D Day - 77 years ago

[WV_Iron_Duke]

To try to bring this train back to the track, I suggest another WWII movie made a couple of years later, The Train (1964). Probably the last non-ironic of the WWII movies made, it's in black and white, and is IMHO one of the great war movies ever. Burt Lancaster as a French underground agent (whose day job is supervising the railroad). If you haven't seen The Train, you need to.

The Train is a great movie and the only one I prefer in black and white. I support Jim and think The Longest Day would be much better in color.
The first great color movie was The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. The first widescreen movie was How to Make a Millionaire in 1953.

[jimsumner]

To try to bring this train back to the track, I suggest another WWII movie made a couple of years later, The Train (1964). Probably the last non-ironic of the WWII movies made, it's in black and white, and is IMHO one of the great war movies ever. Burt Lancaster as a French underground agent (whose day job is supervising the railroad). If you haven't seen The Train, you need to.

Never heard of this. Mucho thanks.

Just did a quick check. The Train appears to be available for streaming on Amazon Prime. When I can carve out 2.5 hours of free time. . .

[Indoor66]

The Train is a great movie. See it and enjoy.

[Phredd3]

An interesting movie. In the 1950s and a good chunk of the 1960s, before Vietnam made us cynics about all things military, Hollywood made a lot of big-budget WWII movies, hitting many of the most pivotal moments, Pearl Harbor, the Doolittle Raid (psychologically big), Midway, Ardennes Forest, Market Garden, Remagen, many more, along with Guns of Navarone, Bridge Over the River Kwai and others less well-known and/or fictional.

History 101 at your local theater.

And The Longest Day certainly had about as many big-name stars as any one movie could handle; Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Richard Burton, Robert Mitchum, Peter Lawford, Eddie Albert (a real-life Marine in the Pacific Theater), Sean Connery, Robert Wagner, a bunch of teenage heartthrobs et. al. They even found a way to get a few women into action.

But the movie is in black and white. A big-budget, Hollywood blockbuster in black and white in 1962? What were they thinking?

They were thinking that it looked more like WWII to the viewers who were seeing the film first-run in 1962. The war was less than 20 years past at that time, and almost none of the actual war coverage was presented in color. There were a few exceptions, of course, but those were very rare and almost never covered actual combat, because color cameras were much heavier and the film stock much more bulky and finicky.

In addition, black-and-white films were still fairly common in 1962. The Longest Day won the Oscar for "Best Cinematography, Black-and-White" that year and was also nominated for "Best Art Direction, Black-and-White" (To Kill a Mockingbird won the latter). The two categories remained split between Color and Black-and-White through 1966. Since the award re-merged in 1967, Schindler's List is the only black-and-white file to have won either award (although The Artist - silent, black-and-white, and shot in 4:3 aspect ratio - famously won Best Picture and four other awards in 2011).

Even though I'm not nearly old enough to have seen them on release, I grew up watching films like Battleground and 30 Seconds over Tokyo produced during or shortly after the war, since my father was a WWII film buff. I like the feel of that style, and appreciated the same approach for The Longest Day, though I can certainly understand that my perspective is pretty unusual.

[wavedukefan70s]

Watched a ton of specials about ww2 .
Even the fact that cheetos came from surplus powdered cheese from our military .several snack foods also.
Was a great learning experience for me and my son.
Plus he did a report on snack foods and how some cane to be from that era .
Just to see if he could get extra credit.

Plus he learned of the sacrifice and grit that generation had .

[rasputin]

The Train is a great movie and the only one I prefer in black and white. I support Jim and think The Longest Day would be much better in color.
The first great color movie was The Adventures of Robin Hood in 1938. The first widescreen movie was How to Make a Millionaire in 1953.

In 1939, the year after Robin Hood, there were more significant movies in color: Gone With the Wind, and The Wizard of Oz (mostly in color). But, as a later poster points out, black and white movies continued to be made in large numbers into the 1960's.

Widescreen was different. By 1953 the movie industry was suffering at the hands of TV, and needed to do something to differentiate itself from the small screen. By the mid-1950's, the vast majority of movies were widescreen (although not much standardization as to the precise ratio of width to height).

[jimsumner]

They were thinking that it looked more like WWII to the viewers who were seeing the film first-run in 1962. The war was less than 20 years past at that time, and almost none of the actual war coverage was presented in color. There were a few exceptions, of course, but those were very rare and almost never covered actual combat, because color cameras were much heavier and the film stock much more bulky and finicky.

In addition, black-and-white films were still fairly common in 1962. The Longest Day won the Oscar for "Best Cinematography, Black-and-White" that year and was also nominated for "Best Art Direction, Black-and-White" (To Kill a Mockingbird won the latter). The two categories remained split between Color and Black-and-White through 1966. Since the award re-merged in 1967, Schindler's List is the only black-and-white file to have won either award (although The Artist - silent, black-and-white, and shot in 4:3 aspect ratio - famously won Best Picture and four other awards in 2011).

Even though I'm not nearly old enough to have seen them on release, I grew up watching films like Battleground and 30 Seconds over Tokyo produced during or shortly after the war, since my father was a WWII film buff. I like the feel of that style, and appreciated the same approach for The Longest Day, though I can certainly understand that my perspective is pretty unusual.

Good point. It seems like both real footage and movies were all over the place as to cover versus b/w. Some real footage was in color, IIRC. The TV series Victory at Sea was enormously influential. I was too young to see it when it was released in the early 1950s but it was shown over and over again.

It is amazing that Hollywood was able to churn out WWII movies during WWII. Guadalcanal Diary is a guilty pleasure. Very loosely based on the Richard Tregaskis memoir of the battle, it was released in the fall of 1943!! Tregaskis was a first-rate war correspondent and the movie doesn't hold a candle to the book. But the scene where William Bendix is trying to get a World Series score and the radio reception conks out is priceless.