The 6 best D-Day movies to watch

The D-Day movie to watch, not least for being the film that changed the grammar of war movies in one extraordinarily visceral opening 24-minute scene. Steven Spielberg’s shakycam depiction of the slaughter on Omaha Beach, with Janusz Kamiński’s desaturated cinematography mirroring Robert Capa’s famous photographs of the battle, plunges you right into the maelstrom of D-Day’s fiercest fighting. It’s as close as you’ll get to understanding what ‘hitting the beaches’ was really like, as the German defenders fire down from bunkers on horrifically exposed G.I.s inching up the sand. Somehow Tom Hanks and his squad of US Rangers make it off intact, but 2,400 others weren’t so lucky. 

Something akin to the British New Wave crashes onto the Normandy beaches in this naturalistic, Tommy’s-eye view of the build-up to the D-Day landings from director and one-time Dirty Dozen cast member Stuart Cooper. It follows a young British Army conscript, Tom (Brian Stirner), from basic training to the beaches of D-Day, lingering longest and most poignantly on the anxious wait to go into action, saying goodbye to his sweetheart and girding himself for the dangers ahead. A downbeat, sombre docudrama, it’s an insightful view of soldiers’ experiences, enhanced with footage from the Imperial War Museum’s archives. 

Producer Darryl F Zanuck’s stated desire with this epic, all-star dramatisation of the invasion of Normandy was to make the most important war movie of all-time, and while it falls well short of that goal, it’s not for a lack of scale: the production required three directors to cover all the battle sequences, cost a then-astronomical $10 million, ran three hours and involved nearly every major Hollywood star of the time, from John Wayne to Henry Fonda to Sean Connery to Richard Burton to Rod Steiger to, uh, Paul Anka. Arriving 30 years before Saving Private Ryan’s terrifyingly visceral recreation, it’s a distinctly 1960s interpretation of the battle – too clean, too triumphant – but the docudrama staging has an undeniable majesty that can still draw you in, even today.

British acting legend Richard Todd was a D-Day war hero in his own right. He landed with the airborne forces at Pegasus Bridge on the eve of the invasion, a battle he recreated in a meta touch in 1962’s The Longest Day, playing the commanding officer, Major John Howard, he actually fought with on the night. This boy’s own war flick, which came only a decade after the conflict, casts him as a fictional commando embarking on a mission to take out Nazi guns ahead of the invasion. He’s one of a few military men in love with a brigadier’s daughter (Dana Wynter). It’s a far cry from the gritty realism of later films but still touches on the trauma of combat and the perils of the vast operation.

British acting legends Michael Caine and Glenda Jackson unite for a drama about a D-Day veteran desperately trying to make it to Normandy for the 70th anniversary commemorations and the wily wife who helps him sneak out of their nursing home. It’s based on a true story and offers a lovely, elegiac perspective on veterans’ relationship with the past and their long-buried traumas. It flashes back to the D-Day experiences of Caine’s character, a sailor on a landing boat, and brings a vivid female perspective on the war from the wonderful Jackson in her last performance. If you don’t fancy the carnage of Saving Private Ryan, give this one a spin. 

Only a segment of Samuel Fuller’s episodic trudge through the European theatre is devoted to Normandy, but it best illustrates the WW2 veteran’s unsentimental view of combat. ‘A guy is hit. So, he’s hit. That’s that’, he once said, ‘I don’t cry because that guy over there got hit. I cry because I’m gonna get hit next.’ Indeed, as the American infantry unit of the film’s title arrives at Omaha Beach, tasked with assembling a cumbersome weapon to blast open an exit point, death comes too fast to process: one by one, each soldier charges over a sand berm, making minimal progress before getting picked off and the next man has his number called. All the while, Fuller’s camera returns to a wristwatch on a severed arm, submerged in the ever-reddening surf, denoting the grueling passage of time – an arresting image taken from the director’s own experience on the beach.