Saving Private Ryan: 60th anniversary commem-
D-Day: June 6, 1944 – the battle for the Normandy beaches by Stephen E Ambrose (Pocket Books, 2002)Saving Private Ryan
Reviewed by Matthew Reynolds, writer, lecturer and historian with a special interest in modern history and 20th-century conflict. He is the author of Greatest Military Clashes (2003) and co-author of Time Team: What happened when (2006). He has also written extensively for the Channel 4 History website about both world wars.
RATING: 9
US, 1998
Director Steven Spielberg
Screenwriter Robert Rodat
Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski
Music John Williams
Cast Tom Hanks (Captain John H Miller), Matt Damon (Private James Francis Ryan), Tom Sizemore (Sergeant Mike Horvath), Barry Pepper (Private Daniel Jackson), Vin Diesel (Private Adrian Caparzo), Giovanni Ribisi (Medic Irwin Wade), Edward Burns (Private Richard Reiben), Adam Goldberg (Private Stanley Mellish), Jeremy Davies (Corporal Timothy Upham)
The war film conundrum
Such a colossal event as the Second World War – which encompasses stories of tragedy and jeopardy, action and adventure, victory and loss, and was fought by citizen armies made up of people just like you and me – provides a storming subject, background and wealth of material for any movie-maker. Yet the war film genre has often struggled to convey elements of reality.
Watching the colour-rich action films of the late 1960s and early '70s, you would be forgiven for thinking that a war film was the same as a classic western but with the cowboys wearing different clothes and evil, robotic Germans replacing the stern-looking Indians.
Ersatz image
Dark movies such as The Dirty Dozen (1967), action adventures such as Where Eagles Dare (1968) and even black comedies such as Kelly's Heroes (1970) all used World War II as their vehicle. Yet, with their Boy's Own attitude, these films have more in common with each other than with actual events. The ersatz image of warfare that they produced was re-enacted by thousands of kids in the playground (with everyone wanting to be Clint Eastwood). But in their defence, they were products of their time and didn't pretend to be based on real events.
A few slipped through the net – Cross of Iron (1977) and Stalingrad (1993) among them – which tackled some of the real issues of men in combat. As a rule, however, the war film continued along a well-worn two-phase route: recruit training and final big battle.
Unashamedly American
The release of Saving Private Ryan in 1998 changed all that. Filmed in a documentary style – shaky hand-held cameras, with obscured shots often providing the point of view of the soldier in the field – the viewer is placed in the centre of the action, and the story unfolds with a refreshingly hard and dramatic perspective. This is enhanced by the use of bleached colour, stuttering explosive effects and an extraordinary use of sound for which the film won two of its five Academy Awards.
It starts with a fluttering American flag – an awfully big clue that it's about US troops. Some reviewers have criticised the film for its one-sided depiction of the conflict, for making it look as if the Americans actually won the war single-handedly. But this is to ignore the film's intentions: Saving Private Ryan is unashamedly an American story.
Bleached colour, stuttering explosive effects and an extraordinary use of sound
Derogatory remarks
The film begins with the Normandy beach landings of D-Day, 6 June 1944. It doesn't attempt to depict the enormity of the complete invasion, as did The Longest Day (1962), but covers just one sector of the American landing zone of Omaha beach. A British or Canadian soldier would have been quite out of place there. And while the landings and the invasion of Europe are the background to the story, they are not the story itself.
The derogatory remarks about the British in general and General Montgomery in particular made later in the film by Tom Hanks and Ted Danson (as Capt. Fred Hamill) were also highlighted by some reviewers. But too much can be read into this. The soldiers' idle chat is typical of the opinions held by many US troops at the time. It is not dissimilar to the way the British often grumbled about how the Americans were too cautious in combat and over-nursed.
Opening scene
The now-famous 30-minute opening sequence depicting the frantic assault of the Normandy beach landings is harrowing and widely accepted as possibly the closest depiction of the real event that has ever been filmed. The scene was actually shot in Ireland, where the beach defences, bunkers, strongholds and cliff-top trench systems were reconstructed with remarkable accuracy.
In the film, two brothers are killed during the landings; a third had died only the week before in the South Pacific theatre. The remaining brother – the eponymous James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon), is serving as a trooper in the 101st Airborne Division – has been dropped behind enemy lines and is missing.
The mission
As their mother receives three telegrams of notification and condolence from the War Department (the family farmstead in this scene was not actually in the US but was created in a Wiltshire valley near the West Kennet long barrow on the Marlborough Downs), a group of US Rangers led by Captain Miller (Hanks) are ordered to find the sole surviving son so that he can be returned home to the States. The Rangers are less than happy with their mission, and in the rest of the film, we learn their stories and share their hopes and fears through their quest to find Ryan in war-torn France.
This story isn't too far fetched. According to Stephen E Ambrose in his book D-Day, the experiences of Fred Niland of the 101st Airborne Division provide a real-life parallel. During the real landings, he was parachuted into France but missed his target zone of Carentan and had to find his way back to the Allies. When he did, and having lost three brothers in quick succession, he was sent home as a 'sole survivor'. This practice had been adopted by US forces in 1942 when all five brothers of the Sullivan family had been tragically lost with their ship off Guadalcanal.
Accuracy
The tactical movements of Hanks' team, their equipment, signals and slang are all in keeping, apart from the safety call 'Thunder' followed by the reply 'Flash', which should have been used the other way round. Much of the actors' convincing behaviour is the result of the compulsory boot camp that they had to attend, run with ex-US Marine captain Dale Dye (who also plays the white-haired War Department colonel who, at the start of the film, questions the sanity of the mission).
A number of actions lead the team to Ryan, and then the film heads towards its second major set-piece and finale: the defence of a small village, Ramelle, and its bridge. Another common criticism of the film is that the enemy they encounter in Ramelle are supposed to be elements of the Das Reich 2nd SS Panzer Division. According to Ambrose, the 2nd SS were prevented from countering the D-Day landings for quite some time when both logistics and the French resistance kept them stalled near their resting base at Toulouse. The SS finally did arrive on the Contentin peninsula but not until more than two weeks had passed since D-Day.
However, in the film, after the initial landings Hanks debriefs an officer about an action (not shown) that has involved some 88s (German artillery) and a mine field. So we know that there has been a break in continuity from the landing sequence. We are also not told whether the Rangers have carried out any other missions before they go in search of Ryan. If the adventurous trek to Ramelle took them, say, three or four days, it is possible that they could have run into the SS at the correct historical time.
Sentimentality
The defence of Ramelle comprises a typical covering of areas of the village with overlapping arcs of fire, using the limited resources available. The Rangers' flexible plan, based on leading the forward enemy unit down the main road into an explosive-laden killing zone, is fairly textbook. The German assault is a bit ragged in its deployment, but as we can see, the SS unit is bolstered by the flotsam of lost troops picked up along the way and so lacks some cohesion. The battle unravels as the German unit splits into two and flanks the town. Soon any clear definition of a 'front line' is lost and the town becomes a nightmare of building-to-building, room-to-room fighting, again a very real proposition.
The action here is particularly vivid. It includes a difficult scene in which Private Mellish (Goldberg) pleads for his life when the fact that he has been defeated in hand-to-hand combat becomes clear through the adrenaline of fighting. Corporal Upham (Davies), who could rescue him, freezes in a moment of fear and cowardice (a subject rarely explored in war movies). Unfortunately this very realistic incident is slightly marred when, rather than Upham carrying this burden for the rest of his life, he redeems himself by turning tough and killing a German. This is one example of the film's admittedly very few moments of sentimentality that some critics have complained about.
The performances
The reality of the action and the accuracy of the equipment go a long way towards making Saving Private Ryan one of the best war films ever made. The power of the film, though, comes from the moving performances of the actors – in particular, Giovanni Ribisi as medic Irwin Wade, Tom Sizemore as Sergeant Mike Horvath, Matt Damon as Private Ryan and Tom Hanks as Captain Miller.
Miller's revelation that he was a school teacher back home and that, with every man he kills, he feels further from getting back, breaks the rollercoaster action (and a tense situation). In this clever piece of cinema, we are starkly reminded, just as we're getting caught up in the war film, that these were real people with real lives, families, aspirations, hopes and fears.
The end
The closing scene, in which Ryan, now old, visits the American Cemetery and Memorial in Normandy, may appear overly sentimental to some. But I dare anyone to visit the site today at Colleville-sur-Mer, overlooking Omaha beach, and not be moved by the experience.
This is one of only two films that I've seen in the cinema – Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) being the other – at the end of which everybody just sat in silence for five minutes.
Check out the Saving Private Ryan Online Encyclopedia, a database that covers many aspects of the film, from equipment and characters to facts about World War II, including more on the Fred Niland story.
