On the 81st Anniversary of D-Day, Stars Who Served Have Lessons for Hollywood

At Friday’s 81st anniversary of D-Day, few who liberated France will be on hand to offer living testimony. But vivid stories endure in films created by those who assaulted Normandy Beach, offering guidance to a Hollywood that seems alienated from its audience. In November 2017, Fox News Channel asked Justice Clarence Thomas if he was “surprised how things are still so rancorous” with segregation ended. He replied that he wasn’t, because citizens had drifted apart. Filmmaking, now a career, is one industry far removed from its fellow citizens.Justice Thomas lamented that “some people have decided that the Constitution … history … culture and principles aren’t worth defending.” He asked, “What binds us? What do we all have in common anymore?” The answer, after World War II, was a culture depicted by Hollywood.In the 1940s, Americans forged ties across social barriers. Having faced a threat to their existence, they marched with Ben Franklin’s Spirit of 1776. “We must all hang together,” he told his fellow signers of the Declaration of Independence, “or assuredly we shall all hang separately.”The Americans who assaulted Normandy alongside British, Canadians, and others came from all walks of life, including filmmakers. A character actor, Charles Durning, charged Omaha Beach with the first wave. Shot several times, he was one of the few in his group to live.James Stewart, a brigadier general, was the executive officer of the 8th Air Force Group on D-Day. Art Carney fought as an infantryman and machine gun crewman throughout the conflict. At Normandy, shrapnel chewed up his leg, resulting in a limp noticeable on “The Honeymooners.”Paul Frees, also wounded, was an actor and songwriter who voiced roles from Boris Badenov in “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” to the Ghost Host at Disney’s Haunted Mansion. The Screen Actors Guild president, Robert Montgomery, served aboard the destroyer USS Barton.A famed director, John Ford, was on USS Plunkett 81 years ago. After watching the destroyer’s first troops launch onto Omaha Beach, he followed them with Coast Guard cameramen to record the price of freeing Europe. Richard Todd was part of the U.K.’s airborne invasion. Tasked with stopping the Germans from attacking across a strategic bridge, he parachuted from his plane before anyone else. Another Englishman, David Niven, was among the first officers ashore.“Young man,” Winston Churchill told Niven before becoming U.K. prime minister, “you did a fine thing to give up your film career to fight for your country,” but “had you not done so, it would have been despicable.”Henry Fonda said he “didn’t want to be a fake in the war studio,” either. On D-Day, he was a quartermaster on the destroyer USS Satterlee. He starred in the 1962’s “The Longest Day,” dramatizing Operation Overlord, D-Day’s codename, as Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr., son of the president. A British actor, Sir Alec Guinness, helped land a troop plane on the doorstep of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. Efrem Zimbalist Jr. led a platoon into combat at Utah Beach. They pushed into France during Operation Cobra and relieved a division surrounded by Nazis.A Canadian, James Doohan, was riddled with bullets when a sentry mistook him for a German, losing a finger as can be glimpsed in “Star Trek.” His obituary included a recollection of June 6, 1944. “The sea was rough,” he said, “and we were more afraid of drowning than the Germans.”These wartime experiences informed what came out of Hollywood after the guns fell silent and the people in theaters could relate to the people on screen. They understood each other; films felt more real and visceral as a result.Today, society’s connective tissue has atrophied. Only one A-list actor of the current generation, Adam Driver, served in the military, enlisting in the Marine Corps after 9/11. A Navy SEAL, Ray Mendoza, co-wrote and directed last month’s “Warfare” about the Battle of Ramadi, Iraq.War is a terrible price to pay to improve films. Yet Hollywood can find inspiration in its predecessors on D-Day. Filmmakers can walk with fellow citizens in peacetime to better entertain, overcome rancor, and find common ground that all Americans agree is worth defending.

On the 81st Anniversary of D-Day, Stars Who Served Have Lessons for Hollywood

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