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32 MARQUEE JULY 24 - 30, 1998
?JC
Even author Ambrose touched by ?Private Ryan?
MARION BELANGER
The Niland brothers are the subject of Stephen Ambrose?s best-selling book ?D-Day, June 6,1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II.?
By JANE SUMMER____________________
THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS
Stephen Ambrose is no wimp. The World War II historian is as crusty as an old master sergeant. As a writer, documentary maker Ken Bums says, ?Ambrose?s arsenal is imposing; his pen is a machine gun: detached, hot and devastating.?
But when the salty author saw ?Saving Private Ryan? at a special one-man screening, he asked the projectionist to stop after the
opening scene ? the horrific D-Day landing.
?I said, ?I?ve got to catch my breath. ? I felt as if I hadn?t breathed in a half an hour. I walked up the stairs and down the stairs in the theater about 10 times. Finally I got myself composed and said, ?OK, roll it!??
At the end, this vigorous man who has told the soldier?s story with such clarity and passion in 10 of his 20 books was physically and emotionally exhausted, barely able to walk from the theater. Although he had served as the
film?s historical consultant, Ambrose says, he didn?t know what to expect when the lights went down.
?I knew it was about D-Day and I knew they used my book to get incidents and scenes and happenings. Like everybody else, my idea of a war movie was Darryl F. Zanuck?s The Longest Day.? This is not ?The Longest Day.? ? Ambrose says he?d watched that 1962 epic many times, with a star-studded cast that included Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda and Zanuck?s girlfriend at the time, Irinia Demich, as a Resistance member. But, Ambrose says, he > saw ?The Longest Day? with new eyes after ?Saving Private Ryan.? ?Things 'just leaped out at me that I hadn?t thought about before. For example, there?s almost no "battle noise in ?The Longest Day.? What little there is fades out for the dialogue. You don?t want to miss a word of what John Wayne?s got to say. In ?Private Ryan, ? you have to lean forward to hear what they?re saying ? and you lose a lot of it.? Also, he says, when a soldier got shot in ?The Longest Day,? he was dead.
?The CO writes home to the widow or the mother that he never knew what hit him. He didn?t suffer. Well, it didn?t happen like that. Only in 1 percent of the cases did you get shot between the eyes or directly in the heart.?
Most of the time, he says, soldiers under fire knew what hit them. ?They knew their guts were coming out of their stomach and they were trying to stuff them back in. They cried out for mother, water, cigarettes and morphine. You don?t ever see that in Zanuck.? Another sight never seen in ?Longest Day? is GIs shooting Germans coming out of dugouts with their hands up.
?That happened a lot. It?s hard to imagine American kids doing that until you talk to them and ask how they could have done it.?
But the veterans he interviewed for his books didn?t mince words. ?They said, ?Listen, that (expletive) was firing until he ran out of ammunition and he hit my buddy. Now he?s out of ammunition and he throws his rifle down and comes out and wants to be my comrade. Screw that!? You see that in Spielberg?s movie.?
Some of the difference between the two films is due to their timing, he says. ?Before Vietnam, Spielberg could not have made ?Private Ryan. ? The public wouldn?t have accepted it, wouldn?t have allowed it. Being after instead of before Vietnam gave him a lot of room that Zanuck didn?t have.?
Reality
Minus the smell and smoke of battle, he says, the re-creation of D-Day in ?Saving Private Ryan? looks authentic. He never expected to see on the screen what he had heard from 1,400 oral histories of men who were there.
?There is (real combat) footage of Dog Green (a sector of Omaha-Beach), shot by. John .Ford or peo-_
ple working for John Ford. But all you see is smoke. Spielberg couldn't have the* smoke. It would have obscured all the action. On D-Day in that first wave, it?s exactly what Spielberg shows.?
Asked how he thinks Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and subject of Ambrose?s two-volume biography, would view ?Saving Private Ryan, ? he says: ?I think he would have said it?s wonderful to show the American people what the cost of war is, how horrible it really is and not glorify or glamorize it. . . . Ike was very big for people knowing what the cost of war is. He had a great line in 1954 at a press conference. ?When you go to war,? he said, ?you do it prayerfully.? ?
But Ambrose adds, ?I think he would have been unhappy with the plot line. I don?t think the Army would have sent out a squad to look for one guy. Now there is this kernel of truth to the story of Fritz Niland, but they found him right away and flew him out.?
Film?s inspiration
In his best-selling book ?D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II? (Simon & Schuster: $30), he writes of the four Niland brothers.
On D-Day, Sgt. Bob Niland was killed at his machine gun in France. A brother in the 4th Division was killed the same morning at Utah Beach. Another was killed that week in Burma. Their mother received three telegrams from the War Department announcing their deaths on the same day. To keep her from getting another, the Army snatched a fourth son, Fritz, of .the.l01sLAirbome_jQut Dllhe.
front line.
Ambrose cares deeply about the citizen soldiers who took the initiative and acted on their own when nothing was as they were told it would be on D-Day. On Omaha Beach alone, they paid a terrible price ? 2,000 casualties ? to break through Hitler?s Atlantic Wall and save democracy. He wants to make sure they?re not forgotten.
D-Day museum
On June 6, 2000, Ambrose, the founder of the National D-Day Museum, will open its doors in an old New Orleans brewery.
?We have artifacts in hand and it?s all go. I can?t tell you how wonderful it is. I?ve been after this for eight years and there were times when I thought it was never going to happen. I could write a hell of a good book on how to build a museum. ?
Spielberg, he says, has made a significant contribution to the museum both in cash and use of his name as a sponsor. At the premiere of ?Saving Private Ryan,? the filmmaker will make a pitch for the D-Day Museum.
?He?s also active with the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. I think it?s wonderful because these are the guys who put an end to the Holocaust. They were the ones who stopped it.?
In interviews for ?Private Ryan,? reporters have asked the historian why Spielberg never lets young people know in the film why World War II had to be fought.
?My response is, ?Well, that?s right. On the other hand, this is the guy who made ?Schindler?s List.? He doesn't have to tell us what this
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