Cinema: the five cult films inspired by D-Day to see

To say that the seventh art took over D-Day at the end of the Second World War would be inaccurate. But one of the major films on the subject has been released for the first time from 1962. It’s about Longest day. History buffs know: the name of this feature film is taken from a famous phrase by German General Rommel.

The longest day

The longest day, the fruit of the work of several American, Swiss and British directors, helped popularize the event in world culture. Le Film tells the story the Landing as it happened chronologically, also discussing the final preparations of the day before. Errors or approximations made in the film, however, make historians jump, like when the French soldiers of the Kieffer commando landed on Sword Beach aboard barges that did not exist at the time.

We have to save the soldier Ryan

There are also errors in another cinema monument largely inspired by D-Day: We have to save the soldier Ryan, by Steven Spielberg. Aside from the fact that the D-Day scenes were tours in Ireland and not in Normandy, the details are unmistakable. During the Allied assault, the sea quickly took on a blood-red color, when in reality it was black. The shells which found themselves at the bottom of the water and which exploded, caused the mud to rise to the surface.

The film, released in 1998, remains, it is true, a fiction based on a true story, that of the Niland brothers. At the start of the Battle of Normandy, American soldiers must find a soldier whose other brothers died on the battlefield. With The longest day, it shares the same duration, approximately three hours. In France alone, Steven Spielberg’s film generated more than four million cinema admissions.

Band of Brothers

The other work inspired by D-Day and worldwide famous still comes to us from the United States, with Band of brothers. This is a mini-series of ten episodes, released at the beginning of the 21st century. It tells the story of an elite unit of American fighters, who, from their training at home up to the conflict in Germany through the Battle of Normandy, covers the entire liberation of Western Europe.

The Atlantic Wall

D-Day and cinema are also sometimes comedy, as in The Atlantic Wall, released in 1970 and signed Marcel Camus. The story begins in 1944, shortly before the D-Day landings. The character played by Bourvil, whose last film this will be, finds himself stealing inadvertently, while he comes to carry out painting work within the Kommandantur, plans revealing German positions on the Atlantic Wall. An unfortunate theft which will prove very useful…

Valiant, fighting pigeon

The world of cinema also thought of children, when, in 2005, Gary Chapman came out Valiant, fighting pigeon. The story is also inspired by real events, that of animals decorated across the Channel for having rendered services during the conflict. British pigeons must deliver secret messages to the French Resistance, but on the way, they come across terrible German hawks.

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