Thursday June 6th | 12 Movies
June 6, 1944, marked the beginning of the end of World War II. D-Day was a coordinated attack by Allied forces against Germany in Occupied France. The planning went by code name Operation Overlord and resulted in five naval assaults on Normandy beaches referred to as Gold, Juno, Omaha, Sword and Utah. Keeping the intelligence about Operation Overlord from the Nazis was pivotal for its success. In the years that followed, there would be many cinematic explorations of D-Day from all different angles. From planning and espionage to intelligence missions, many attempts at depicting one of the greatest military invasions of our time have been made. What greater stakes for the characters in a movie than when the fate of the entire world is in their hands?
On June 6th, 2024, TCM will be honoring the 80th anniversary with 12 movies about D-Day.
Helmed by producer Darryl F. Zanuck for 20th Century-Fox, The Longest Day (1962) is an epic war drama that is best remembered for having one of the greatest all-star casts in cinematic history. Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Peter Lawford, Robert Ryan, John Wayne, Richard Burton, Rod Steiger, Eddie Albert and many more were cast in this ambitious project. The film was based on the best-selling novel by Cornelius Ryan and offers the perspectives of American, British, French and German forces leading up to the big day. Much effort was put into authenticity. Real landing crafts and German planes were used. While filming on Normandy beach, the crew uncovered a tank buried in the sands. It was cleaned off and fixed up then used in the film. Active-duty American and British soldiers were cast as extras and actual D-Day participants were technical advisors on the film. There was a lot riding on the success of The Longest Day, especially since Fox had also been making another big-budget picture: Cleopatra (1963). Zanuck believed that the key to the film’s success was to have as many notable names in the movie as possible as well as multiple directors working at the same time to keep the production on schedule. His gamble paid off. The Longest Day was a box-office hit.
Saving Private Ryan (1998), Steven Spielberg’s ode to the Greatest Generation, is often lauded for its honest depiction of the brutality of war. D-Day encompasses a harrowing 24 minutes of the film, where the horrors of battle are presented with just about as much realism as you can get. According to TCM writer Sean Axmaker, “The script was inspired by a true story: the Niland family had lost three of their four sons to the war. The War Department, still remembering the five Sullivan brothers who all died while serving on the same battleship (which led to the policy of preventing siblings from serving together), was not going to let it happen again.” The majority of the film focuses on Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller and his special detachment to find Private Ryan (Matt Damon) and repatriate him. In Ben Mankiewicz’s article for The New York Times entitled “How D-Day is Defined By Movie-Laced Memories,” he shared a quote from his father Frank Mankiewicz, who served during WWII and remarked that Saving Private Ryan was the “only truly accurate depiction of combat I’ve ever seen in a movie.”
Recreating battle scenes is one thing but filming them in real time is quite another. Among the Hollywood directors who made documentary films during WWII, John Ford and George Stevens were on the beaches of Normandy to film the D-Day invasion as it was happening. John Ford—the subject of Season 5 of the TCM podcast The Plot Thickens, premiering June 6—filmed on Omaha beach. According to film historian Mark Harris, while Ford “loved to tell war stories, [he] didn’t talk about D-Day for 20 years.” Stevens went on to film the liberation of Paris as well as the Dachau concentration camps. Similar to Ford, Stevens was greatly affected by what he witnessed. His son George Stevens Jr. made two documentaries about his father’s newsreel and documentary coverage.
George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (1984) and George Stevens: D-Day to Berlin (1994) were released on the 40th and 50th anniversaries of D-Day, respectively. Stevens Jr. presents his father’s footage, which includes the 35mm black-and-white film from Stevens’ Unit of the Allied Expeditionary Force. He also took his own 16mm camera with Kodachrome film to create a sort of diary of his time during the war. As Stevens Jr. states in the documentaries, what his father captured on his own turned out to be the most comprehensive color footage of the war in Europe. In addition to that, his black-and-white footage has greatly contributed to how we visualize the war today.
Fictional stories about D-Day offered different takes on personal relationships during wartime. Take for example Henry Koster’s sweeping romantic drama D-Day the Sixth of June (1956). The story focuses on a love triangle between an American captain (Robert Taylor), a subaltern for the Auxiliary Territorial Service (Dana Wynter) and a British Lieutenant Colonel (Richard Todd). Todd himself served as a parachutist on D-Day and would go on to appear in The Longest Day. Edmond O’Brien plays Lieutenant Colonel Timmer, a role possibly inspired by Major Cleveland A. Lytle, who had a similar emotional breakdown as Timmer did in the film. The story was a novel by Lionel Shapiro, a former war correspondent who witnessed the invasion of Juno Beach. While the film mostly focuses on the love story, it does feature some thrilling action sequences. The film stands out for touching upon Canada’s involvement in the war effort. It was released around the 12th anniversary of D-Day, and over one thousand D-Day veterans were invited to attend special screenings.
James Garner and Julie Andrews starred in The Americanization of Emily (1964), a dark comedy with an opposites-attract love story and an anti-war message. Garner plays Charlie Madison, a dog robber—military slang for a personal attendant who supplies his superiors with clothes, liquor and women. Andrews plays the title character Emily, a war widow who has lost her husband, brother and father but still believes strongly in the war effort. While Charlie preaches cowardice and Emily believes in valor, a romance blossoms even though they don’t see eye-to-eye. Among the cast is Melvyn Douglas as the loony Admiral Jessup who sends Charlie and his best pal Bus Cummings (James Coburn) on an impossible task: to make a newsreel about the upcoming D-Day invasion insisting that the “first dead man on Omaha beach must be a sailor.” The Americanization of Emily poked fun at some of the more ridiculous aspects of wartime work.
Several films about D-Day examine the potential of one individual altering the course of history. George Seaton’s thriller 36 Hours (1964) imagines a way in which psychological warfare could have been used to glean intelligence about D-Day. American Major Jefferson Pike (James Garner) is kidnapped by a network of spies working for the Nazis. Orchestrated by Major Gerber (Rod Taylor), the elaborate scheme involves drugging Pike, changing his appearance and altering his eyesight so that when he wakes up, he can easily be convinced that it is now May 1950. The spies have 36 hours to get the intelligence out of their prisoner in order to thwart the Allied invasion. The ruse involves many players including nurse Anna Hedler (Eva Marie Saint), a concentration camp prisoner who is coerced into participating and pretends to be the major’s wife.
The British film I See a Dark Stranger (1946) blends espionage and romance with a bit of comedy. Deborah Kerr plays Bridie Quilty, a young Irish woman whose ire towards the British leads her to become a spy for Nazi Germany. Naive and idealistic, she believes that she’s carrying her father’s torch by fighting against the British but doesn’t quite realize the ramifications of her actions. The movie’s plot revolves around Bridie being caught between two operatives: a German spy (Raymond Huntley) who hires her to thwart the efforts of counter-intelligence agent Lieutenant Baynes (Trevor Howard). It all comes down to what she will do with intelligence she’s deciphered about the impending D-Day and her blossoming romance. I See a Dark Stranger was written by Frank Launder and Sidney Gilliat, the writing duo behind Alfred Hitchcock’s spy thriller The Lady Vanishes (1938). Wolfgang Wilhelm also contributed to the screenplay with additional dialogue from Liam Redmond.
Donald Sutherland plays a much more serious and dangerous spy for Nazi Germany in the thriller Eye of the Needle (1981), directed by Richard Marquand and based on the novel by Ken Follett. Sutherland’s character, Henry Faber, transmits British intelligence to his German contacts in the days leading up to the Normandy invasion. He earns the nickname “The Needle” because he takes out his adversaries by stabbing them with a stiletto dagger. With the MI5 on his tail, Faber finds himself stranded on a remote Scottish island where he meets the despondent Lucy Rose (Kate Nelligan), who lives in isolation with her embittered double-amputee husband and young son. Faber tells Lucy, “The war's come down to the two of us” when it becomes clear that Lucy needs to stop Faber from alerting the Germans about D-Day.
Red Ball Express (1952) is a fictional story about the real convoy of the same name. This racially integrated platoon transported cargo to Allied forces in the weeks following the invasion of Normandy. It was formed by Major General Frank Ross, who served as a technical advisor on the movie and delivered guns, ammunition, gasoline and other supplies mostly to General Patton’s division. The film stars Jeff Chandler as Lieutenant Chick Campbell, the person in charge of the platoon, and features an early role for Sidney Poitier.
In Jonathan Sanger’s directorial debut Code Name: Emerald (1985), Ed Harris plays Gus Lang, a double agent serving the Allied military while creating a partnership with German officials. Actors Max von Sydow, Horst Buchholz and Helmut Berger play the Nazis, while Patrick Stewart plays the British superior who tasks Emerald (aka Gus Lang) with preventing captured Lieutenant Andy Wheeler (Eric Stoltz) from revealing intelligence about D-Day. There is plenty of double-crossing and a bit of a romance between Harris and Cyrielle Clair, who plays a secret agent working for the French resistance.
Overlord (1975) stands out from the other D-Day films as it’s one of the rare films to depict the attack on Sword Beach. Directed by Stuart Cooper, the film stars Brian Stirner as Tom, a quiet, unassuming soldier who joins his local regiment. Overlord blends archival footage with fictional narrative and dream sequences. Tom is the opposite of a brave war hero, which makes his journey from trainee to soldier fighting on D-Day all the more harrowing. Overlord did not receive US theatrical distribution at the time of its release and only found its way stateside in the 1980s and then theatrically in 2008 by Janus Films.
