On this day in 1944, seventy years ago, tens of thousands of soldiers from the U.S. and other allied nations launched a massive military mission to take back France and eventually Europe from Nazi Germany. These men, most of them under 30, journeyed on boats from Great Britain across the rough English Channel to make a surprise amphibious landing on the beaches of Normandy, France. Thousands of them died before they even reached the sand. But the rest of them fought through Hitlers defense lines, allowing allied forces to get into Europe and defeat the Nazis. The 1962 film The Longest Day depicts this epic moment in World War II. It is a spectacular movie that covers the events of D-Day with a dozen different plots and a hundred very realistic characters on both sides of the fight. The movie is packed with the biggest actors of the 1960s, such as John Wayne, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Edmund OBrien, Peter Lawford, and even Sal Mineo, Paul Anka, Robert Wagner, Sean Connery, Red Buttons, and Fabian, and theres not a bad performance in the bunch. If you want to understand WWII, this is one of the essential films that tells you what happened, and why we won. There are several other classic World War II films which I highly recommend: Sink The Bismarck, Midway, The Enemy Below, In Harms Way, Twelve OClock High, From Here To Eternity, The Guns Of Navarone, Above And Beyond, and of course Casablanca. These films cover all different perspectives, from naval battles and submarines to commando raids and the atomic bombs of 1945. Theyre all well acted and directed, and they all tell sensational stories about WWII and the people who fought it for us. --MJD
Posted on: Fri, 06 Jun 2014 14:51:15 +0000