While John Wayne’s 1962 war epic might not be the most famous cinematic depiction of D-Day thanks to Saving Private Ryan‘s release, this critical hit did shape the later movies that explored the same event from their own unique angles. War movies vary widely in their approach to the subject, with some treating war as a patriotic spectacle while others engage with it as a fundamentally horrifying phenomenon. Tragic war movies like Come and See or Grave of the Fireflies couldn’t be more different from the likes of The Green Berets or other pro-war propaganda.
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That said, there is a surprisingly consistent approach to depicting one major real-life battle across various war movies and shows, and the success of one John Wayne epic from 1962 may explain why. Based on military historian Cornelius Ryan’s non-fiction book of the same name from three years earlier, 1962’s The Longest Day assembled a trio of different directors and a massive, sprawling ensemble cast to offer the definitive 180-minute portrayal of D-Day onscreen, and the movie still influences depictions of the event to this day.
The Longest Day Was One of the Earliest Major D-Day Movies
Split between Britain, France, Germany, and America, the production of The Longest Day mirrored the story the movie tells. The Longest Day attempts to encapsulate just how much planning and work went into the operations of that fateful day, and to this end, the gigantic cast of the movie includes John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Richard Burton, Henry Fonda, Rod Steiger, Robert Wagner, Paul Anka, George Segal, Sean Connery, and many, many more stars of the era. Numerous actual combatants also re-enacted their real-life roles in the movie’s version of the events of D-day.
An ambitious blend of documentary-style reconstruction and straightforward war drama, The Longest Day was a massive influence on Steven Spielberg’s seminal 1998 classic Saving Private Ryan. Of course, this means that The Longest Day was also a formative influence on later World War II movies and shows, such as Spielberg’s own Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Masters of the Air, as well as ambitious later movies that took on the war, from 2014’s Fury to 2017’s Dunkirk.
Later War Movies Borrowed Heavily From The Longest Day
It is perhaps telling that Variety summarised The Longest Day as not just a “stunning war epic” but also a “grand scale semi-fictionalized documentary,” since this description could be applied to an array of hit war movies and movies from later decades. The movie’s attempts at verisimilitude can be seen in everything from director Clint Eastwood’s famous back-to-back releases Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima to 2025’s Warfare, which promised new levels of veracity thanks to utilising actual combatants as consultants.
While The Longest Day remains a compelling war movie in its own right, it is tough to watch the epic in 2026 without noticing how much the sprawling story has shaped later movie and TV depictions not just of D-Day specifically, but of conflict more broadly. The central goal of this John Wayne war movie was to provide shape, meaning, and coherence to the chaotic conflict of actual war, and The Longest Day’s success in this endeavour went on to alter how generations of directors approached war as a subject.
