The cost, both physical and psychological, was beyond counting. Heroism? Heroism was simply staying on your feet and keeping your sanity intact. An organisational disaster that cost untold lives. Omaha beach, let Spielberg tell us, was a fuck-up.
But World War II, the big gun heroism of Wayne and co., wresting battered Europe from the tyrannical Nazis? It was glorious, it was sweeping, the only red you ever caught were the alternate stripes on the US insignia. The brazen psychological soup of enough Oliver Stone movies have hammered it home. It is a 24 minute sequence of unalloyed horror, shot with almost documentarian closeness. Soldiers clutch at their spilled intestines crying out for their mothers as the sea is turned blood red. The numbing clarity with which bodies are fragged and flayed by the unending hail of German machine gunfire, heads imploding, limbs torn away, men vomiting in terror and nausea over the gunwales of Higgins boats pitching over the surf to the fatal beach. A terrifying ordeal of handheld camerawork depicting soldiers exposed to the alien extremes of absolute carnage.įor Ambrose, it was a sight he never thought he would witness again and the footage was too much to bear.
Watching the Omaha beach landing of American troops on the blustery day of June 6, 1944, we are served a blood and gut-spitting range of cinema vérité that would make Sam Peckinpah blanch. Spielberg's magnum opus World War II movie opens with a passage of combat verisimilitude unprecedented in cinema history. Then he returned to the cinema and watched the rest of the film without a break. He needed to compose himself, to gather in the storm of memories and emotions that swirled around his head. Then he waved a hand, called for the projectionist to halt the film and strode purposefully for daylight. Ambrose, from whose memoirs Steven Spielberg drew historical inspiration, first watched Saving Private Ryan he lasted about 20 minutes. When military historian and D-day veteran Stephen E. Ian Nathan meets Tom Hanks and the gallant men who endured sheer hell for the sake of absolute realism. Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan has been heralded as a masterpiece of historic cinema. A powerful study of humanity in the face of madness. The most evocative battle scenes ever put to film. This article was first published in Empire Magazine Issue #112 (October 1998). Steven Spielberg leads Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Tom Sizemore, Edward Burns et al into D-day hell.~ BY IAN NATHAN ~
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