The Longest Day

The Longest Day would have worked better without the central conceit in its creation: using stunt casting to draw audiences in. There is a great story in here, but seeing cameo appearances in every scene is a distraction. Most of the time, these actors have very little to do; instead, the film relies on the viewer recognizing the actor and hopes that the actor’s cachet, not the actual character’s, will create importance and attachment in the viewer.

Jean-Louis Barrault and Arletty, two giants of French cinema who made one of that country’s best films, The Children of Paradise (filmed under the Nazi occupation of Paris no less), are given bit parts. They, along with many of the other actors cast in The Longest Day, don’t receive roles that they can sink their teeth into. The exceptions are perhaps Red Buttons, whose character witnesses a massacre while hanging from a parachute stuck to the spire of a ringing church tower, a stoic Richard Burton (go watch The Spy Who Came In From The Cold if you’d like to see more of this), and Richard Beymer, whose character seems perpetually lost. John Wayne, who in real life embodied the worst tendencies of the patriotism that this film espouses, has one affecting moment when he witnesses the bodies of his Lt. Colonel character’s paratroopers, hanging by their chute cords in a town square where they had landed instead of their planned landing zone and had been killed immediately with extreme prejudice.

François Truffaut opined that it is impossible to make an anti-war film because the very nature of filming such stories ennobles the violence that occurs within it, transforming a transgressive act into mere spectacle. While a film like Come and See would prove to be an exception, films like The Longest Day prove the rule. There is a minute and a half long take near the beginning of the last half-hour of the film where the camera, mounted to a helicopter, follows a group of French soldiers as they fight their way along a waterway, across a bridge, and up a hill to where German soldiers have made a bunker out of a casino. The shot ends by ascending past the French on the ground to the top of the casino, giving the viewer the Germans’ machine-gun nest perspective from their artificial high ground. This take is absolutely thrilling: the craftsmanship of the scene fires on all cylinders, with the coordination of hundreds of extras and ordinances on full display, and the scene jump-starts the next episode of The Longest Day where viewers will marvel at the grit showed by both sides of the battle. However, this scene, more than any other like it, proves Truffaut’s point: war is a thrilling sacrifice in The Longest Day, meant to be an entertainment; therefore, when the film tries to show the cost of war, the impact is dulled, desensitized by the thrills that helped sell the movie so well in its initial run in 1962 and subsequent re-runs over the decades that followed.