Brilliant and touching

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

. . . or remedial movie-making is not the easiest thing to do nearly 50 years later. This less-than-an-hour "documentary" was released by Fox just before that corporation hoped to capitalize on "D-Day's" 25th anniversary by Re-releasing its plodding retelling of the Normandy Invasion, THE LONGEST DAY (which seemed to many folks to be the longest WEEK that they had ever spent in a movie theater!). Some of the hallmarks that made DAY a strong candidate for the title of Most Tediously Boring War Flick Ever were its haphazard use of German subtitles, its substitution of occasional on-screen annotations for any effort at normal exposition, and its goal of leaving as many story threads dangling as possible. Couple these problems with an over-peopled screen that leaves most of the 42 or 43 (both numbers are ballyhooed) "international stars" with only a couple lines of dialogue each, and it's no wonder that DAY producer Darryl F. Zanuck felt the need to fill in a few of the holes in his Swiss cheese-like movie plot here. Unfortunately, Zanuck himself is nearly as unorganized and incoherent here as his DAY screenwriters and editors proved themselves during the making of his feature film. Roughly half of D-DAY REVISITED is devoted to random clips of that debacle, so it seems that "crass commercialism" won out.

The film begins with an introduction by Darryl Zanuck--and I was taken aback by the ordinariness of this film giant's voice. If anything, he sounded a bit wimpy. You'd think with someone as powerful as him (as head of Twentieth-Century Fox) that he'd have sounded more loud and powerful! Considering I have only seen him in stock footage, it's nice to actually finally hear the guy. However, a few of the 'impromptu' meetings with French locals were a bit silly, as they tried to make them seem accidental and unstaged--but of course there was a film crew there and not just Zanuck! Once the film begins, Zanuck walks about the countryside--narrating about what each location is. Then, film footage from his film "The Longest Day" (1962) is inserted to show the way he portrayed this in the movie. It's obviously a chance not only to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the Normandy landing but also a chance to promote the re-release of the feature film.A few of the really interesting portions of the film were watching a French family having a picnic in a giant bomb crater that has since grown over with grass as well as seeing the condition of the bunkers over two decades later.All in all, it's an interesting little film and DVD extra for "The Longest Day". However, it is far from perfect--relying too much on lengthy clips from the movie--as self-promotion seemed important than actually showing the sites where the battle took place! Showing much shorter clips would have made for a much better short film.