I saw part of the movie on TV. I really wasn’t terribly impressed with the Omaha Beach landing bit. I know many people prefer this movie to Saving Private Ryan, but I felt SPR had a bit more of an “oomph” to the beach landing sequence. The biggest gripe I had against TLD is that the beach landings, as well as the combat scenes in general, just didn’t seem as chaotic as they should have been. The action just seemed kind of choreographed to me.
yeah i saw it on AMC yesterday it was interesting enough but the landing and parachute scenes weren’t very realistic
I’m willing to forgive the special effects, since it was a pretty old movie. It’s just that the actors seemed to act in the battles in a very planned, choreographed way. One egrigious thing I noticed was that a Brit hit a German with the butt of his gun and the German was supposed to fall into water. You can tell that the rifle’s butt clearly missed him and the German jumped.
I wasn’t too impressed with the decision to cast John Wayne either.
i dont think the special effects has anything to do with the lack of realism, it’s just that i’m suprised that we (the general public) have a better grasp of the confusion of the actual combat, (not to mention the actual process of dying from a bullet wound) 60 years after the war then we did only 20 years later, i mean someone who worked on a movie in '62 was likely to have been a veteran himself right?
I think that CG has really helped in the special effects department. And there is more demand now for realism and authenticity.
The Longest Day
http://amazon.imdb.com/title/tt0056197/
http://amazon.imdb.com/title/tt0056197/fullcredits#cast
A few of the cast were actual veterans. There might have been more since I didn’t have time to do a thorough search.
Eddie Albert - US Navy. Drove Amtracks in several Pacific invasions. He served in the landings at Saipan in 1943, where he rescued wounded and stranded Marines from the beachhead. At Tarawa, he was wounded and lost most of his hearing and earned the Bronze Star.
Red Buttons - USAAF, Cpl.
Henry Fonda - US Navy. Bronze Star for Valor.
Rod Stieger - Torpedoman, US Navy. Falsified his age to enlist at 16
Actors who Served in WW2
http://www.ww2incolor.com/forum/showthread.php?p=103847#post103847
http://www.geocities.com/ww2_remembered/movies.html
http://www.palletmastersworkshop.com/flipside.html
Longest day was a great 60’s movie, which despite some cheesieness to us now I think conveys the Grand Scope of things to those that had been there at the time. Some of the starts like Richard Todd were actual ww2 veterans (he was in 9 Para I think).
I think it conveyed the overall shape of things while missing the intimate gorey details. After all SPR wasnt about DDay.
oh, don’t misinterpret my posts, i thought it was an excellent movie even by today’s standard, I’m just surprised that actual veterans would let these things slide
By unwritten rules, movies of the period were prohibited from showing graphic, detailed blood, gore and violence. Quite simply a movie like Saving Private Ryan would never be made in 1962 on that criteria.
digger
Again, my issue was not the gore, or lack thereof. I just thought the acting of the battles seemed a little wooden.
For me this movie is more a documentary with actors in it.
I especially like the B/W version and therefore I bought the ‘60th Birthday of D-day’ version.
You should remember this is an old movie with, as said before, veterans in it and that WWII was still something very alive by the people watching it and starring in it. It wasn’t history yet…
This changes alot in the building of a movie.
It’s certainly a “must have” ! 
K
The piper who played the bagpipes as Lord Lovat’s commandos stormed ashore is played by the late Pipe Major Leslie de Laspee who was at the time Pipe Major of the London Scottish Pipe Band, and personal piper to HM the Queen Mother. The actual man who did this stirring deed on D-Day is Bill Millin. He recently donated that very set of pipes to the national war memorial in Edinburgh Castle.
During shooting in Ste. Mère-Eglise, traffic was stopped, stores were closed and the power was shut down in order not to endanger the paratroopers who were unused to night drops in populated areas. Still, the lights and staged fire proved too difficult to work around, and only one or two jumpers managed to land in the square - with several suffering minor injuries. One of the initial jumpers broke both legs in landing. Ultimately, plans to use authentic jumps were abandoned, opting instead for rigged jumps from high cranes.
Kenneth More, playing Capt. Colin Maud, carried the shillelagh Maud had used in the actual invasion. Maud loaned it to More so the actor could use it in the film
The character who calls the homing pigeons on Juno beach “Traitors” when they appear to fly east towards Germany is Canadian journalist Charles Lynch, who landed with the Canadians and covered the landings for Reuters.
Richard Todd was an officer in the 7th Battalion (LI) The Parachute Regiment. On D-Day this Battalion made contact with Major Howard at the Orne Bridge now called Pegasus Bridge. Todd was the officer who made contact. In the “Longest Day” he played Major Howard and the meeting with Todd was one scene.
As a 22-year-old private, Joseph Lowe landed on Omaha Beach on D-Day with the Second Ranger Battalion and scaled the cliffs at Point-Du-Hoc. He scaled those hundred-foot cliffs all over again, for the cameras, some 17 years later.