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[[File:longest-day-_9884.jpg|frame]]
'''''The Longest Day''''' was the title of a book by Cornelius Ryan describing the events of D-Day through the eyes of as many of the participants - Allied, German and local inhabitants - as he could find and interview.
In 1962, the book was made into a film with an [[All-Star Cast]] and [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]. Rather than
Because the film was made just 20 years after the events it depicts, many of the older actors had fought in [[World War Two]], and some had even taken part in the landings - Richard Todd even played his own commanding officer from 1944<ref>Todd had participated in the Pegasus Bridge operation as a young soldier, and is even shown in the film interacting with "himself", although this is never mentioned in the film</ref>.
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{{tropelist}}
* [[The Ace]]: [[wikipedia:Josef Priller|Josef Priller]], a fighter wing commander and one of the two German airmen later seen strafing the beaches on the day as mentioned below in [[Worthy Opponent]] (the other being his wingman Heinz Wodarczyk). His ace status is referred to during the phone conversation early on in the film in which he basically asks "where the hell are my planes?"
* [[America Saves the Day]]
* [[Anyone Can Die]]
* [[Artistic License Ships]]:
* [[As Himself]]
** Played straight with Joseph Lowe, one of the cliff climbers at Utah Beach who
** Also played straight by Bill Millin, the bagpiper with Lord Lovat's commandos.
* [[Battle Epic]]
* [[Bilingual Bonus]]
* [[Bloodless Carnage]]
* [[Chroma Key]]
* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: Loads and loads.
* [[Deliberately Monochrome]]:
* [[Distracted by the Sexy]]: You're driving a hay cart with two Resistance operatives hiding in the hay. You need to get past a German checkpoint. So you arrange for an insanely hot lady Resistance fighter to arrive at the checkpoint at the same time, riding a bike, showing off cleavage with a half-unbuttoned blouse. It works like a charm.
** Later subverted when she tries the same trick to distract a late-night German patrol from discovering the explosives in the railway tracks and nearly gets killed in the process.
* [[Dramatic Gun Cock]]
* [[Dying Moment of Awesome]]
* [[The Engineer]]:
* [[Field Promotion]]: When Brigadier General Norman Cota (Robert Mitchum) finds that the highest ranking Army engineer is Sergeant John H. Fuller, he promotes Fuller to lieutenant and puts him in charge of demolishing a concrete barrier.
* [[Four-Star Badass]]
* [[General Failure]]:
* [[Heroic BSOD]]
* [[Hollywood Nuns]]
* [[Ironic Echo]]:
* [[Irony]]
** General Marcks, a Wehrmacht division commander, plans to assault Normandy while role-playing as General Eisenhower (the Allied commander), in the German war game in Rennes, because such a move is "inconceivable" to his colleagues. When news of the invasion comes to him, he can only look at the map and laugh at himself.
*** When Marcks explains his attack plan to an underling, even he thinks [[Dwight D. Eisenhower|Eisenhower]] is too cautious and would never use that plan. Cut to Eisenhower meeting with his Generals to discuss the weather conditions, with Eisenhower deciding "I'm quite positive we must give the order. I don't like it, but there it is. Gentlemen, [[Crowning Moment of Awesome|I don't see how we can possibly do anything... but go."]]
** Also the aforementioned {{spoiler|[[Dramatic Gun Cock]]}} moment. A young paratrooper lands in an isolated area, and suddenly hears somebody nearby. He instantly (as he was instructed) unpacks his little communication tool (a tin click-clack toy), and gives a signal (one click-clack), and awaits two click-clacks in return, if the other person were another paratrooper. He in fact hears two click clacks right away, and goes to greet the person in relief. Suddenly,
* [[It's Raining Men]]
** And on a more humorous note, straight onto a German general's headquarters.
{{quote|"Terribly sorry, old man. We simply landed here by accident."}}
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{{quote|You were a lousy pilot when we flew into Russia. Now you're flying a desk and you're STILL A LOUSY PILOT!}}
* [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]
* [[Officer and a Gentleman]]:
* [[Oh Crap|Oh Scheiße]]: "Pluskat, where are those ships heading?" "STRAIGHT FOR ME!"
* [[The Oner]]:
* [[Percussive Maintenance]] - Captain Maud fixing a stalled tank on the beach with a baton.▼
* [[Only Sane Man]]
▲* [[The Engineer]] - naturally, when you're up against a big concrete wall, you call in this guy.
▲* [[The Oner]] - a long overhead tracking shot of the Free French forces taking Ouistreham. It follows the troops running from cover to cover, crossing pedestrian bridges, taking fire, heading upriver toward a target that the camera eventually reveals is a casino building fortified into a massive German bunker. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzd1gCc5CO8 View it here].
▲* [[Only Sane Man]] - Blumentritt. He's the one German officer who can see this is the critical battle and tries to get his superiors to deploy the tank reserves that could stop the Allies. No one listens to him.
* [[Parachute in a Tree]]: There's a scene ([[Based on a True Story]]) where a paratrooper becomes snagged on a French church spire.
* [[Real Life Writes the Plot]]
** [[Sean Connery]], on the other hand, also has a small role because he was eager to get off to Jamaica and begin filming ''[[Dr. No]]''.
***
* [[Road Sign Reversal]]
* [[Rousing Speech]]:
* [[Shell-Shocked Veteran]]
* [[Those Wacky Nazis]]
** Well, let's say most of them. All of those who didn't run off to play war-games or attending birthday parties.
*** The German officers left for war games that had been scheduled for months. Considering the foul weather they didn't expect [[Evil Cannot Comprehend Good|Eisenhower to give the order]].
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*** Hitler had it set up so that only he could order the reserve Panzer divisions to move. The refusal to wake him on D-Day was costly to put it mildly.
**** Mildly? When Hitler did wake up, [[It Got Worse]].
***** Though that's only what Blumentritt ''thinks'' to have happened. In reality, when Hitler woke up, he was more cheerful than ever about the invasion, because now he was actually able to reach the allied army for the first time in that war, and crush them... theoretically (Not only he didn't manage that... the Soviets got him first). He was so happy, that he started dancing and fell back into his originial alpine Austrian dialect: ''O'ganga is! (It's on!)''. But why did he not set the Panzer reserves free? Nobody knows for fact. Even the historians wonder. Okay, I'm finished... [[The More You Know]]...
****** The best the historians can figure is that Hitler was still convinced the Allies would send a ''larger'' invasion force at Calais, ignoring the obvious size of the force at Normandy. There's also the possibility that Hitler believed the Americans to be weak and soft enough that the troops already deployed could handle it, despite all the ass-kicking that had already taken place in Africa and Sicily.
** Actor Curt Jürgens, in his role as the German General Blumentritt, calls the German generals incompetent. Jürgens was actually imprisoned by the Nazis in his youth, so this might be considered a bit of [[Take That]].
** The only time the phrase "Sieg Heil!" appears in the movie is graffiti on a bunker wall in Ouistreham.
* [[Title Drop]]:
▲* [[Title Drop]] - when Rommel is discussing the need for building up mass defenses along the French shoreline: that Germany needs to repel any landing before the Allies can secure a firm foothold.
{{quote|"Believe me, gentlemen, the first 24 hours of the invasion will be decisive. For the Allies as well as the Germans, it will be the longest day... The longest day."}}
** [[Truth in Television]] as Rommel really did say this phrase, although without the dramatic repeat at the end.
* [[Villain Ball]]/[[This Is Your Brain on Evil]]: Hitler.
* [[War Is Hell]]:
** Omaha Beach. Just... damn.
*** The memorial on Omaha Beach is actually kind of Real Life Tear Jerker in itself (No matter that you smirk a bit when you have to go through metal detectors and checkout in order to enter it. And the fact that when you compare the giant memorial for US soldiers to memorials of other nation armies, which makes irony almost unbearable) - it is nothing but
** The Utah Beach unit climbing the cliffs to get at the big guns overlooking half the beach-head reach their objectives {{spoiler|only to find the Germans hadn't installed the guns into their bunkers yet. "You mean we climbed all this way... for nothing?"}} In [[Real Life]] [[It Got Worse]] when those secured positions were fired on by the warships anchored off-shore.
*** In [[Real Life]] it wasn't for nothing. The Germans had moved the guns inland prior to the invasion and the US Rangers found and destroyed them.
*** Between this scene and a scene in which one of the Rangers shoots two German soldiers attempting to surrender, many Ranger veterans were quite upset with their portrayal in this film, as they felt they'd been unfairly singled out to deliver the [[War Is Hell]] message.
** "He's dead. I'm crippled. You're lost. Do you suppose it's always like that? I mean war."
* [[World War Two]]
* [[Worthy Opponent]]: Most German soldiers. Special props to the ''two Luftwaffe pilots available'', whom even a British officer admired.
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[[Category:Epic Movie]]
[[Category:The Longest Day]]
[[Category:Films Based on Books]]
[[Category:Military and Warfare Films]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Longest Day, The}}
[[Category:Film]]
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