Day #74 - The Guns of Navarone

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Ooooh, good movie :) Gregory Peck - le sigh. I loves me a rugged tall man :) Hahaha - ok really, I enjoyed this movie - another good WWII movie, though much more palatable than some of the others I've seen. The plot was easy to follow which I appreciate because some war movies are hard to follow if you don't come in already knowing about the situation or the people involved.

The Guns of Navarone was made in 1961 by Columbia Pictures - directed by J. Lee Thompson and starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn (LOVE) and David Niven. The Guns of Navarone were actual guns that were positioned on a cliff in Greece overlooking the Aegean Sea - their location enabled them to sink Allied ships while maintaining a spot which was heavily protected and fortified. Peck, Quinn and Niven were part of a selected group of soldiers sent on a near impossible mission to destroy the guns. As the guns were positioned on the edge of a cliff, the beginning and end of their mission involved scaling the straight up and down face.

I love Gregory Peck as much as any woman with a brain but I'm not sure military roles are really his strong suit. He has a very signature look on his face all the time - like he is amused....or smug? How do I describe it? He always looks like such a nice guy - it works great if you are playing Joe Bradley or Atticus Finch but I'm not sure it's quite as convincing as a military commander. All I see when I look at David Niven is the Pink Panther so that took him out of the game - and Anthony Quinn, well, I just love him. I also saw him in Lawrence of Arabia but I have to admit, and I am NOT ashamed to say, that I FIRST saw him in A Walk in the Clouds. Yes, thank you.

The Guns of Navarone won an Oscar for Best Special Effects but was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Score, Best Sound and Best Screenplay.

Day #44 - The Longest Day

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I liked this movie even more than I thought I was going to! Being such a history buff, you give me a D-Day movie and I'm a happy camper :) What I enjoyed the most about The Longest Day is that they didn't just give you the Allied point of view. You also got to follow the Germans, which is rare in war movies. Not only that - but you didn't just follow one company or one military branch for the Allies - we got to see Air Force, Navy, Army, Airborne..we saw gliders at work as well as engineers. They really made accuracy a priority so I found it to be a really interesting story. It's unbelievable to see how the Germans handled the days before and of the invasion of Normandy - I had read before about how they expected the invasion to come at a different location but I didn't know how much they relied on weather to make strategy assumptions. Not only that, but once the invasion did start, it was as though Hitler didn't take it seriously. He wouldn't release the Panzer divisions and I found it interesting that his high ranking officers didn't have the guts to wake him up to even tell him what was happening!

I digress. The Longest Day was released in 1962 and was directed by Ken Annakin, Andrew Marton and Bernhard Wicki. It starred a great many actors of that era, including Richard Burton, Red Buttons, a young Sean Connery, John Wayne, Henry Fonda and Robert Mitchum. The nice thing was that none of these actors, in my opinion, really stuck out as a lead. It was more of an ensemble which I always feel is best for war movies. A bit of trivia - apparently this was one of the first war movies ever made where everyone spoke their native languages - the Germans spoke German, the French spoke French, and the British and Americans spoke English. Also, at $10 millioin, The Longest Day was the most expensive black and white movie ever made until Schindlers List came along in 1993. It won 2 Oscars - Best Cinematography and Best Special Effects.

One of the scenes that really blew me away was the invasion of Omaha Beach at Point-Du-Hoc. The men who were assigned this part of the beach had to scale hundred foot cliffs with ropes and ladders, taking heavy fire the whole time from Germans above. Amazing.

Day #41 - Stalag 17

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Stalag 17 was recommended to us and neither Chris nor myself had ever heard of it. Stalag is German for prisoner camp so Stalag 17 is about a group of men who share a barracks as American POW's during WWII. The movie came out in 1953 and starred William Holden, who won an Academy Award for it. It was also written and directed by Billy Wilder! This is my FOURTH Billy Wilder movie and I think my.....3rd William Holden movie :) Go me.

I felt so-so about Stalag 17 - first of all, we didn't know it was a comedy. I thought it was going to be a serious war movie. Apparently Billy Wilder liked to make comedies surrounded by a morose or dark context. So that threw me off a little bit. When the movie started I realized it was going to focus a lot on these two "barracks clowns" who provided a lot of slapsticky type comedy throughout which was fine I suppose, but I didn't expect it. Early on in the movie we are told that there is a "traitor" in the barracks who is feeding information to the Germans - information on escape attempts and equipment the men shouldn't have like radios. I really had no idea who it was until it was shown to me so I appreciated the surprise. Overall, like, I said, it was so-so for me. After the movie we watched the "making of" featurette which helped us to understand the movie more and I feel like when we watch older movies we should always know a bit about the context ahead of time. Chris was offended that they said Stalag 17 was the best POW camp/escape movie because we both liked The Great Escape much better :)

With all of that said, William Holden is HOT and I am MORE than happy to watch more of his movies :)

Day #30 - Gettysburg

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As a head's up, I am going to be tackling Gettysburg - yes, all 7 hours of it!! I will probably turn this into 2 or 3 postings as I'm sure I won't be able to watch it all in one sitting :)

Gettysburg was a mini-series which aired in 1993 - directed by Robert Maxwell.

OK - so Gettysburg is done! It was only 4 hours, not the original 7 that I thought - thank goodness now I can just do one post! SO, I really enjoyed watching Gettysburg. I really like the idea of taking 4 hours and dedicating it to one battle instead of the whole war - you can really get into the details of the men and the strategy....and I LOVE history and war movies so I'm game. Gettysburg in particular was great in the sense that everything was filmed on location so you could get a pretty good feel of the surroundings. The actors really surprised me - I knew Martin Sheen would be good as Robert E. Lee because he is always amazing...but Jeff Daniels and Tom Berenger I wasn't so sure about going in. They left me pleasantly surprised. All I know Tom Berenger from is Platoon and he's definitely not a good guy ("They've got Elias!"). And HELLO, Ponyboy was in it! (C. Thomas Howell). Stay Gold, Ponyboy.

With all of that being said, I had some definite issues with the series - mainly, I didn't always like how they filled the time between battles. With four hours of play, they had some huge opportunities and I would have liked for them to have been more efficient - it's like every scene was just too long. The movie overall wasn't too long, they just spend too much time on each scene, does that make sense? What bothered me more than anything though, was the monologues given the Generals. They spoke as if they already understood their own historical significance - like they already knew what would happen at Gettysburg and what it would mean to the overall war. So they kept having this inspirational, big picture, "our place in history" kind of talks and I thought, even though they knew Gettysburg might be the battle to end the war, there is no way they could have known to talk about the things they did. So that's a pretty big grievance but it definitely didn't ruin the series for me - I still really liked it. The extras really made Chris and I laugh - I imagine it's a huge undertaking to form an army of extras and have them act but we kept catching guys who looked like they were out for a Sunday stroll....la la la...oh yah, I'm supposed to be fighting this guy next to me. I also think I'm hypercritical because I've been watching Band of Brothers, and to me, every minute of that series is perfect. Here is an awesome little tidbit about the extras....

Except for the professional actors, this movie featured over 13,000 volunteer Civil War re-enactors who paid their own way, provided their own props and uniforms and fought the battles presented on screen using the same tactics as were current at the time.

I'd like to read about Robert E. Lee and specifically about his strategy at Gettysburg. It seemed like he was making a lot of foolish decisions - even with his top General, Longstreet (Berenger) voicing his disapproval. Was he just too prideful to turn around and retreat? Did he really think they were invincible as he said at the end? It was really cool though how throughout the series, comments were made by the men about their General Lee - about the respect they had for him and how sort of "untouchable" he was. They really loved him - and the series portrayed him, even amidst his decisions, as a pious and relatively quiet man.

OH - and Melissa, the actor who played General George Pickett was Stephen Lang AKA Ike Clanton! Haha - "why Ike, whatever do you mean?"