Quote:
Originally Posted by pig4bill
The Longest Day was 10 times the movie this one is.
The Longest Day is certainly a fine piece of work. The landing on Omaha Beach, for instance, is far more realistically portrayed than in Saving Private Ryan. The 2nd Rangers did not storm fearlessly off the beach in 20 minutes as Spielberg pretended -- they let themselves be pinned down for hours like everybody else, lying there all morning because of a single German machine-gunner who inflicted most of the US casualties, and only moved in the end because Brig Gen Norman Cota of the 29th Division, played in The Longest Day by Robert Mitchum, started kicking Rangers up their behinds and telling them to do their job and get forward (though The Longest Day doesn't show that, it just shows his verbal commands).
Fuller's The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller landed with the 1st Infantry Division on Omaha, alongside the 29th) and even Hiller's comedy The Americanization of Emily both give a more realistic (and less 'patriotic') depiction of the Omaha landings than Saving Private Ryan does.
Incidentally, the character played by Red Buttons in The Longest Day is Private John Steele. He is still commemorated at Sainte Mere Eglise by an effigy hanging in parachute lines from the church tower.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Steele_(paratrooper)