Today marks 81years since the day that turned the direction of the war against Hitler’s war machine, an event that was the beginning of the end of the Second World War. The 6th June 1944 saw more than 5000 ships and landing crafts make the journey across the English Channel to Normandy carrying nearly 160,000 allied soldiers in the largest armada ever assembled, as well as 23,000 allied airborne troops on D-Day.
It’s not surprising that this momentous historic moment in history has been the subject of many movies over the years. The huge scale of heroism lends so much material to film makers.
So this weekend, why not check one or two D-Day movies and remember those that gave the ultimate sacrifice.
Screaming Eagles (1956) DVD
Screaming Eagles is a 1956 American historical war film directed by Charles F. Haasd starring Tom Tryon, Jan Merlin and, in her film debut, French Miss Universe 1954 runner-up Jacqueline Beer. It was released by Allied Artists.
The story is set in World War II during the night of the Normandy invasion where the 101st Airborne Division parachutes into France. The title of the film refers to the nickname of the division based on its shoulder sleeve insignia.
The film is notable for its large cast of up-and-coming actors.
Screaming Eagles is a homage to the American paratroopers who dropped the night before D-Day. It was a black and white drive-in movie. Director Charles Haas made a living making B-rated movies. This was his only war movie. He was allowed to film at Fort Benning, Ga. Richard Case, a veteran of D-Day with the 101st Airborne, acted as a technical adviser. Also on set was Werner Klingler, a German director who had a role in the film.
Eye of the Needle (1981) Available on Amazon Video
An excellent adaptation of the novel by Ken Follett. This falls into the genre of ‘a German Nazi spy hiding in Great Britain during World War II’.
A ruthless German spy who goes by the name of Henry Faber (Donald Sutherland) is on his way back home from England after gathering information about the D-Day invasion for Hitler.
Henry, who is actually the “Needle,” a name that refers to his favourite method of killing, becomes stranded on Storm Island with Lucy (Kate Nelligan) and her husband, David (Christopher Cazenove). Lucy’s strained relationship with her disabled husband leaves her vulnerable to Henry’s charms.
Churchill (2017) Available on Amazon Prime Video
Ninety-six hours before the World War II invasion of Normandy, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill struggles with his severe reservations with Operation Overlord and his increasingly marginalised role in the war effort.
June 1944. Allied Forces stand on the brink: a massive army is secretly assembled on the south coast of Britain, poised to re-take Nazi-occupied Europe. One man stands in their way: Winston Churchill. Behind the iconic figure and rousing speeches: a man who has faced political ridicule, military failure and a speech impediment.
An impulsive, sometimes bullying personality – fearful, obsessive and hurting. Fearful of repeating, on his disastrous command, the mass slaughter of 1915, when hundreds of thousands of young men were cut down on the beaches of Gallipoli. Obsessed with fulfilling historical greatness: his destiny.
Exhausted by years of war and plagued by depression, Churchill is a shadow of the hero who has resisted Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. Should the D-Day landings fail, he is terrified he’ll be remembered as an architect of carnage. Political opponents sharpen their knives.
General Eisenhower and Field Marshal Montgomery are increasingly frustrated by Churchill’s attempts to stop the invasion. King George VI must intervene. Only the support of Churchill’s brilliant, yet exasperated wife Clementine can halt the Prime Minister’s physical and mental collapse.
The untold story of Britain’s most celebrated leader, uncovering the true nature of Churchill’s herculean war-time status and his vital relationship with “Clemmie” – his backbone and total confidant…the love that inspired him to greatness.
Overlord (2018) Available to buy or rent on Amazon Video
Overlord is a 2018 American alternate history action horror film directed by Julius Avery and written by Billy Ray and Mark L. Smith. It stars Jovan Adepo, Wyatt Russell, Mathilde Ollivier, John Magaro, Gianny Taufer, Pilou Asbæk, Bokeem Woodbine and Iain De Caestecker. The film was produced by Lindsey Weber and J. J. Abrams, through his Bad Robot banner, as the company’s first R-rated film. The plot follows several American soldiers who are dropped behind enemy lines the day before D-Day and discover terrifying Nazi experiments.
On the eve of D-Day in an alternate 1940s where Executive Order 9981 is signed in 1944, a paratrooper squad, most of them in an integrated unit, is sent to destroy a German radio-jamming tower in an old church.
Their plane is shot down and crashes, and most of the squad, including squad leader Sgt. Rensin, die either in the crash or by Nazi soldiers and landmines. Four survivors remain: second-in-command Corporal Ford, Pfc. Boyce, Pfc. Tibbet, and Pvt. Chase.
Ford becomes leader of the group and they try to get the town with the tower in order to complete the mission. In the forest close to the town they meet Chloe, a villager who assists the soldiers in her home with her elderly aunt and little brother Paul.
The mission gets complicated when, by accident, Boyce ends up inside the Nazi radio tower, only to find horrible secret experiments. With D-Day approaching, Boyce and the others begin to realise there is more going on in this Nazi-occupied village than a simple military operation
Red Ball Express (1952) Available on DVD
Commencing after D-day, Budd Boetticher’s Red Ball Express is a tense depiction of the kinds of operations that the allied invasion of Normandy enabled. With General Patton’s advancing Third Army running dangerously low on gas and supplies, a military truck route is set up for the ad-hoc, titular truck convoy to replenish and refuel the troops and vehicles.
Red Ball Express focuses on one racially integrated platoon whose interpersonal grievances are as threatening to morale as the missions they carry out are to their lives.
Starring Jeff Chandler as Lt Chick Campbell and Sidney Poitier as his truck partner, Cpl Andrew Robertson, Red Ball Express drew justified criticism for its historical inaccuracies. In reality, close to 75% of the Red Ball Express drivers were African Americans thought of as ‘expendable’, a far cry from the on-screen demographic and their heroic portrayal in the film. Despite this, Boetticher’s film does effectively capture the perilous nature of the Red Ball Express.
D-Day the Sixth June (1956) Available to buy or rent on Amazon Video
Flitting between D-day itself and lengthy flashback sequences covering the period after the Americans joined the allied war effort, Henry Koster’s war drama revolves around a love triangle both enabled and dictated by World War II.
Based on war correspondent and writer Lionel Shapiro’s 1955 novel, The Sixth of June, Koster’s engrossing adaptation sees British subaltern Valerie Russell (Dana Wynter) fall in love with married American Capt Brad Parker (Robert Taylor) while Russell’s hitherto beau, Lt Col John Wynter (played by D-day veteran Richard Todd), is posted in Africa.
Finding themselves both aboard an advance ship carrying the first soldiers to land on the Normandy beaches, Wynter and Parker both reminisce about their respective relationships with Russell. Featuring an impressively convincing D-day landing sequence shot with only two landing craft, 80 extras and canny use of a back-projection screen, D-day the Sixth of June reaches a tragic conclusion that leaves the love triangle forever unresolved.
The Longest Day (1962) Available to buy or rent on Amazon Video
The recipient of two Academy Awards, for cinematography and special effects, The Longest Day is an epic recreation of D-day, beginning in the immediate lead up to the invasion and ending as the allied troops advance inland into France from their newly established beachheads.
Shot in a striking, monochrome docudrama style, with on-screen titles naming various figures and subtitles for the French and German led sequences, The Longest Day captures the invasion from the angles of all the participants. Primed and ready to go, the determination and courage showed by the allied forces is ably matched by the bravery of the French resistance as the invasion commences.
The arrogance and misplaced air of invincibility displayed by the German high command is also portrayed as a contributing factor to the invasion’s success. Featuring several D-day veterans among its truly stellar, international ensemble cast, The Longest Day saw British actor Richard Todd sporting the actual beret he wore on 6.6.44.
Saving Private Ryan (1998) Available on Amazon Prime Video & Sky Cinema
Though only those who have experienced the heat of battle first hand can ever truly know how it feels, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan – and in particular its opening 27-minute sequence – gave audiences as realistic a portrayal of the true horrors of war as yet committed to film.
That opening sequence, depicting the Omaha Beach landings, cost $12 million and featured over 1,500 extras and is as technically dazzling as it is emotionally harrowing. A disorienting, shocking assault on the senses created with Academy Award winning sound design, sound editing, film editing and cinematography, the film’s opening sequence is a frenzy of noise, fear and catastrophic loss of life.
For those that survived and made it off the beach, including Tom Hanks’ Captain Miller and his men, there was no respite. Pushing inland, Miller and his company battle against the odds to bring Private First Class James Ryan (Matt Damon) home. An unforgettably powerful, visceral and influential viewing experience.
Overlord (1975) Available to buy on Sky Store
Sombre, poetic and elegiac, American filmmaker, writer and actor Stuart Cooper’s 1975 black and white war drama, Overlord, is stylistically and tonally at odds with the majority of D-day themed films. Eschewing any hints of heroism, bombast or spectacle, Overlord instead explores the grim reality that for thousands of young men the allied invasion was to be a fait accompli ending in their deaths.
With no star names in the cast, Cooper’s screenplay, co-written with Christopher Hudson, follows 20-year-old everyman Tom Beddows (Brian Stirner) from his call up into the East Yorkshire Regiment to his seemingly inexorable fate on Sword Beach.
Seamlessly combining actual Second World War footage with contemporary sequences, and impeccably shot by regular Stanley Kubrick collaborator John Alcott, Overlord visualises Private Beddows’ premonitions of death and romantic reveries in a number of powerful and experimental sequences. Made with the assistance of The Imperial War Museum, Overlord deservedly won the Silver Bear at the 25th Berlin Film Festival.
The Big Red One (1980) Available to buy or rent on Amazon Video
Heavily cut by Lorimar on its original release but restored to its full 162-minute glory in 2004, Sam Fuller’s The Big Red One manages to avoid falling into the trappings of many other ‘epic’ war movies. As the late Roger Ebert insightfully wrote in his review at the time: “‘A’ war movies are about war, but ‘B’ war movies are about soldiers,” and Fuller’s self-penned tale, based on the decorated WWII veteran’s own wartime experiences, is as hard-boiled as any of the B-movies that bare the director’s name.
Fuller’s action-packed narrative follows Lee Marvin’s unnamed sergeant and his squad of soldiers in the 1st Infantry Division (the titular Big Red One) from the deserts of Africa to the battlefields of northern and central Europe. Fuller himself once stated that “The real glory of War is surviving,” and after watching the movie’s death-defying D-day scenes you’d be hard pushed to disagree with him.
Code Name: Emerald (1985) Available on DVD
Both the first theatrical release produced by NBC and the directorial debut of hitherto producer Jonathan Sanger, Code Name: Emerald is a slow-burning, effective espionage drama set in Paris during the run-up to the allied invasion of Normandy.
Sanger’s film forms part of the small sub-genre of D-day films that doesn’t focus on the invasion itself but is concerned with the allies’ determined efforts to keep the details of the invasion secret. Starring Ed Harris as Augustus ‘Gus’ Lang, a double agent working for the allies against the Nazis, who believe he is one of theirs, the film’s solid cast also includes Max von Sydow, Patrick Stewart and a scene-stealing Helmut Berger as ruthless SS officer Ernst Ritter.
When ‘Overlord’ signalman Andy Wheeler (Eric Stoltz) – one of the select people with foreknowledge of the D-day plans – is captured, Lang is sent deep undercover, charged with making sure Wheeler doesn’t talk by any means necessary.
Ike: Countdown to D-Day (2004) Available to buy or rent on Amazon Prime Video.
It’s a far cry from his days as Magnum P.I. for Tom Selleck in Robert Harmon’s made-for-television movie Ike: Countdown to D-day. Cast in the lead role as Dwight D. Eisenhower, popularly known by his nickname ‘Ike’, Selleck gives a suitably beefy, dominant performance as the commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF).
A D-day film devoid of any combat sequences, Harmon’s film instead focuses entirely on the inner workings of and decision making within SHAEF in preparation for the invasion. For Ike, part of his personal battle was effectively martialling the clashing personalities at the head of the RAF, Royal Navy and the ground forces, with the latter being under the command of the combative and eccentric Field Marshal Montgomery (Bruce Phillips).
An intimate and riveting portrait of both Ike and the gargantuan planning that went into D-day – that he assumed overall responsibility for – Harmon’s film is a superior slice of small-screen viewing.
The Last Rifleman (2023) Available on Sky Cinema
The Last Rifleman is a 2023 British drama film written by Kevin Fitzpatrick, loosely based on true events and directed by Terry Loane, which features Pierce Brosnan.
The Last Rifleman follows WW2 veteran Artie Crawford (Pierce Brosnan), who hears from his care home in Northern Ireland about the 75th anniversary commemorations in Normandy. Determined to join, Artie plots a daring escape and embarks on an inspirational road-trip of a lifetime, to pay his final respects to his old regiment one last time, to face the ghosts of his past.
The Last Rifleman marked the final film appearance by John Amos prior to his death on August 21, 2024. The film did not have a theatrical release; it premiered on the Sky Cinema subscription service on 5th November 2023.
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