiments that had bivouacked at places like Valley Forge, Stony Creek, Antietam, Gettysburg, that had fought in the Argonne. They had crossed the beaches of North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno. Now they had one more beach to cross. They would call this one Bloody Omaha.”

Maartje (47:44)
That’s very striking. And it’s funny to me to hear that and then know that they sanitised this movie of all its blood. There’s no blood in this movie whatsoever. And James Jones actually complained to the director about this — he said, “What was Omaha Beach if not bloody?”

Sam (48:05)
We should remind everyone that James Jones wrote From Here to Eternity and The Thin Red Line, and certainly didn’t shy away from depicting violence in what he wrote about.

Maartje (48:16)
And he was also a vocal critic of the sanitised modern war movie.

Sam (48:20)
Yeah, he didn’t like this glorified, sanitised version.

Maartje (48:24)
No.

I wonder how his involvement in writing the script changed things, knowing he felt that way. It obviously did end up being sanitised, but I think that was probably a studio requirement rather than a choice by the writers.

Sam (48:43)
So Ryan did not get along with Zanuck, the producer, because Zanuck wanted to make a war movie and Ryan wanted to be historically accurate. They clashed quite a lot. And then they ended up having such a dispute that all these other writers were brought in to make small adjustments.

But the changes were so minor that Ryan still ended up with the full writing credit. The guys who were brought in — like James Jones, and actually Erich Maria Remarque, who wrote All Quiet on the Western Front, who came in to do some of the German scenes — were mostly just doing cultural tweaks. Making the dialogue more realistic in terms of how Americans or Germans would actually speak. So they made changes, but not substantial ones.

Maartje (49:33)
Interesting. It’s also funny that, because they hated each other so much, the associate producer had to act as a liaison between the two, because they just couldn’t stand each other. That associate producer later went on to work on Tora! Tora! Tora!

Sam (49:50)
Ryan was a guy who was very opinionated. He famously did not get along with Steven Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers. He definitely had a thought on every topic.

Maartje (49:56)
Ha!

British landings.

On Sword Beach at 6:53 AM. Memorable figures involved: acting Captain Colin Maud, played by Kenneth More, on Juno Beach, and Private Bill Millin, played by Leslie de Laspée — what a great name. Piper of the 1st Special Service Brigade.

I enjoyed this very much. Just to hear the bagpipes coming in, while being shelled to pieces, but still playing the bagpipes.

Sam (50:32)
Yeah, they did have a real piper with them on D-Day. He’s just standing on the beach piping, and everyone else is screaming, “Get down, you mad bastard!” But he’s like, “No, I came here to play the pipes.” Just imagine fighting for your life and hearing some guy playing a lively tune on the bagpipes.

Maartje (50:49)
Bagpipes are kind of terrifying, so I do get that they can also be a mechanism to scare people away.

Sam (50:56)
Yeah, absolutely. And to inspire the guys on your own side.

I particularly mention Colin Maud, the Beachmaster, because there’s a part that really cracked me up. There’s a half-track where the engine’s not working because it’s full of seawater, and he’s like, “Are you going to get that thing going or what?” And the guys say, “Well, sir, the engine’s not working.” And he says, “Well, as my grandmother always told me, sometimes you just have to give it a good whack.” And he smacks it with his walking stick, and the engine starts right up.

Maartje (51:22)
I think he even says before that, “If you can’t get it going, you’ll have to carry it.”

Sam (51:28)
Yeah. So as many people already know, but for casual listeners: the Americans landed at Omaha and Utah Beach, the British landed at Sword and Gold Beach, and the Canadians landed at Juno Beach. And Ryan doesn’t spend a lot of time on the Canadians in his book, and there are barely any in the movie. But he does mention they had a few bloody clashes with the Germans on Juno Beach and then proceeded inland fairly quickly.

So even though Ryan didn’t mention the Canadians a lot, I will. More than 14,000 Canadian soldiers landed or parachuted into France on D-Day, sustaining 1,074 casualties. Ten thousand sailors of the Royal Canadian Navy and fifteen squadrons of airmen from the RCAF played supporting roles.

Maartje (51:56)
Of course.

Sam (52:15)
The objective for those on the beaches was to cut the Caen-Bayeux road, to take the Carpiquet Airport, and to form a beachhead linking Gold and Sword beaches, with Juno right in the middle of those two. In the first waves of the assault, almost one in every two men was either wounded or killed. There are a lot of first-hand accounts where a guy will say, “Of the ten guys who went out of the landing craft in front of me, eight of them were shot.”

So obviously really harrowing. And although none of the Allied forces achieved all of their D-Day objectives, the Canadians managed to push further inland than Allied troops on any of the other beaches.

I found a quote from a French civilian named Jean Huel, who emerged at the end of the day from a bomb shelter underneath the ruins of his home at Courseulles-sur-Mer, a little town right on the edge of Juno Beach. I’ve been there actually — they have a really affordable, really great little museum about the landings at Juno. If you’re ever in the neighbourhood, it’s definitely worth checking out.

So this guy, Jean Huel, comes out of his bomb shelter to welcome his liberators. He sees all these guys in British-style helmets and thinks, “Here they are, the Tommies.” And he remembers one Canadian soldier proudly correcting him in French: “Je suis Canadien.”

Maartje (53:33)
Ohh.

There’s a character on Juno Beach who has to get the pigeons out to send messages because they can’t use radio communications. And they released the homing pigeons and they fly in the wrong direction, toward Germany. There’s a guy who calls them traitors for flying that way.

And it’s actually Canadian journalist Charles Lynch. He was embedded with the Canadians and covered the landings for Reuters. So I thought that was a funny little extra Canada mention there.

Sam (54:12)
Amazing.

Maartje (54:13)
Rommel, who’s in Germany if you recall, gets a phone call that he doesn’t like, saying the invasion has started.

Sam (54:20)
It’s truly wild. I mean, technically the invasion starts the night before with the paratroopers, but the guys start landing on the beaches at 6:30 in the morning. Rommel doesn’t get a phone call until about 10 AM. It just feels wild that it took so long for him to find out that this invasion — the one he’s supposed to be pushing back into the sea — is happening.

Maartje (54:42)
Imagine being Rommel at that point. Celebrating his wife’s birthday with some nice shoes.

Meanwhile, at Pointe du Hoc at 7:11 AM — I just wanted to say “seven-eleven,” I thought it was funny — the American Army Rangers do their thing, only to find out there aren’t even any big guns in the emplacements they’ve scaled cliffs to take out. These cliffs were pretty challenging, with Germans shooting at them and trying to knock them down. The scene is about five minutes long. And then they get up there and there are no guns.

Sam (55:15)
Yeah, they ended up finding the guns that were supposed to be at that emplacement about a mile inland.

Super unfortunate, because they sustained high casualties doing this. And there was a member of the French Resistance who had actually sent a message to London before D-Day saying those guns weren’t there anymore. He tried to transmit that message, but there were just too many layers of bureaucracy to get through, and the Rangers never got it. And it cost them a lot of lives.

Maartje (55:52)
Yeah, it’s sad. It feels kind of like an anticlimax in the movie. But obviously they’ve just scaled these rocks. And in the movie it’s five minutes — I don’t know how long it took in real life, but I’m guessing quite a long time to get up there.

Sam (56:09)
Yeah. They really wanted to get it done because they were thinking: if we don’t take these guns out, they’re going to be mowing down our guys on the beach. We can’t let that happen.

I did get a kick out of the one guy who’s still wearing his Mae West, his life jacket. And they say, “Why are you still wearing your life jacket?” And he says, “Well, I can’t swim.” And I think this was taken from the book. Ryan quotes a first-hand account where this Ranger is climbing the cliff and all of a sudden his life jacket inflates, and he almost falls off the rope because he was not expecting to suddenly have all this life jacket around him.

Maartje (56:42)
Wow. Imagine if that was to be the end of him. That would have been kind of hilarious, but also sad.

Sam (56:50)
Yeah. Mostly funny because he did not die.

Hitler’s awake by now. We don’t see him in the movie, but apparently this conversation was something else. He didn’t really believe the Normandy invasion was the real invasion — just kept insisting it was a diversion. We’ve talked about this before, where this huge bulk of the German army was waiting at Pas-de-Calais, and Hitler didn’t move them away until the end of July, because he was so sure Normandy was a diversion.

And everyone is so busy telling him about the invasion that no one asks about the reserve Panzers. And Von Rundstedt’s sidekick says, “You’ve got to call Hitler and ask him for these Panzers.” And Von Rundstedt says, “I am not calling that Bohemian corporal to beg on my knees for Panzer divisions.” And it’s true that Von Rundstedt in real life did not call Hitler at any point on D-Day.

So at long last, Howard’s soldiers holding the bridge over the Orne are reinforced by Lovat and his men as the beach-storming troops meet up with the paratroopers. It made me laugh because Howard just keeps hearing this disembodied voice saying, “Hold until relieved.” And when the guys come to relieve him, they can hear bagpipes in the distance. One man says, “I hear bagpipes,” and the other says, “You definitely don’t hear bagpipes.” And he says, “No, I really hear bagpipes.” So yeah, they show up, and you hear the disembodied voice again — “Hold until relieved” — and of course now they’re relieved. Howard is very pleased with himself.

And meanwhile, Vandervoort and his paratroopers proceed to take and hold the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, while French commandos battle it out at Ouistreham.

Maartje (58:12)
Where there’s a casino, which is apparently one of the very few mistakes Ryan makes in his book — because apparently by the time they got there, the casino had been replaced by a bunker.

Sam (58:40)
They have quite the scrap over it, that’s for sure.

Maartje (58:42)
But because they’d already built the casino for the movie, they decided not to change it and just kept the casino.

Sam (58:50)
I mean, it’s a fun scene. They’re across the street in this building that’s battered to pieces and they look over and just see this massive gun poking out of a little hole in the casino. There are lots of fun explosions and running around happening in this part.

Maartje (59:07)
The Americans are embattled down at Omaha.

Cota recruits some engineers and develops a plan to get the guys off the beach by blowing up a German defensive wall, which is successful. I think we see something similar in Saving Private Ryan at the beginning of that movie.

And there’s a quote from the movie here: “Only two kinds of people are going to stay on this beach. The ones who are dead, and the ones who will be.”

Sam (59:32)
Yeah, and that comes right from Ryan’s book too. Someone overheard it on the real Omaha Beach on the day.

Maartje (59:38)
That’s dreadful.

Sam (59:39)
Yeah, I guess you’ve got to get off the beach though.

Schultz encounters a wounded Pilot Campbell — the second part of Richard Burton’s little cameo. He’s been shot down. He has a massive leg wound that’s been safety-pinned shut by a medic, which also comes from Ryan’s book — truth really is stranger than fiction. And Schultz sums up the confusion and chaos of the day with: “I wonder who won.”

Maartje (1:00:01)
Just tells you how far away from any of the targets they were.

Sam (1:00:06)
Yeah, and even so many Germans are still not acknowledging that the invasion is taking place. There’s one part in Ryan’s book where someone asks, “Well, if the invasion’s taking place, tell me where the focal point is.” And then Ryan says something like, “Any private anywhere on the Normandy front could have told you that.”

Maartje (1:00:26)
And then the movie ends with the same shot we began on, with the lone helmet on the beach. Which I enjoyed.

Sam (1:00:34)
Yeah, me too. It became quite an iconic image, I think.

Maartje (1:00:37)
Yeah. Just for fun — if you’re listening to this podcast, I encourage you to go look up “the longest yarn” and you will find this image recreated in yarn, which was made for the 80th commemoration of the invasion of Normandy.

Sam (1:00:54)
Pause. I’m looking it up right now.

Maartje (1:00:56)
They did a bunch of scenes actually, but this one is the main one.

Sam (1:01:00)
Oh my god, yeah, they have all the boats and stuff. Guys on the beach. The obstacles are made out of yarn.

Maartje (1:01:07)
Yeah.

Sam (1:01:08)
Okay, I need to see the helmet. Hang on.

Maartje (1:01:08)
And it’s a — yeah, it’s a ridiculous amount of yarn.

Sam (1:01:12)
Amazing. Wow. I love this. This is classic, as my mom would say: people with lots of time on their hands.

Maartje (1:01:19)
Yeah. And an obsession with WWII.

Sam (1:01:21)
That’s fair. If I could make stuff out of yarn, I can’t guarantee I would not be making this out of yarn.

Maartje (1:01:35)
I do have some extra notes about the movie-making. We did some of them during the discussion already, but here are a few more. This movie was the biggest hit of 1962, and it remained the most profitable and most expensive black-and-white movie until Schindler’s List displaced it over thirty years later. So that’s a long time to hold both records.

And there’s a theme song near the end, written by Paul Anka, which was used as the regimental march of the Canadian Airborne Regiment for a time.

Sam (1:02:18)
That song plays over the credits — I think it’s the one just called “The Longest Day.” I watched the credits all the way through because the song was such a bop. I was just walking around my living room doing stuff, but doing this little march, and Oscar was sitting on the couch just like, “What are you doing?”

Maartje (1:02:22)
Ha ha ha.

And there’s a bunch more you can learn about this movie — it was a big deal. If you want to do more research, there’s a lot out there. I would definitely also recommend reading Ryan’s book to get both the everyman’s view and the commander’s view. Everyone is in this book, really.

Sam (1:02:58)
I really think it’s the authoritative popular history of D-Day. There were some things we know now that Ryan simply didn’t have access to, because of when it was published. But it’s an incredible read. It’s less than three hundred pages and it gives you such a good sense of what it was actually like.

Maartje (1:03:21)
Yeah, it makes you feel like you were actually in the room with the people you’re reading about. You feel like just another person there, participating.

And that’s it for most of this episode. We do have to rate this movie, but before we do I’d like to remind you that you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts, or you can send this episode to a friend — which you should, because it’s almost D-Day and it kind of just deserves it.

No notes from Sam today. No notes from Sam.

Sam (1:03:52)
I don’t have anything to add. They should send it to a friend because it’s almost D-Day.

Maartje (1:03:56)
Perfect. And I guess now we have to rate this movie. I feel like we should rate it in traitor pigeons out of ten.

Sam (1:04:03)
How many traitor pigeons out of ten would you rate this movie?

Maartje (1:04:05)
I would give it — I don’t know — six point eight traitor pigeons out of ten. I just couldn’t get into it as much as I would have liked. And I feel like it’s more a me problem than a movie problem. So maybe I should watch it again and give it a higher rating next time. How about you?

Sam (1:04:28)
Yeah, I’m going to give it a seven point seven. Because when I saw it was three hours, I was like, “The Longest Day — more like the longest movie.” But I honestly feel like it had to be that long to do justice to the sheer array of characters they needed to introduce to give you some sense of what happened at D-Day. And they were trying to be as historically accurate as possible. All the characters in the movie are based on real people.

Maartje (1:04:40)
Ha ha ha ha.

Sam (1:04:55)
And there are a lot of specific moments in the movie where it just looked so much like the pictures and footage I’ve seen from D-Day — things I knew they filmed for the movie, not the real Normandy footage — and I was just like, wow. There’s a scene where soldiers are running up onto Utah Beach with all the obstacles in the sand, and it looks so breathtakingly real.

I think they did a great job of almost capturing it for posterity, and creating a movie that is a lot of people’s touchstone for D-Day, similar to the way the book is. And watching it now, because I don’t know as many of the actors, probably when you were watching it at the time the star-packed cast might have been a bit distracting. But I don’t think it is now. I just get to benefit from the acting skills of all these great performers without necessarily recognising every face in a way that’s distracting. It’s not like seeing Brad Pitt in a movie for me.

I just think Ryan brought his storytelling A-game to the movie in a similar way to his books. And I don’t know if this is going to be your movie if you’re not really into combat scenes and prefer a more intellectual kind of war movie. But if you want to watch effectively a historical re-enactment of D-Day, this is the film for you. I think they pulled off what they meant to pull off.

Maartje (1:06:25)
I also think it helps — for us at least — that we know who all the commanders are. If you know who you’re looking at, and know the context, you’ll get a lot more from it. Obviously we already know quite a lot about D-Day. I feel like people might struggle the way I felt when I was watching The Battle of Britain and didn’t know anything about it.

But it’s a good way to learn, and a nice way in, because you get all these different points of view. And it does sometimes feel, especially with the Germans, like, “They can’t be seriously ignoring all of these signs.” But apparently it did happen like that. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Sam (1:07:10)
Yeah, absolutely.

Maartje (1:07:12)
Yeah.

I guess that’s it for this episode. Are you reading anything new and exciting?

Sam (1:07:17)
Yes! I’m reading Khatyn by Ales Adamovich. It’s a novel about Belarusian partisans in World War II, and they made a film based on it called Come and See, which we could definitely cover on the podcast. So far what I’m finding interesting is that there don’t appear to be chapters — it’s just continuous action. I’m maybe a quarter of the way through, and I’m finding it a neat process. I’m so accustomed to formatting my reading time into “okay, I’ll read two chapters and then go do something else.” With this book I really have to just tell myself: pull yourself away. I have to keep track.

Maartje (1:07:57)
But that works if it’s really interesting, I guess. It would not work as well if it wasn’t.

I feel like Come and See has been on our list for a long time. We have a big mega-list in a spreadsheet with about three hundred movies, and this one has been on there a long time. So we’ll have to watch it.

I’m not reading anything currently. But I did get a bunch of book recommendations from my cousin that I just saw, so maybe I’ll have something new to tell you next week. And this weekend I’m going to England, so I’ll be away. But our scheduling will continue unharmed.

Sam (1:08:33)
Nice.

Yep, and when this episode airs I will be done my exam, so — hopefully you didn’t mess this up, future me.

Maartje (1:08:50)
Let’s circle back on that next time we record.

Anyway, thank you so much for listening to yet another episode of Rosie the Reviewer. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. A rating of five stars, you can send this episode to a friend, you can follow us on Instagram at @rosiethereviewerpodcast, or you can visit our website, rosiethereviewer.com, for more information.

Sam (1:08:54)
Okay.

Maartje (1:09:15)
Bye.

Sam (1:09:17)
Bye.