It Was... An Hour Too Long!

Rating: 4/10 (4 November 2007)

Yes, that's a lot of men jumping out of airplanes. Uh huh. No, really, I get it.
Many 60s and 70s war movies trend toward the sluggish, mistaking specifics for spectacle. TORA TORA BORA, THE LONGEST DAY (you ever spent watching a movie) - painstakingly technical, despite scattered scenes of destruction they are as dull as they are long. PATTON is saved by a gigantic central performance. It turns out that a protagonist is a useful thing in an epic. It's a big drawback of the all-star cast that nobody really stars. There are too few scenes with each character to define character, so it's hard to care.
Attenborough takes pains to keep us informed of the big picture - small errors add up to gross negligence and eventually cost thousands of lives - but what's happening in any given moment is less clear. When James Caan's stuck in that Jeep - is he between two sets of Nazis or three? Why does he go for the gun, then change his mind and make a run for it? Clearly, there was insufficient coverage to make the scene coherent or interesting. The economical decision after the fact would be to cut the scene. But you can't do that when you just paid Caan fifteen percent of your budget.
Dependence on more than a couple of stars often makes a production unwieldy. This movie had that problem in spades. According to William Goldman, Steve McQueen said he'd do the movie only if they bought a house he was trying to sell. (They didn't get him, and the movie is probably no poorer for his absence.)
Ah, well. They tried.