Sequence shot from The Longest Day (1962) - The Ouistreham casino attack
Film title: The Longest Day
Original title: The Longest Day
Year: 1962
Director of the sequence: Ken Annakin (British and French sequences)
Co-directors of the film: Andrew Marton (American sequences), Bernhard Wicki (German sequences), Gerd Oswald (parachute jumps), Darryl F. Zanuck (additional sequences)
Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck (Darryl F. Zanuck Productions / 20th Century Fox)
Battle Coordinator, Editorial Advisor: Elmo Williams
Country: United States / France
Chief cinematographer for the French sequences: Henri Persin
Aerial footage: Guy Tabary
Other cinematographers on the film: Jean Bourgoin, Walter Wottitz, Pierre Levent
Helicopter pilot: Gilbert Chomat
Helicopter used: Alouette II (Sud-Aviation)
Filming format: 35mm CinemaScope, black and white (re-released in 70mm)
Optics: anamorphic Bausch & Lomb "combined"
Shot duration: approximately 8 minutes (according to Ken Annakin, autobiography So You Wanna Be a Director)
Filming location: Port-en-Bessin-Huppain (Calvados), substituted for Ouistreham
Setting: a casino rebuilt in wood and plaster over three floors, from a neighboring hotel slated for demolition
Main cast of the sequence: Christian Marquand (Commander Philippe Kieffer)
Technical advisor: Philippe Kieffer himself, the officer who led the actual assault on June 6, 1944
Music: Maurice Jarre
Film budget: $10 million (the most expensive black and white film ever produced until Schindler's List in 1993)
Awards: 5 Oscar nominations, 2 wins (Best Cinematography, Best Special Effects)
The camera hovers over a Norman port, skimming the rooftops. Below, Commander Philippe Kieffer (Christian Marquand) leads his French commandos down a straight street, green berets and Sten submachine guns at his hips. At the end, the casino, which the Germans have transformed into a bunker, spits bullets from its rooftop bristling with snipers. The commandos advance in a zigzag pattern between explosions. Nuns appear to tend to the wounded. The camera never descends. For nearly eight minutes, it remains attached to the helicopter following the assault, gliding over the rooftops, skimming the facades, descending back onto the esplanade just as the casino is blown up
Why this scene is iconic
You never get the feeling you're watching a reenactment. The camera refuses to cut. It refuses to zoom in on a face to reassure you. It stays at rooftop level, a distance impossible to achieve in conventional editing, and shows you the attack as a general would have seen it: the street, the corners, the dead falling on the cobblestones, the casino holding out. This distance would never have existed in 1944. That's precisely what makes the scene so devastating. You physically understand the geography of the assault. You see why Kieffer lost a quarter of his men in a matter of minutes
The length of the shot prevents the comfort of a cut. No reassuring close-up of the hero, no break to catch your breath, no grandiose music to take over. Annakin denies you the respite that editing usually provides. You accompany the assault without being able to speed it up or slow it down. You remain airborne with the pilot, a powerless witness, until the final explosion. In 1962, this sequence invented a grammar that modern war cinema would subsequently adopt en masse : duration as a dramatic tool, continuity as a refusal of rest.
How they filmed it
The long take was originally Darryl F. Zanuck's idea, not Annakin's. In his autobiography, *So You Wanna Be a Director*, Annakin recounts that Zanuck had envisioned an eight-minute helicopter shot to depict the casino assault, and that every director on the film had already attempted the take without satisfying the producer or his editorial advisor, Elmo Williams. By the time Annakin took over the project, the shot had become a production obsession that no one could seem to complete.
It was at this point that he was introduced to Gilbert Chomat. Annakin described him as " a French helicopter wizard pilot, who could do anything with an Alouette." Chomat wasn't a cinematographer; he was a pilot. But he had a sense of framing the industry had never seen: he could position the camera exactly where the director wanted it, provided that every speed, every altitude, every trajectory was detailed to him in advance. The discipline was reversed compared to a traditional film set. It was no longer the director of photography whodictated the movement; it was the pilot who executed a meticulously choreographed routine with his aircraft while the camera remained stationary in the basket.
The set itself is a trompe-l'œil. The Ouistreham casino has been gone since 1942. The Germans razed it to make way for a defensive complex of eighty bunkers connected by underground tunnels, which Rommel personally inspected twice. Filming was impossible. So the production moved about fifty kilometers west to Port-en-Bessin-Huppain, where they rebuilt a fake casino, three stories high, out of wood and plaster, using a neighboring hotel slated for demolition. On the surrounding buildings, the "Port-en-Bessin" signs were repainted "Ouistreham." A facade on Place de la Fontaine still bears the ghostly trace of this substitution today, beneath the faded letters of the new business
The sequence involves over a hundred uniformed extras, timed explosions on the ground, German defenders on the casino roof, and a pyrotechnic finale with the building's destruction. Everything must be filmed in a single take, at the speed of the Alouette helicopter. The technical challenge lies as much in the ground choreography as in the stability of Chomat's hovering flight.Overall success depends on approximately one hundred simultaneous local successes.
The entire film was shot in 35mm CinemaScope black and white, using Bausch & Lomb "combined" anamorphic lenses that compressed the image horizontally for widescreen. The final 2.35:1 aspect ratio takes full advantage of the height of the shot: Henri Persin, director of photography for the French sequences, and Guy Tabary, in charge of aerial shots, exploited this width to frame the entire street and the casino in a single shot. The film received the Academy Award for Best Cinematography in 1963: this long take played a significant role in the jury's decision
On set, Philippe Kieffer himself served as technical advisor. The real commander who led the assault in 1944 walked with the crew, corrected details of their uniforms, and watched Christian Marquand recreate his actions. During breaks, according to a witness to the filming quoted by Cigar Aficionado, Zanuck shared gambling memories with him. Kieffer, ill, died in December 1962, a few months after the film's release. It is unknown whether he had the chance to see it screened.
The most telling anecdote, however, concerns Zanuck's own travels. The producer would go from one filming location to another by helicopter and, as Cigar Aficionado reports, demanded that the pilot fly lower and lower over the Normandy countryside to hunt rabbits. The pilot argued that every ten centimeters less represented a real danger. Zanuck laughed. It was in this atmosphere of excess and constant risk-taking that the casino plan finally came to fruition.
What to observe when reviewing it
The Norman anachronism : towards the end of the shot, when the helicopter climbs to frame the burning casino, look at the background on the right of the frame. The Vauban tower of Port-en-Bessin appears clearly, a 17th-century military structure that reveals the actual filming location 50 km from the real Ouistreham.
The invented nuns : before arriving at the casino, two nuns appear in the street to treat the wounded. Purely a plot device. No convent existed at that location, and veteran Maurice Chauvet, who had participated in the actual assault and had begun filming as a technical advisor, left the production mid-way through in protest against these historical liberties.
The overloaded roof : On the roof of the casino, in the middle of the shot, count the German defenders. There are about thirty of them. In reality, the building no longer existed; it was just a concrete bunker defended by a handful of men, and the commandos had to wait for the arrival of the Sherman DD tanks of the 13/18 Hussars to break through.
Did you know?
All the other directors had failed before Annakin. According to his autobiography, Zanuck had every director on the film try out the shot before Annakin inherited it. Annakin finally signed off on the only take deemed satisfactory by the producer and his editor, Elmo Williams. Thirty years later, he still refers to it as the sequence he is most proud of in his entire career.
Gilbert Chomat, the magician pilot. After The Longest Day , Chomat became the go-to man for all aerial shots in European cinema of the 1960s: John Frankenheimer's Grand Prix (1966), John Huston's The Bible (1966), You Only Live Twice (1967), and Blake Edwards' Darling Lili (1970). He died in 1970, at the age of 39, in a helicopter collision on a film set.
A casino never built in this form. The real Ouistreham casino, in the style of a pre-war Norman half-timbered villa, was razed by the Germans in 1942 along with about a hundred neighboring villas. The monumental casino in the film, three stories high with its roof adorned with defenders, is a pure invention built in Port-en-Bessin.
Bill Millin and the bagpipes. In the scene, Kieffer's commandos land at the same time as Bill Millin, Lord Lovat's personal bagpiper. This is historically accurate: Millin did indeed play the bagpipes on Sword Beach on June 6, 1944, as the Germans opened fire, a gesture that has become legendary. But the film exaggerates: Millin did not cross Pegasus Bridge playing the bagpipes, as the following sequence shows.
Kubrick's legacy. Five years before The Longest Day, Stanley Kubrick laid the foundations of the long-take war film with Paths of Glory (1957). But where Kubrick followed Kirk Douglas at eye level on a dolly (camera dolly on rails) in the trench, Zanuck and Annakin chose the opposite: the vertiginous distance of a helicopter. Two opposing philosophies of the long-take war film, separated by only five years.
The most expensive black and white film ever produced until Schindler's List (1993). Budget: $10 million in 1962, approximately $106 million today. The casino sequence, with its helicopter, one hundred extras, and giant set that had to be rebuilt, alone accounted for a substantial portion of this budget.
Sources
Ken Annakin, So You Wanna Be a Director, Tomahawk Press, 2001 (autobiography)
Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day, Robert Laffont, 1961
Paul Tatara, "The Longest Day", Turner Classic Movies (TCM), April 27, 2006
Jason Hellerman, "This Oner from 'The Longest Day' has a Permanent Space in My Brain", No Film School, June 2024
ImagesDéfense (Ministry of the Armed Forces), "The Longest Day: Behind the Scenes of a Major Cinematic Operation"
Cigar Aficionado, "The Longest Day"
Andrew Tarantola, Bitter and Bloody, Key Military, 2024
Normandy Then and Now, "When Hollywood met Normandy, on Sword Beach, 1944", 2018
French Cinematheque, film page for The Longest Day
Jean-Charles Stasi, Commando Kieffer, Heimdal, 2014
The Little Bedouin, "Ouistreham in trompe-l'œil"
Wikipedia FR & EN, articles "The Longest Day"
Also read:
The long take in Paths of Glory (1957) – The trench and the attack : five years before the Ouistreham casino, Kubrick laid the foundations of the continuous-take war film, with an approach radically opposed to that of Annakin, camera on the ground versus camera in the sky. The dialogue between these two examples illuminates the entire grammar of the genre.
Why the duration of a sequence shot changes everything : eight minutes in a helicopter is a long time. But what exactly does this duration convey, and why is it inseparable from the feeling you experience in front of the scene?
Long take: the complete guide : if you are new to the subject, this is the reference article to understand the history, technique and narrative stakes of long takes in cinema.
