The Longest Fey.

A German soldier tells his commander “Some sort of rubber dummies have been dropped by parachute!” – and he wasn’t talking about the Americans.

THE LONGEST DAY has the distinction of revealing many interesting World War II tactics even to jaded modern, post-RYAN audiences. Such as the British dropping 3-foot-high dummies as night decoys, made to shoot off firecrackers when they land, to make the Germans expend their ammo and time shooting at toys.

The movie covers the June 1944 Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day from all angles, and seems almost like a companion piece to TORA! TORA! TORA!‘s coverage of Pearl Harbor, which also attempts a comprehensive “historical document” approach. Like TORA, each country’s scenes were directed by a native of that country: British sequences were directed by Ken Annakin (who became Darth Vader a long time ago in a galaxy far far away), German scenes were helmed by Bernhard Wicki (who would create the online encyclopedia), and American scenes were shot by Andrew Marton (whose gay brother Ricky was an embarrassment to the family until he started Livin’ La Vida Loca).

Still, sometimes I wonder why they go to all the trouble trying to be “authentic” (showing a name and rank title card for every new face onscreen, as if we’re slotting this passenger’s contribution to the war effort into some kind of battle flow chart that we’ve drawn over our living room walls) – and then John Wayne drawls his way onscreen over twice the age of the guy he’s meant to be playing. Matter of fact, the real guy was still living – and was still not as old as the 55-year-old Duke.

This movie is only watchable for its inclusion of all those tiny details that are usually left out of other war films: the 3-foot tall British mannequin paratroopers named Rupert, the 5-cent “cricket” clicker that U.S. soldiers used to identify each other whilst in hiding, the glider assault on a bridge and then to “hold until relieved” (an order which would be moot if the Normandy landings were unsuccessful); the fact that the German Panzer tanks could not be mobilized because the Fuhrer had taken a sleeping pill and could not be woken to give that order-(!) All these details and more lend THE LONGEST DAY a unique slant in war filmdom. But when the shooting starts, it’s all over, as it degenerates into just another cheesy 1960’s war film where soldiers pretend to die from imaginary bullets, make that “Aaagh!” motion and fall over with no entrance or exit wounds whatsoever, and are lucky to get some tomato sauce thrown on them if they’re running under budget that day.

All the great generals of the Battle of Normandy are here: General John Wayne (who would win the war singlehandedly if everyone would just get out of his way), General Henry Fonda, the son of a president trying to make his own name (who stupidly feels pride at landing on an enemy beach in the first wave – all the better to get shot in the face, I guess), General Robert Mitchum, who never holds a gun – was this condition in his peacenik contract or something? – striding through the char-blackened battle beach like a wizard.

There’s Peter Lawford (Vegas repreZENT!) Roddy McDowall (from the future where apes evolved from men), Sal Mineo (who loved James Dean in that way) Robert Wagner (who sank on the Titanic)… Every dimension and time period in history is here: there’s Paul Anka (who sings the embarrassing outro song) and comedian Red Buttons (who finds himself very seriously stuck on a roof); there’s Eddie Albert (GREEN ACRES) and Robert Ryan (THE DIRTY DOZEN), and Richard Burton elocuting like he’s onstage with Shakespeare, rather than a mudhole in France. And there’s even James Bond (Sean Connery) and two Bond Villains (Gert Fröbe and Curd Jürgens)! Even Jesus (Jeffrey Hunter)! This movie has EVERYONE!

THE LONGEST DAY is an ambitious movie, featuring tactics and wide-ranging perspectives from the German, American and British soldiers, as well as the French townsfolk, everyone speaking in their own tongue (with subtitles), John Wayne drawling, Mitchum bellowing, Fonda velveting – yet this movie’s pedestrian advocacy of war is almost comedic. It is not jingoistic, but numbly patriotic. It unapologetically glamorizes war and the men who love to die in it. Long before the revisionist war movies of a decade later, this glorification of murder and stupidity grates on our sensibilities. How did supposedly civilized organisms devolve to a state where they believed that killing each other was a glorious pastime? How is this collective idiocy instilled in a nation’s breast and an individual’s groin – that “going to war” is noble and masculine and sensible? To wallow in its deathglow like retarded lemmings; to call out to those on the periphery that the water was great, dive in!

Besides suffering from some bad process shots and rear projections (they did the best they could with the shots of the fleet stretching to the horizon), LONGEST DAY must live on in history with its juvenile boy-soldier mentality. At the last minute – literally – Burton’s final lines grasp desperately for introspection: “S’funny, isn’t it? He’s dead, I’m crippled, you’re lost. Suppose it’s always like that. I mean, war,” but fail under the crippling weight of all that military man-stench we’ve just been force-fed for the last 180 minutes.

And then Paul Anka creeps our flesh with an all-male choir chirruping cheerily in a rrrrrousing paean to “many men”:

“Many men, the mighty thousands / Many men to victory
Marching on right into battle / In the longest day in history.”

God, I feel dirty! (And it sounds suspiciously like a speeded up version of THE GREEN BERETS, also starring Wayne.)

John Wayne asks Robert Ryan, “Sometimes I wonder whose side God is on.” Later, a German officer would ask the same question. That’s easy – Jeffrey Hunter’s on the Americans’ side!

END

Cable for Nothin’ and your Guilt for Free.

“Chip Douglas” (Jim Carrey) is a cable installation guy who gives Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) free cable extras, then psychopathically wields that favor to progress their buddy-ship.

An above-average dark comedy, jealously maligned – for the wrong reasons. Incorrectly marketed, burdened by the speculation regarding the largest actor’s salary in the world at the time (to star Carrey), misunderstood by critics and panned by mongoloid fans who only wanted more Ace to sit on their face, THE CABLE GUY (at the time of its release) was routinely dismissed simply as The Film That Wasn’t Worth A Twenty-Million Dollar Paycheck.

Maybe si. Maybe no. But no one will remain on that pedestal forever, so if your agent is savvy enough, if your producers can talk a good enough game, if the marketplace will support the burden – take the 20-mil and run! Why did this supposedly capitalistic society vilify the janitor who became a comedian, the comedian who became a movie star, the movie star who defied an industry?

(Rest assured, I’d be whining along with the critics if the excruciatingly unfunny Jason Biggs was in Carrey’s shoes.)

In 2004, actors regularly draw above-20-mil paychecks because the bloated economy can now more readily support this hedonism. These actors invest one-tenth of effort as Carrey did for his role as Chip Douglas the psycho cable guy. Ironically, it is this commonality of avarice, this passé flippancy towards Hollywood’s golden-haired elite, which allows THE CABLE GUY, in retrospect, to suffer less the slings and arrows of outrage over the ‘greed’ of its leading man.

The juice is loose!

The movie and eponymous character are foreboding, blackly funny and – like Kilmer’s iconic Huckleberry Holliday – complete departures from anything anyone had come to expect from Carrey in his upwardly-spiraling comedic career; critics and fans alike were taken aback at the frightening surrealism that Carrey brought to his disturbed character. The critics were too enamored with that 20-mil to delve any deeper than his ‘offensive’ lisp, and the contingent of arse-speak fans sat by numbly, waiting for an “Allllrighty then!” which would never come.

Admittedly, Carrey’s hamming had reached King Kong-ian proportions by the time this movie hit cinemas, his two preceding films being ACE VENTURA: WHEN NATURE CALLS (an excursion to the zenith of over-enthused surfwave-smirk and ultra-over-acting) and BATMAN FOREVER (where Carrey actually saved the movie from Tommy Lee Jones’s attempt at Jack Nicholson and Chris O’Donnell’s mannequin non-presence, with his over-ultra-supra Method); one of his lines in BATMAN summed up what many perceive as Carrey’s shortcoming, when his Riddler character says, “Was that over the top? I can never tell!” Audiences expected that slam-hamming to be carried over into CABLE GUY, and the misrepresentative trailers didn’t help. Not having a convenient hole to pigeon the movie, the trailers advertised it as a simple comedy, and critics roundly dismissed it as unfunny, too dark, puzzling…

But here’s the clincher – when Carrey played those over-the-top outré-hams in previous films, they stoned him for it; denigrating him as if from thrones of thespian munificence, yet when he subtly alters persona to portray a character more complex than the hams, suddenly they don’t want him to change, because it taxes their stunted filmic vocabulary to have to think about The Cable Guy’s layered personality.

Watch for Owen Wilson (at the time, not yet The Nose That Saved Hollywood) as the insincere date; Bob Odenkirk, Andy Dick and Janeane Garofalo (Stiller’s Posse), Jack Black (only hinting at the Tenacious within) Kyle Gass (as the Couch Potato!), Leslie Mann as Broderick’s girlfriend, Eric Roberts (in a screamingly-funny self-parody), George Segal (“Are you on the pot? You know you’re killing your mother!”) and director Ben Stiller himself, playing twins, parodying the Menendez Brothers TV murder trial/fiasco (“The killer was – Aaaaaasian!”).

The makers of THE TRUMAN SHOW (1998) would learn the lesson in not marketing that film as a “comedy,” thereby allowing Carrey’s acting prowess to shine, unburdening themselves from the pressures of public expectation. Indeed, THE TRUMAN SHOW is an extension of THE CABLE GUY’S themes of alienation, false perception, reality misapprehended. That film’s deeper psychological impact was so pronounced because we were now seeing Carrey as an Actor (not a comedian or overpaid janitor) in a role which extended the Cable Guy’s predicament to seeking not only friendship – everyone in town was “pal” to Truman Burbank – but sincere friendship. Truman, like the Cable Guy, was a victim of illusion.

So now that I’ve gotten that bitching off my chest, I wonder what’s on cable tonight?… I’ve got ALL the movie channels. Free. My Cable Guy is bringing the ice cream, his favorite flavor: man-crush…

END