It's been a very long time since I've seen Saving Private Ryan, and I probably should give it another watch sometime to see how it plays now. Is this still the only movie that has really dramatized the D-Day invasion, or have there been others?
When I think of those beaches in northern France and WWII, my mind goes more to the evacuation at Dunkirk, since it has been beautifully shown on screen twice. First the incredible long one-shot scene in Atonement, and then Christopher Nolan's film Dunkirk.
Plenty of movies have addressed D-Day, probably The Longest Day most notably, but none with the detail and commitment to visceral realism that Spielberg attempts with SPR. (I saw The Longest Day as a kid with my dad and liked it at the time, but it doesn't have much of a rep. Quite curious over Overlord. Anyone see that one?)
Overlord interlays real footage against a story. Criterion released a nice copy. It is not essential but an interesting watch.
Band of Brothers does a phenomenal job with the paratroop portion of the assault. The Richard Winters led assault on a gun placement is depicted incredibly. I believe West Point taught that as textbook assault against an enemy position.
Thanks for bringing THE THIN RED LINE into this discussion. Of the two films, that is the one that has stayed with me precisely because of its interest in the internal and existential aspects of war. The filmmaking of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is immersive and moving. It blends emotion and history into a compelling experience that felt one-of a-kind in the area of theatre-viewing. I could never get as close to SPR though. The sentimentality was spread a bit too thick, most notably in the bookends (were they even needed?). Above all, it was the mythologizing that keeps me from embracing SPR. I know this is saying more about me than the movie, but I felt like it served as a recruitment piece for military service much more than a critique on the toll of war.
That's fair. As I note in the piece, SPR is a very conventional, old-fashioned war movie in certain respects, and definitely not as philosophical as TTRL. But I think it does try to dig into the harder realities of a soldier's experience, both with the visceral horror of the Omaha Beach sequence and with characters who show real vulnerability in the face of combat.
Upham has another moment with the captive they let free following the assault on the radio tower. Upham was vocal in not shooting him as most of the unit wanted, and that German winds up being the one to shoot Captain Miller on the bridge. Upham is there when they are captured and when the German recognizes him, Upham shoots him.
The way Spielberg framed that shot of Capt Miller being shot still haunts me in its …. banalaity? I dont mean that as complaint. It’s horrifying how cheap life is on a battlefield, and Spielberg drives that home with the way he framed it. The gasps in the theater were legion.
I was just about to ask about this scene...it's been literally quarter of a century (!) since I saw this movie, but I remember that Upham shoots that guy without hesitation.
It's funny -- at the time, I said to myself, "Jesus Christ, about time, dude." Because that murder scene with Adam Goldberg is just so horrible, the Nazi blade going into the poor guy's heart so slowly...it's just such a torturous death, while Upham, the coward that he is, just watches and whimpers.
And yet now when I think about it, that the war, in the end, takes someone as unprepared as Upham and turns him into a stone-cold killer in the end...goodness. That's the genius of that scene, that there is no validation or catharsis or anything. It's just a tragedy in every which way.
A friend once told me the Nazi is singing a lullaby to Melish as he ….. finishes it. Not sure that is true but I hope it is. Makes it even more disheartening.
Tragedy. Yes, well put. In every conceivable way. Upham as coward. I don’t know. So easy to say should have done this or that. It is not unrealistic to say he simply froze from fear. Terror is as human a response as bravery. It is a maelstrom. The fact that people do anything beyond shriveling up is sort of remarkable.
Goodness, I'd be the first to admit that I would probably do even WORSE than Upham -- I'd no doubt pee and poo my pants while cowering and whimpering.
Lullaby...! Well, looks like I'll be having that nightmare now for sure, thinking about this terrifying movie. The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan are scarier than 95% of the horror movies...
It's funny -- I was a bigger fan of the Malick film after seeing it not that shortly after SPR, but I remember SPR so much more. Maybe it's just that TTRL was more poetic and imagistic (like I can recall a shot of a dead Japanese soldier over Malickian voiceover poetry), but you know what part of SPR that I still recall with startling clarity? That part where Giovanni Ribisi tells his platoon about how he pretended to sleep because he didn't want to talk to his mother. I'm fairly certain his voice breaks as he recounts this, and it's just such a relatable thing, this stupid regret that we can all share.
Amen. There are so many moments in SPR that are heartbreaking. Ribisi’s speech about his mother, but then link it to his death scene …. Where his final words are “mama mama mama”. It’s just …it’s too much to bear. Just sitting here thinking about that.
The Thin Red Line is one of my favorites. The impact moments are less …. gratuitous? …. than SPR. But it is remarkable. Scott’s comment about war being against nature … let’s remember what Col Tall says to Staros: “nature is cruel.” Men reflect it.
I have to take a moment and say that a war movie only truly works when it is done as horror. No movie, even these two, comes as close to that as Come And See.
I rewatched SPR for the first time last year, when my 12-year-old wanted to see it. (Some quality parenting going on in the Callan household.)
The moment that had lingered in my memory: That stabbing death you mention, which remains one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen and not just because Upham freezes. The way that plays out is nightmare fuel for me in a way that the admittedly more visceral D-Day sequences aren't. (No shade on them, they're great, just not sticky for me.)
My son recently wanted to watch Fury, which I had not seen, and it was interesting to compare an even more straight-up presentation of similar war movie violence — SPR looked better in comparison. (Fury wastes its one really electric sequence by turning away from the American soldiers threatening the German women, IMHO.)
Side note: It's interesting watching movies like these with my son who plays a lot of first-person shooter war games these days, because he regularly seems to think almost any character could've survived if they'd just played the situation correctly. I'm like dude, it's chaos and a meatgrinder.
That's the thing that's so sobering about Omaha Beach and so affecting about Spielberg's depiction of it-- it's not really about men making maneuvers, but three hours of absolute catastrophe and carnage on the American side. It was surprisingly emotional for me just to walk on that beach, see the short distance between the ridge and the water line, and imagine what happened on that day.
Normandy is the part of France I’ve traveled in the most, because some former in-laws have a house there. Visiting those beaches is truly sobering, not least because many of the German bunkers remain in place. It’s easy to see what a shooting gallery the Allies were entering upon landing, and hard to imagine yourself surviving in their boots.
What those visits and SPR remind me also is what the countryside must have been like for the French at the time. I have a hard time driving around Normandy and not wondering if that farmhouse or that one or that church once housed the German invaders. It’s sobering too to visit Caen and realize that 70% of that city was destroyed during the Battle of Normandy. Americans sacrificed plenty in WWII, but visit Normandy and it beggars the mind what France and the rest of Europe endured.
I don’t know if you visited the walled city of Saint-Malo in Brittany on your trip -- it’s not too far a drive from Mont-Saint-Michel -- but that’s another place that was almost totally destroyed at the end of the war of Europe. I don’t know if there’s ever been a movie about that, but it’s made vivid in the Pulitzer-winning novel All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
God I really wish I could have gone to Saint-Malo, but we only had a few days total in Normandy and our agenda was packed: a night in Honfleur, two in Bayeux (D-Day tour, the tapestry, etc.) and one near Mont-St.-Michel. Anyway, the D-Day tour is really something, and I was grateful to have a guide who had a lot of knowledge and also understood and respected the gravity of it.
I should really finally read All the Light We Cannot See, but boy howdy that's a long one.
I can’t argue with that itinerary. Honfleur is gorgeous -- hope you had some mussels! I also hope you tasted a bit of calvados somewhere along the way.
I can’t give All the Light We Cannot See a 100% enthusiastic recommendation. Doerr’s writing is way too florid for my taste, and I think the novel would have been better at two thirds the length. But he certainly does not stint when it comes to immersing you in the bombing of Saint-Malo.
"It takes some imagination to bring it to life. More specifically, it takes Steven Spielberg’s imagination to bring it to life."
Any time the received wisdom of SPR as a great movie, and/or as an expression of complexity, let alone Spielberg's imagination (quick tip, he took the image that stands above all others from Sam Fuller), rears its head, it's always good to go back to one of the great moments in movie writing: Tom Carson on Saving Private Ryan from Esquire back then.
Rest assured, I found your essay rather moving as well! 😁
And, most importantly, it made me want to revisit a movie I likewise only saw in the theater when it came out and haven’t seen since. I didn’t like it back when, but I was also like 18 or 19 and knew absolutely nothing about the world.
I recently rewatched SPR for a class I teach so I augmented it with some readings podcasts (in other words, not clear where others' ideas end and my ideas begin). SPR is usually presented as Spielberg's attempt to both capture what his father and others of that generation went through but also to commemorate it. If you look critically at this plus the Greatest Generation zeitgeist, the implication is that current Americans don't measure up (I actually had a veteran student say he resented this implication as he felt it diminished his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan - but there's a lot more good war/bad war dichotomy to unpack there). If Upham is the audience surrogate in that he's there to ask questions we the viewer would like answers to but the other characters already know, is Spielberg trying to say something when Upham freezes? Is this his way of saying that the audience surrogate and thus current viewers aren't up to the task that men like his father were?
I know that's a really weird way to think about it, but for a movie I'd seen countless times it really changed my way of looking at it.
That was my read when I watched it years ago, particularly given the framing device. It accuses the audience and demands they honor the sacrifice, and while you can read that as grappling with the horror you can also see that mentality as a step toward Iraq and call to provide MORE meat for the grinder to 'do our part' and 'measure up'. I've been meaning to rewatch it because I suspect me now is probably a more sophisticated viewer than teenage me.
Antony Beevor in his book D-DAY: THE BATTLE FOR NORMANDY says that new guys (like Upton) had a rough time of it after being dropped in as replacements, old hands tended to freeze them out and even give them the more dangerous jobs because they hadn't proved themselves, which made it more likely they'd get killer.
It's been a very long time since I've seen Saving Private Ryan, and I probably should give it another watch sometime to see how it plays now. Is this still the only movie that has really dramatized the D-Day invasion, or have there been others?
When I think of those beaches in northern France and WWII, my mind goes more to the evacuation at Dunkirk, since it has been beautifully shown on screen twice. First the incredible long one-shot scene in Atonement, and then Christopher Nolan's film Dunkirk.
Plenty of movies have addressed D-Day, probably The Longest Day most notably, but none with the detail and commitment to visceral realism that Spielberg attempts with SPR. (I saw The Longest Day as a kid with my dad and liked it at the time, but it doesn't have much of a rep. Quite curious over Overlord. Anyone see that one?)
Overlord interlays real footage against a story. Criterion released a nice copy. It is not essential but an interesting watch.
Band of Brothers does a phenomenal job with the paratroop portion of the assault. The Richard Winters led assault on a gun placement is depicted incredibly. I believe West Point taught that as textbook assault against an enemy position.
Oh shit, I reviewed OVERLORD and forgot about it! https://www.avclub.com/film/reviews/overlord-1975
Came here to extol the virtues of Band of Brothers. Incredible television, and fun to revisit as a freshman facebook of future male stars.
Thanks for bringing THE THIN RED LINE into this discussion. Of the two films, that is the one that has stayed with me precisely because of its interest in the internal and existential aspects of war. The filmmaking of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN is immersive and moving. It blends emotion and history into a compelling experience that felt one-of a-kind in the area of theatre-viewing. I could never get as close to SPR though. The sentimentality was spread a bit too thick, most notably in the bookends (were they even needed?). Above all, it was the mythologizing that keeps me from embracing SPR. I know this is saying more about me than the movie, but I felt like it served as a recruitment piece for military service much more than a critique on the toll of war.
That's fair. As I note in the piece, SPR is a very conventional, old-fashioned war movie in certain respects, and definitely not as philosophical as TTRL. But I think it does try to dig into the harder realities of a soldier's experience, both with the visceral horror of the Omaha Beach sequence and with characters who show real vulnerability in the face of combat.
I agree. It's success in these areas is evidenced in the influence it has on action/war films to this day.
I'm with you that the bookends actually detract from the film, rather than add to it
Upham has another moment with the captive they let free following the assault on the radio tower. Upham was vocal in not shooting him as most of the unit wanted, and that German winds up being the one to shoot Captain Miller on the bridge. Upham is there when they are captured and when the German recognizes him, Upham shoots him.
The way Spielberg framed that shot of Capt Miller being shot still haunts me in its …. banalaity? I dont mean that as complaint. It’s horrifying how cheap life is on a battlefield, and Spielberg drives that home with the way he framed it. The gasps in the theater were legion.
I was just about to ask about this scene...it's been literally quarter of a century (!) since I saw this movie, but I remember that Upham shoots that guy without hesitation.
It's funny -- at the time, I said to myself, "Jesus Christ, about time, dude." Because that murder scene with Adam Goldberg is just so horrible, the Nazi blade going into the poor guy's heart so slowly...it's just such a torturous death, while Upham, the coward that he is, just watches and whimpers.
And yet now when I think about it, that the war, in the end, takes someone as unprepared as Upham and turns him into a stone-cold killer in the end...goodness. That's the genius of that scene, that there is no validation or catharsis or anything. It's just a tragedy in every which way.
A friend once told me the Nazi is singing a lullaby to Melish as he ….. finishes it. Not sure that is true but I hope it is. Makes it even more disheartening.
Tragedy. Yes, well put. In every conceivable way. Upham as coward. I don’t know. So easy to say should have done this or that. It is not unrealistic to say he simply froze from fear. Terror is as human a response as bravery. It is a maelstrom. The fact that people do anything beyond shriveling up is sort of remarkable.
Goodness, I'd be the first to admit that I would probably do even WORSE than Upham -- I'd no doubt pee and poo my pants while cowering and whimpering.
Lullaby...! Well, looks like I'll be having that nightmare now for sure, thinking about this terrifying movie. The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan are scarier than 95% of the horror movies...
It's funny -- I was a bigger fan of the Malick film after seeing it not that shortly after SPR, but I remember SPR so much more. Maybe it's just that TTRL was more poetic and imagistic (like I can recall a shot of a dead Japanese soldier over Malickian voiceover poetry), but you know what part of SPR that I still recall with startling clarity? That part where Giovanni Ribisi tells his platoon about how he pretended to sleep because he didn't want to talk to his mother. I'm fairly certain his voice breaks as he recounts this, and it's just such a relatable thing, this stupid regret that we can all share.
Amen. There are so many moments in SPR that are heartbreaking. Ribisi’s speech about his mother, but then link it to his death scene …. Where his final words are “mama mama mama”. It’s just …it’s too much to bear. Just sitting here thinking about that.
The Thin Red Line is one of my favorites. The impact moments are less …. gratuitous? …. than SPR. But it is remarkable. Scott’s comment about war being against nature … let’s remember what Col Tall says to Staros: “nature is cruel.” Men reflect it.
I have to take a moment and say that a war movie only truly works when it is done as horror. No movie, even these two, comes as close to that as Come And See.
I rewatched SPR for the first time last year, when my 12-year-old wanted to see it. (Some quality parenting going on in the Callan household.)
The moment that had lingered in my memory: That stabbing death you mention, which remains one of the most horrifying things I've ever seen and not just because Upham freezes. The way that plays out is nightmare fuel for me in a way that the admittedly more visceral D-Day sequences aren't. (No shade on them, they're great, just not sticky for me.)
My son recently wanted to watch Fury, which I had not seen, and it was interesting to compare an even more straight-up presentation of similar war movie violence — SPR looked better in comparison. (Fury wastes its one really electric sequence by turning away from the American soldiers threatening the German women, IMHO.)
Side note: It's interesting watching movies like these with my son who plays a lot of first-person shooter war games these days, because he regularly seems to think almost any character could've survived if they'd just played the situation correctly. I'm like dude, it's chaos and a meatgrinder.
That's the thing that's so sobering about Omaha Beach and so affecting about Spielberg's depiction of it-- it's not really about men making maneuvers, but three hours of absolute catastrophe and carnage on the American side. It was surprisingly emotional for me just to walk on that beach, see the short distance between the ridge and the water line, and imagine what happened on that day.
Normandy is the part of France I’ve traveled in the most, because some former in-laws have a house there. Visiting those beaches is truly sobering, not least because many of the German bunkers remain in place. It’s easy to see what a shooting gallery the Allies were entering upon landing, and hard to imagine yourself surviving in their boots.
What those visits and SPR remind me also is what the countryside must have been like for the French at the time. I have a hard time driving around Normandy and not wondering if that farmhouse or that one or that church once housed the German invaders. It’s sobering too to visit Caen and realize that 70% of that city was destroyed during the Battle of Normandy. Americans sacrificed plenty in WWII, but visit Normandy and it beggars the mind what France and the rest of Europe endured.
I don’t know if you visited the walled city of Saint-Malo in Brittany on your trip -- it’s not too far a drive from Mont-Saint-Michel -- but that’s another place that was almost totally destroyed at the end of the war of Europe. I don’t know if there’s ever been a movie about that, but it’s made vivid in the Pulitzer-winning novel All The Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr.
God I really wish I could have gone to Saint-Malo, but we only had a few days total in Normandy and our agenda was packed: a night in Honfleur, two in Bayeux (D-Day tour, the tapestry, etc.) and one near Mont-St.-Michel. Anyway, the D-Day tour is really something, and I was grateful to have a guide who had a lot of knowledge and also understood and respected the gravity of it.
I should really finally read All the Light We Cannot See, but boy howdy that's a long one.
I can’t argue with that itinerary. Honfleur is gorgeous -- hope you had some mussels! I also hope you tasted a bit of calvados somewhere along the way.
I can’t give All the Light We Cannot See a 100% enthusiastic recommendation. Doerr’s writing is way too florid for my taste, and I think the novel would have been better at two thirds the length. But he certainly does not stint when it comes to immersing you in the bombing of Saint-Malo.
"It takes some imagination to bring it to life. More specifically, it takes Steven Spielberg’s imagination to bring it to life."
Any time the received wisdom of SPR as a great movie, and/or as an expression of complexity, let alone Spielberg's imagination (quick tip, he took the image that stands above all others from Sam Fuller), rears its head, it's always good to go back to one of the great moments in movie writing: Tom Carson on Saving Private Ryan from Esquire back then.
https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a1490/riefenstahl-nationalism-0399/
I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of the great poems of all-time, relevant to this topic, Carl Sanburg's "Grass":
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work—
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.
Wow. That's even better than what I wrote!
In all seriousness, that is a really striking aspect of these sites-- how time and nature reclaims them.
Rest assured, I found your essay rather moving as well! 😁
And, most importantly, it made me want to revisit a movie I likewise only saw in the theater when it came out and haven’t seen since. I didn’t like it back when, but I was also like 18 or 19 and knew absolutely nothing about the world.
I recently rewatched SPR for a class I teach so I augmented it with some readings podcasts (in other words, not clear where others' ideas end and my ideas begin). SPR is usually presented as Spielberg's attempt to both capture what his father and others of that generation went through but also to commemorate it. If you look critically at this plus the Greatest Generation zeitgeist, the implication is that current Americans don't measure up (I actually had a veteran student say he resented this implication as he felt it diminished his experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan - but there's a lot more good war/bad war dichotomy to unpack there). If Upham is the audience surrogate in that he's there to ask questions we the viewer would like answers to but the other characters already know, is Spielberg trying to say something when Upham freezes? Is this his way of saying that the audience surrogate and thus current viewers aren't up to the task that men like his father were?
I know that's a really weird way to think about it, but for a movie I'd seen countless times it really changed my way of looking at it.
That was my read when I watched it years ago, particularly given the framing device. It accuses the audience and demands they honor the sacrifice, and while you can read that as grappling with the horror you can also see that mentality as a step toward Iraq and call to provide MORE meat for the grinder to 'do our part' and 'measure up'. I've been meaning to rewatch it because I suspect me now is probably a more sophisticated viewer than teenage me.
Antony Beevor in his book D-DAY: THE BATTLE FOR NORMANDY says that new guys (like Upton) had a rough time of it after being dropped in as replacements, old hands tended to freeze them out and even give them the more dangerous jobs because they hadn't proved themselves, which made it more likely they'd get killer.