Classic Despite Flaws, The Longest Day is Still Relevant and Powerful Even After 40 Years

The Longest Day, Darryl F. Zanuck's ambitious and expensive recreation of the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy, is one of the best - if somewhat flawed - war films ever made. Boasting an all-star cast of 41 "A-List" (for 1962, that is) actors from four countries and filmed in various locations around France (Corsica doubling for most of the five invasion beaches on northern France) and made with the assistance of NATO's armed forces, The Longest Day was, for 31 years, the most expensive movie ever shot in black and white.

It was also, in some ways, a major roll of the movie-making dice for Zanuck and 20th Century-Fox. Not only was the studio spending over $20 million on this huge war epic (with some $2.5 million going to John Wayne), but filming was also underway on the even more costly Elizabeth Taylor - Richard Burton historical soap opera Cleopatra, which with its color production and gargantuan Egyptian sets and almost as gargantuan cast was to cost Fox and Zanuck $40 million....and would be famous for becoming the biggest bomb of its time. Therefore, it would be no exaggeration to say that just as the fate of the free world hung on the success of the Normandy invasion, the future of 20th Century-Fox depended greatly on the box office take of these two huge epic films.

As it turned out, Zanuck got lucky. Cleopatra's failure at the box office nearly did bleed his studio to death. He was also fortunate because The Longest Day was, and still is, a good movie adaptation of one of the classic non-fiction books on the subject of D-Day, Cornelius Ryan's 1959 international best-selling work of the same title.