Cinema: Operation Overblown

The Longest Day. On June 6, 1944, vast fleets of Allied bombers blasted the north coast of France; the mightiest armada the world had ever seen, 5,000 transport vessels and fighting ships, churned up to the coast of Normandy; 150,000 Allied soldiers smashed ashore at five points under withering fire from the Wehrmacht; 10,000 Allied fighting men and perhaps half that many Germans were killed or wounded; and the outcome of the greatest war in history was unalterably determined.

Such an epic must some day find its Homer. At the moment, it has Darryl Zanuck. At 60, Producer Zanuck is known as an organizational genius who for 20 years was chief of production at 20th Century-Fox and is currently president of the company—long an ailing entity that now, after two years of playing Antony to Cleopatra, seems dangerously close to collapse (TIME, Aug. 3).

To put his corporation back in the black, Zanuck boldly decided to go for broke. In 1960 he shelled out $175,000 for the screen rights to The Longest Day, Cornelius Ryan’s bestselling history (800,000 copies) of Operation Overlord. In the course of the next year he bought up five scriptwriters, five directors, 37 military advisers and 42—no, it’s not a misprint—42 stars.* Then, to the horror of economy-minded Congressmen, Zanuck somehow managed, in effect, to rent several thousand U.S. servicemen and 22 ships of the U.S. Sixth Fleet—all for next to nothing. On top of that, he hit the British for 1,000 paratroopers and the French for 2,000 regulars—at the height of the crisis in Algeria. When Zanuck needed a train to blow up, he got one. To transport his troops he assembled a large fleet of Jeeps, tanks and halftracks, plus an impressive personal navy of assorted landing craft. Suddenly Darryl the Great, as his minions know him, was the ninth strongest military power in the world. Zanuck himself modestly admits: “My job was even tougher than Ike’s. He had the men and he had the equipment. I had to find both.”

On the strength of his achievement, however, Zanuck is unlikely to become President of the United States—and perhaps may not even survive as president of his studio. The Longest Day cost $10 million to put in the can, more than any black-and-white picture ever produced, and Fox is by no means certain to get all its money back. Not that the picture is a clinker. As Hollywood epics go, it goes well enough. It is long (3 hrs.), but it is never boring. Some of the skirmishes that flare up in the darkness make mighty exciting cinema. Some of the comic relief from combat—a paratrooper who falls from the skies beside a little old lady on her way to the outhouse, another paratrooper who plummets kerplop into a well—is witty and welcome. Some scenes, such as those of paratroopers still in their chute harnesses swinging lifeless from the battle-scarred trees, have a note of almost Goyaesque poignancy. Most of the German side of the story is presented with style by Director Wicki (The Bridge).

Then what is wrong with The Longest Day? Plenty. Too many of the lines just lie there. Too many of the actors just stand there. Too much of the direction (“I ended up directing about 65% of the picture myself,” Zanuck says) has no direction. Furthermore, the film is technically crude. In one crucial sequence the process shots are so badly matched that the mighty invasion fleet looks like a silly flotilla of peanut shells in a puddle. Worse yet. the film is confusing, and war’s natural confusion is compounded. For want of legible maps, for want of sensible continuity, the spectator fails to grasp the operation as a whole: he often does not know where in hell or Normandy he is or why in the general scheme of things he is there. Worst of all, the film is dishonest. Though it is superficially true to the facts as Ryan reports them, it is fundamentally false to the spirit of the events. Most of the time, Zanuck shamelessly sugars his bullets—men die by the thousands, but not one living wound, not one believable drop of blood is seen on the screen. All too often, when a shell bursts, out come hearts and flowers. And at every opportunity the screen is cluttered with low-comedy Krauts and G.I. jokers. Such tricks may be good show business but they are also bad history and bad taste. They often insult the intelligence and sometimes insult the dead.

* The scriptwriters: Reporter Ryan, Novelists James Jones and Remain Gary, Scenarists David Pursall and Jack Seddon. The directors: Elmo Williams, Bernhard Wicki, Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Gerd Oswald. Among the advisers: General d’Armee Pierre Koenig, Lieut. General James Gavin, Lord Lovat, General Gunther Blumentritt, Frau Lucie-Maria Rommel. A few of the stars: John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Jean-Louis Barrault, Curt Jurgens, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Robert Wagner, Richard Beymer, Mel Ferrer, Jeffrey Hunter, Peter Lawford, Kenneth More, Richard Todd, Leo Genn, Stuart Whitman, Eddie Albert, Edmond O’Brien, Red Buttons, Sal Mineo, Tommy Sands and Fabian.