The Longest Day

United States

1962

178 Min

Black and White

2.35:1

English, French, German

Currently 3.7/5 Stars.
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DIR Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton, Bernhard Wicki, Darryl F. Zanuck

SCR Romain Gary, James Jones, David Pursall, Cornelius Ryan, Jack Seddon

DP Jean Bourgoin, Walter Wottitz

CAST John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, Rod Steiger, Sean Connery, Peter Lawford, Steve Forrest, George Segal, Red Buttons, Edmond O'Brien, Curd Jürgens, Gert Fröbe, Richard Burton, Irina Demick, Kenneth More, Sal Mineo, Mel Ferrer, Robert Wagner, Roddy McDowall, Karl John, Arletty, Richard Beymer, Bourvil, Jean-Louis Barrault, Fred Dur, Paul Anka, Hans Christian Blech, Eddie Albert, Christian Marquand, Leslie Phillips

SOUND Joseph de Bretagne, Jacques Maumont, William Robert Sivel

Director

Ken Annakin directed four motion pictures for Disney, including the live-action classic “Swiss Family Robinson” in 1960. A director of epic proportions, Ken lent his vision and precision to realizing “Swiss Family Robinson,” which was considered one of Disney’s most lavish films at the time, costing more than $4 million to create.

Shot on location on the Caribbean island of Tobago over a 22-week period, a menagerie of exotic animals, as well as actors, were cast in the movie, including elephants, ostriches, tigers, and more. In his recently published autobiography “So You Wanna Be a Director?,” Ken recalled Walt Disney suggesting a scene with a tiger. Ken hesitated, however, based on a previous experience directing a tiger and suggested a lion instead.

“Oh-ho,” Walt said. “At last we’ve found something Ken’s afraid of. If you’re scared to film the tiger, I’ll come out with a sixteen millimeter camera and shoot it myself!”

The tiger stayed in the picture.

Ken Annakin directed four motion pictures for Disney, including the live-action classic “Swiss Family Robinson” in 1960. A director of epic proportions, Ken lent his vision and precision to realizing “Swiss Family Robinson,” which was considered one of Disney’s most lavish films at the time, costing more than $4 million to create.

Shot on location on the Caribbean island of Tobago over a 22-week period, a menagerie of exotic animals, as well as actors, were cast in the movie, including elephants, ostriches, tigers, and more. In his recently published autobiography “So You Wanna Be a Director?,” Ken recalled Walt Disney suggesting a scene with a tiger. Ken hesitated, however, based on a previous experience directing a tiger and suggested a lion instead.

“Oh-ho,” Walt said. “At last we’ve found something Ken’s afraid of. If you’re scared to film the tiger, I’ll come out with a sixteen millimeter camera and shoot it myself!”

The tiger stayed in the picture.

Born in Beverley, England, on August 10, 1914, Ken was a restless young man, who, at 22, took off for Australia and New Zealand for three years. His adventurous nature carried through his professional career, as well, directing movies on location from Africa to India, Scandinavia to China.

Ken began his career in England during World War II, working on army training and documentary films as a camera assistant at the Ministry of Information. In 1947, he made his directorial debut with the comedy “Holiday Camp,” followed by the popular “Miranda,” starring Glynis Johns, and the Somerset Maugham films “Quartet” in 1948 and “Trio” in 1950.

While at Pinewood Studios in England, he was approached by Disney producer Perce Pearce to direct “The Story of Robin Hood and His Merrie Men” in 1952, followed by “The Sword and the Rose” in 1953.

A year after the box office success of “Swiss Family Robinson,” Ken directed Disney’s “Third Man on the Mountain” on location in the Swiss Alps, which featured impressive vertigo-inducing mountain-climbing footage.

Disney proved a fruitful training ground for the young filmmaker, who later recalled, “Working with Walt was a great experience in learning discipline because when you worked with him, you were making his picture under his conditions. He was very organized; every picture was storyboarded before filming.”

Ken used storyboards, a production technique he learned from Disney, to visually develop subsequent big-scale pictures, including “The Longest Day” in 1962, “Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines” in 1964, “The Battle of the Bulge” in 1965, among others.

In 1999, The Walt Disney Studios, in conjunction with the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, Los Angeles, hosted “A Tribute to Ken Annakin,” featuring excerpts from 12 of his 49 motion pictures.

Ken Annakin died on April 22, 2009, in Beverly Hills, California. —Disney Legends

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Bernhard Wicki

Bernhard Wicki was born in 1919 in Austria and died in 2000 in Munich. He studied Acting and Photography in Berlin and Vienna, followed by theater work in Vienna, Munich, Salzburg and Zurich. His first film role was in Der fallende Stern (1950). Thereafter, he starred in numerous other films including Die letzte Bruecke (1954), Es geschah am 20. Juli (1955), Weil du arm bist, musst du frueher sterben (1956), Die Zuercher Verlobung, and the Italian production Die Nacht (La notte, 1961). He made his directorial debut with the documentary Warum sind sie gegen uns (1958), a film about youth problems in the Federal Republic of Germany. He went on to direct Miracle of Malachias (Das Wunder des Malachias, 1961), the Duerrenmatt-adaptation_ The Visit _(Der Besuch,1964), Die Zitadelle (1977), The Longest Day (Der laengste Tag, 1962), Morituri (1965), Karpfs Karriere… read more

Darryl F. Zanuck

One of the kingpins of Hollywood’s studio system, Zanuck was the offspring of the ill-fated marriage of the alcoholic night clerk in Wahoo, Nebraska’s only hotel and the hotel owner’s promiscuous daughter. Both parents had abandoned him by the time he was 13. At 15, he joined the U.S. Army, and he fought in Belgium in World War I. Mustered out, he kept himself alive with a series of desultory jobs — steelworker, foreman in a garment factory, professional boxer — while pursuing a career as a writer. He turned his first published story (for "Physical Culture, " a pulp magazine) into a film scenario for William Russell; his next important sale was to Irving Thalberg.

Although often described as barely literate, Zanuck turned out to have a prodigious knack for movie plots. After a well-paid apprenticeship with Mack Sennett, Syd Chaplin and Carl Laemmle, Zanuck hit his stride by devising (with Malcolm St. Clair) the Rin Tin Tin series of police-dog movies for Warner Brothers. For… read more

One of the kingpins of Hollywood’s studio system, Zanuck was the offspring of the ill-fated marriage of the alcoholic night clerk in Wahoo, Nebraska’s only hotel and the hotel owner’s promiscuous daughter. Both parents had abandoned him by the time he was 13. At 15, he joined the U.S. Army, and he fought in Belgium in World War I. Mustered out, he kept himself alive with a series of desultory jobs — steelworker, foreman in a garment factory, professional boxer — while pursuing a career as a writer. He turned his first published story (for "Physical Culture, " a pulp magazine) into a film scenario for William Russell; his next important sale was to Irving Thalberg.

Although often described as barely literate, Zanuck turned out to have a prodigious knack for movie plots. After a well-paid apprenticeship with Mack Sennett, Syd Chaplin and Carl Laemmle, Zanuck hit his stride by devising (with Malcolm St. Clair) the Rin Tin Tin series of police-dog movies for Warner Brothers. For Warner, under his own name and three pseudonyms, he ground out as many as 19 scripts a year and became head of production at age 23. He helped forge that studio’s style with such films as The Jazz Singer (1927), The Public Enemy (1931) and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932).

In 1933, after the Warners made it clear that Zanuck would never be more than an employee, he quit to form Twentieth Century Films (with backing from Louis B. Mayer and Joseph M. Schenck). In 1935, Twentieth absorbed a bankrupt giant, Fox. Zanuck ruled the combined studio for decades. He became known as the most “hands-on” of the major studio bosses, taking particular pride in his talent for remaking movies in the cutting room. His signature productions were such sentimental, content-laden dramas as How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and Twelve O’Clock High (1949).

In the late fifties, Zanuck relinquished day-to-day control of the studio, left his wife, and moved to Europe to concentrate on producing. Many of his later films were designed in part to promote the careers of his successive girlfriends, Bella Darvi, Juliette Gréco, Irina Demick and Geneviève Gilles — none of whom found much favor with directors or audiences. After the success of The Longest Day (1962), Zanuck returned to run 20th Century-Fox; he promoted his son, Richard D. Zanuck, to head of production, then engineered his firing in a messy boardroom brawl. Within a few months, in May 1971, Zanuck himself was deposed. He was the last studio boss of his era to go down. —IMDb

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