D-Day, The Sixth Of June/Young Lions double pack [DVD] [1956]

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Editorial reviews

Amazon.co.uk Review
A World War II double-bill comes to DVD with the pairing of IThe Young Lions/I (1958) and ID-Day the Sixth of June/I (1956). p Edward Dmytryk's IThe Young Lions/I is one of the most thoughtful films about the War. Based on a novel by Irwin Shaw, it tells parallel stories of two American soldiers (Montgomery Clift and Dean Martin) and one German officer (Marlon Brando), whose war experiences we follow until they intersect outside a concentration camp. Martin plays what he calls "a likable coward", Clift is intense as a Jewish GI, and Brando experiments with the limits of his part as a Nazi re-evaluating his beliefs. Legend has it that Clift accused Brando of bleeding-heart excessiveness. Interestingly, the two Method actors share no scenes together. --ITom Keogh/I p ID-Day the Sixth of June/I is a misleading title for a very tame wartime romance with barely 10 minutes of combat in the last reel. What we mostly get is a year's worth of flashbacks depicting the reluctant, London-based affair of a married US staff officer (Robert Taylor) and a British Red Cross worker (Dana Wynter) whose commando suitor (Richard Todd) is fighting in Africa. To be sure, the emotional desperation and embattled decency of good people in time of war is as worthy of film treatment as any military campaign, and the script works pre-invasion Anglo-American tensions into the story. But the CinemaScope production is utterly formulaic, with leaden direction by Henry Koster. Wynter's porcelain beauty apparently didn't permit changes of expression, and Taylor looks about 15 years past his prime. --IRichard T Jameson/I

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2009-01-24 rating:
One ambitious underachiever and a soapy romancer
Heavily diluting Irwin Shaw's doorstop novel about two American soldiers and one Nazi whose paths gradually converge over the years from 1939-45 into an expensive but mostly not very good, often surprisingly studiobound CinemaScope soap opera, 1958's The Young Lions delivers a lot less dramatic weight than you'd expect from a film featuring both Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. br / br /The two stars only encounter each other in the film's last couple of minutes and don't even share a scene, but there's little doubt that if they did it would have been Brando who would have walked away with it, and not just because he has the most interesting character. Despite looking every inch the blonde Aryan ubermensch, his Christian is a much more sympathetic creation than the character in Shaw's novel, here a somewhat naïve believer in the Nazi Party who is gradually disillusioned and destroyed by the brutality he sees in service that takes him from Paris to North Africa and, ultimately, a near-abandoned concentration camp. In the novel Christian remained an unrepentant Nazi to the end, killing Clift's Jewish soldier before being killed himself, but the novel changes him from bully into victim in what would become the clichéd screen image of `the good German' who doesn't realise what the Nazis really are until it's too late (a change that infuriated Clift). Yet Brando, playing his part softly, manages to convince in a way his co-star never does, especially in his early scene when he tries inarticulately to explain to an American girl why he thinks the Nazi Party is a good thing for Germany. br / br /Sadly there's no doubting that the film's biggest liability as far as casting goes is Montgomery Clift, delivering one of the worst and most inappropriately amateurish performances you'll ever see from a great actor. Even allowing for the effects of the accident that left half his face paralysed, he's hopelessly miscast despite the role being reduced to little more than a variation of his From Here to Eternity persona: looking much older and frailer than his years, it's impossible to believe he's the young A-1 soldier other characters talk about. It's hard to tell whether he genuinely improves in the second half of the film or you just get used to the array of clumsy mannerism and inflections he adopts: certainly his last big speech is a painful bit of curiously underpowered overacting. Knowing that Clift felt it was his finest screen work and was certain it would land him an Oscar only makes it seem all the more painful. By contrast, Dean Martin's less prominent role as a Broadway star pulling strings to stay out of the front line who befriends him is much more convincing. Maximilian Schell, sounding curiously like a young Alan Arkin, also makes an impression as Brando's ruthless immediate superior, as does Parley Baer as Christian's bon vivant friend. br / br /George Stevens had tried to make the film years earlier, and he'd probably have done a better job of it than Edward Dmytryk who, post-blacklist, directs like a man who isn't taking any chances and who doesn't want any trouble. It's very much an old-school, rather stolid production for much of the running time, with limited location work in Europe and stock newsreel footage mixing less than convincingly with overfamiliar standing sets on the 20th Century Fox backlot. br / br /There are moments when the picture briefly sputters into life: a sequence of triumphant Nazi soldiers swarming over the steps of the Sacre Coeur in Paris like flies on a sugarlump as they take tourist photos of each other; an uncomfortable walk through a small town as Clift's prospective father-in-law who has never even met a Jew is forced to face his own anti-Semitism; Brando walking through the decimated streets of a blitzed Berlin; and an encounter with a self-justifying concentration camp commander who prides himself on being a good soldier (a scene somewhat compromised by half of his dialogue being dubbed by a French actor and the rest played in his own thick German accent). Certainly there is enough to make the film worth watching despite the not always convincing romantic subplots - Dean Martin and Barbara Rush's being particularly confused and underwhelming - but nowhere near enough to make the film live up to its potential, let alone become the `most revered film of this generation' that the film's laughably hype-heavy trailer that is this release's only extra promised (it spends almost as much time promoting producer Al Lichtman as it does the cast or the film!). br / br / br /1956 effort D-Day - The 6th of June is pure production line stuff given a CinemaScope and Stereophonic gloss, with the emphasis on romantic, rather than military, manoeuvres. Robert Taylor (understandably) loves Dana Wynter, who also (not so understandably) loves Richard Todd; Edmond O'Brien loves glory; and John Williams just hangs around the sidelines of both plot and frame as the quintessential old-world fogey. After much talk, guilt and plot contrivances, O'Brien loses his nerve, Taylor loses the girl and Todd loses even more. Waterloo Bridge it ain't. br / br /Very much an American take on the invasion (although in fact it deals primarily with a diversionary raid), Taylor's arrogance and the screenplay's clumsy culture clashes do give off an unfortunate aura of seeing the British as a bunch of ingrates who couldn't tie their shoelaces without help from the Yanks that is less than endearing. Sample dialogue: "I don't go for them Limeys. They talk fast, but fight slow." The Home Guard too are singled out for contempt. The very few other British to make it into the film are of the "Cor, luvaduck guv'nor" variety, although, to be fair, even fewer Germans are on view - while not exactly a cheapie, the budget obviously didn't extend to more than five German uniforms. br / br /Despite director Henry Koster's limited visual imagination - if there are three people in any given shot, you can bet he'll line them up left, right and centre without fail - and a total absence of close-ups so prevalent in early widescreen pictures, the old-fashioned CinemaScope is a virtue and one of the chief reasons for buying this: with little in the way of battle scenes and much mushy stuff, this is more one for undemanding romantics and readers of Mills and Boon than the Boys Own brigade. br / br /

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