The Longest Day
- This is a past program
Part of the series Runaway Hollywood: Global Production in the Postwar World.
By the early 1960s, Hollywood produced some of its most ambitious international productions. Producer Darryl F. Zanuck aimed to set the bar high for World War II epics with this account of the Allied forces’ D-Day invasion of German-occupied France. To handle the film’s multiple perspectives and massive cast, Zanuck recruited several directors, multiple filming units, and a dizzying cast of teen idols and tough-guy stars—including John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and Henry Fonda. Shot in France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, the film treats war as a procedural, dissecting the gradual advances the Allies needed to take to win the war. (1962, dir. Andrew Martin, Ken Annakin, Bernard Wicki, Ger Oswald, DCP, black and white, 180 min.)
