Some of awards it received included an Oscar for Best Special Effects and a Golden Globe for Best Black And White Cinematography. The film ended up being a huge hit, and was nominated for a number of awards. However, the exact same scenes had also been filmed with the actors speaking in English, and these scenes later replaced the ones with the actors speaking French and German. In the original release of the firm, the scenes were shown in these languages, with subtitles. They also rented four Spitfire airplanes from the Belgian Air Force, as well as two Messerschmitts from the Spanish Air Force.Īlso, what was very unusual for the time, but which was again done for the sake of extreme authenticity, was scenes featuring German and French dialogue. They hired an enormous number of extras, two thousand of whom were real soldiers from the British, French and American armies.
MOVIES ABOUT D DAY MOVIE
The filmmakers spared no expense in making sure that all of the details in the movie were as historically accurate as possible. Mère Eglise – where, apparently, the extras dressed as German troops looked so authentic that some of the older residents of the town threw stones at them! These included the beaches of Normandy, where the real landings took place, and the coastal town of Ste. The directors’ desire for authenticity meant that many of the filming locations used were actual D-Day battlefields. Film still from the D-Day landings showing commandos aboard a landing craft on their approach to Sword, 6 June 1944. He fought with the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, which was where he got the scars on his face. On the German side, there was Hans Christian Blech, who played the part of Major Werner Pluskat. There was also Donald Houston, who plays an RAF pilot – he actually was an RAF pilot during the war. Pegasus Bridge, 9 June 1944 Horsa gliders can be seen where they landed. He climbed the exact same cliffs again eighteen years later, in front of The Longest Day‘s cameras. At the time of the D-Day landings, he was a 22-year-old private fighting with the 2nd Ranger Battalion, and he landed on Omaha Beach and scaled the hundred-foot-tall cliffs at Pointe Du Hoc. Pre-invasion bombing of Pointe du Hoc by 9th Air Force A-20 Havoc bombersĪnother actor who relived his actual WWII experience for the film was Joseph Lowe. Richard Todd, for example, who plays Major Howard in the film, actually relieved Major Howard in real life at Pegasus Bridge. Indeed, some of the veterans were asked to portray people who had been in the very same missions as they had in the war. This commitment to authenticity extended to the actors and military advisors they hired for the roles. Stuart Whitman in The Longest Day – publicity still One of the main reasons it had such a massive budget was that the film’s producers and directors wanted to make the enormous battle scenes look as authentic as possible. It was the most expensive black and white movie ever made, with this record only being broken in 1994 by Schindler’s List. At the time it was made, The Longest Day, based on Cornelius Ryan’s 1959 novel of the same name, had an enormous budget: ten million dollars, a huge amount for the time.