In a recent podcast interview with The New Yorker, Tom Hanks trotted out some seemingly well-polished titbits about making his biggest films; the sort of Forrest Gump recollections you might imagine him sending forth to amuse his guests at one dinner party after another.
Hearing Hanks talk about being thrust into the freezing water of the Irish sea while filming the D-Day landings in his 1998 war epic, Saving Private Ryan is different. “Don’t look down,” Hanks recalls a special effects expert warning of the blood squibs attached to so many fake soldier’s chests, as explosions reigned around nervous extras. If the opening scene, depicting the Allied assault on Omaha Beach in 1944, remains a go-to in Hanks’ repertoire of stories, it’s with good reason.
The 24-minute sequence captures war in a way that we hadn’t seen before, and hasn’t been matched since. It’s the nervous shakes that possess Hanks’ hands. The vomit. The desperate surprise of soldiers drowning in the shallows, dragged down by their gear. The indiscriminate German bullets landing with a ‘puft’ in American chests. The relentless machine gun fire and explosions. The arms blown off, the guts hanging out, all of it captured by a camera man running alongside the actors, instructed to pan to whatever part of the horror caught his attention.
"I cannot tell you how many veterans came up to me [...] and said: 'Please be honest about it. Please don't make another Hollywood movie about WW2. Please tell our stories'" Spielberg has said, criticising other WW2 films as being “sanitised”. Instead, Spielberg opted to depict the "almost blind terror” that these veterans had conveyed of their experiences.
“I remember one of the [veterans] telling me the entire charge up the beach was a blur – not a blur to his memory, because he still remembered every single grain of sand when he had his face buried in it from that fusillade raining down on them from above," recalled Spielberg in a 2018 interview with the Los Angeles Times. "But he described how everything was not in focus for him. And he described the sounds, and he described the vibrations of every concussion of every 88 shell that hit the beach, which gave some of them bloody noses, rattled their ears. The ground would come up and slam into their faces from the concussions”.
To watch this opening salvo is to witness this veteran’s story transposed directly onto the screen. It’s a guttural, terrifying sequence that plays like something from a horror film. As it should; so realistic was this beach assault that it was reported to have triggered PTSD in veterans.
“I was a whimpering, sobbing pile of blubber. I was very embarrassed and didn’t want to be in that state of mind, but I couldn’t help it. You feel that terror. I was in Vietnam, and [the movie] was WW2, but it was familiar,” a former army sergeant in the Vietnam War confided to therapist Dr. Bill Weitz after seeing the film. Should we ever become fatigued by news of the war in Ukraine, this might help us reengage.
Saving Private Ryan is about more than America saving the day. It’s brutal and ugly, both in what the invaders faced but also, in this film, in their anger towards the German defenders. “Let ‘em burn! one character shouts as the still-alive bodies of German soldiers, engulfed in flames, dive from a bunker. “I’m sorry, I can’t understand what you’re saying,” another soldier says before he and his compatriot gun down two surrendering Germans. (These specific scenes are fictional; it’s implied via a cut-away that Hank’s Captain Miller does not approve of such behaviour. But of course).
So powerful is this introduction to the awesome terror of the Western Front that it doesn’t matter that the film’s actual plot – Hanks’ entire squad dying to send Matt Damon home – is daft beyond belief, and that the film sometimes strays into the kind of sentimentality that Spielberg worked to avoid.
We saw shades of this same commitment to realism in Spielberg’s HBO series Band of Brothers (and, with less impact, in The Pacific). This year he and Hanks will reunite to produce Masters of the Air, about ace fighter pilots in WW2. The series will complete the work they began with Saving Private Ryan. It will have to go a long way to surpass how it all started, on those landing crafts 25 years ago.
Tom Ward is a freelance writer and author. He is a winner of the GQ Norman Mailer Award and a PPA Award. Find him at tomwardwrites.com
