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The Longest Day (1962)

This is film would never get made today. There is a lot more you can say about The Longest Day but the crux of the matter is that it is a film making achievement that could not be rivalled in the modern era. No one would even think of making a film like this that was internationally inclusive (although the Canadians are sadly missing from the film), with such an amazing cast (Wayne, Fonda, Mitchum, Connery & Burton to name a few) and also stick to the actual story of the events in question rather than shoe horn in a love story and focus on a fictional protagonist (I am looking at you Michael Bay).

While there may not be a sequence that can rival the opening of Saving Private Ryan for depicting the initial assault on the Normandy beaches there are a great number of excellent action scenes, the best of which has to be the long sequence of the French attack on the casino. Characters from all sides, ranks and nationalities provide us with a great over view of the situation in the build up to and the opening day of the Allied invasion of northern France.

This is one of the few examples when Hollywood has got telling history right. Stick to the facts and do not crow bar in some clichéd melodramatic rubbish to try and appeal to a wider audience. Weighing in at over 3 hours The Longest Day manages not to get bogged down or start to drag thanks to the wealth of characters and stories to tell, it also manages to have so many characters without becoming confusing as to who is who or what is going on.

I give this a 5/5 an epic in every sense of the word and it stands the test of time very well.