A quarter century Saving Private Ryan
On July 21, 1998, Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" premiered in Westwood, California, USA.
The history of the film's creation can be said to have begun in 1994, when 41-year-old Robert Rodat, at that time known mainly as a television screenwriter, while in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, saw a monument dedicated to Agnes Ellison and her sons. This woman had 6 sons and four of them died during the American Civil War. Rodat came up with the idea to write a screenplay based on the story of Allison's sons, but set in World War II. Naturally, to implement this idea, Rodat turned to literary and documentary sources about the participation of the US Army in military operations against the German army on the fronts of World War II. One of the books that Rowdath studied was a study called "Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest", by renowned American historian Stephen Ambrose. In this book, among other things, Rodat came across a description of the fate of the Niland brothers.
The four Niland brothers served in different parts of the US Armed Forces. Their parents in a short period of time, less than a month, received news of the death of three of them: on May 16, 1944, the eldest son, 32-year-old Edward, a pilot, was shot down in the sky over Burma, on June 6, 1944, 25-year-old Robert, a sergeant, was killed during a landing in Normandy, on June 7, 1944, 29-year-old Preston, second lieutenant, died there in Normandy. Only the youngest brother, 24-year-old Frederic, remained. Rodat came up with a story about the search for this younger Niland and based it on his script.
In fact, there was no need to look for Frederick. But first, a little historical background. Two years before the Allied landings in Normandy, a tragic event occurred in the US Navy: during the Battle of Guadalcanal, the light cruiser USS Juneau was sunk, on which five Sullivan brothers served. They all died. Then the US military leadership decided to distribute siblings to different military units. So the Niland brothers, in accordance with this decision, were distributed among different military units. On June 15, 1944, the unit in which Frederick Niland served was relatively calm, and he decided to visit his brother Robert. Arriving in his unit, he learned about the death of Robert and Preston. He had been familiarized with the notice of Edward's death earlier. In accordance with the procedures in force in the American army, Frederick, as the only remaining son in the family, was sent back to the United States, where he served in the military police in New York until the end of the war. And only after the victory in 1945, it turned out that the older brother, Edward, also managed to avoid death. Having descended by parachute from a wrecked plane, he was captured by the Japanese. Both Edward and Frederick survived into the 80s. But if the true story of the Niland brothers had been conveyed in the script, the film would not have happened, would it?
By the way, there is another detail in the film that is questionable, at least from a historical point of view. This applies to the so-called "Bixby letter", which in the film is read out with great pathos, moreover, twice, by General George Marshall. This letter was allegedly written in November 1864 by President Abraham Lincoln to the widow Lydia Parker Bixby, who was believed to have lost five sons during the American Civil War. In fact, Lydia Bixby's two sons survived the war and died much later for other reasons. The fate of another son remained unexplained. It is only known that he was captured by the Confederates, after which his traces were lost. And the authorship of the letter, according to many, does not belong to Lincoln, but to his secretary John Hay.
Rodat presented the draft of the script to his friend producer Mark Gordon. The producer liked the synopsis and submitted it to Paramount. The film company also liked Rodat's synopsis and commissioned him to prepare a full-length script. But before the film company paid for the screenwriter, Rodat had to rewrite the script 11 times, following the instructions of Mark Gordon. A year later, work on the script was completed. Initially for directing Michael Bay was assigned, who had just completed work on the movie "The Rock", starring Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. And Thomas Hanks was appointed to the main role of Captain Miller. But Bay very quickly realized that the assigned work was beyond his power. Then Hanks, who had long wanted to work with Steven Spielberg, introduced him to the script of Rodat. Spielberg did not hesitate to accept the directing a film based on this script.
Filming began on June 27, 1997 and ended on August 27, 1997. Initially, it was planned to shoot on the coast of England with the involvement of British Army soldiers as extras. But the British Ministry of Defense refused to provide the requested 2,500 soldiers. As a result, filming moved from England to Ireland as the Irish Defense Forces provided the required number of extras from the Army Reserve and the Navy. The British Ministry of Defense did provide several hundred of its soldiers. This army of nearly 3,000 extras spent nearly four weeks on the beaches of Ireland filming the Allied landings in Normandy.
In early 1999, Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan received five Golden Globe nominations and won two of them, the most important of which were Best Motion Picture - Drama and Best Director. In both of these nominations, the film's main competitor was Peter Weir's "The Truman Show". A little later, Spielberg's film received 11 Oscar nominations and won 5 of them, including the Best Director nomination. In the Best Film nomination, the American Film Academy preferred John Madden's "Shakespeare in Love".
Outside the United States, the accomplishments of Spielberg's picture were somewhat more modest. The British Film Academy nominated the picture for their BAFTA award in 10 categories, but the victory was awarded in only two of them, moreover, technical ones. In the Best Picture nomination "Saving Private Ryan" lost to "Shakespeare in Love", and in the Best Director nomination, the British Film Academy preferred Peter Weir for his "The Truman Show". The French film academy nominated Spielberg's picture for the César Award in the Best Foreign Film category, but Roberto Benigni's Italian film "La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful)" was recognized as the winner in this category. The company of "relative losers" to Spielberg's film was "Titanic" by James Cameron and "Central do Brasil (Central Station)" by Walter Salles. The European Film Academy also nominated Spielberg's film for its Screen International Award, which includes non-European films. But the victory was awarded to "The Truman Show". Here, "Saving Private Ryan" was joined by "The Big Lebowski" by Joel Coen. Finally, while listing the prestigious festival venues that "Saving Private Ryan" participated in, we should mention the nomination of the Japanese Film Academy in the Best Foreign Film category. But the Japanese Film Academy preferred another film - Curtis Hanson's "L.A. Confidential". In this case, Spielberg's film was accompanied with James L. Brooks' "As Good As It Gets" and Gus Van Sant's "Good Will Hunting".
Leading American film critics gave the film the most rave reviews. Thus, The New York Times film reviewer Janet Maslin noted in her review:
"Spielberg uses his preternatural storytelling gifts to personalize the unimaginable, to create instantly empathetic characters and to hold an audience spellbound from the moment the action starts. Though the film essentially begins and ends with staggering, phenomenally agile battle sequences and contains isolated violent tragedies in between, its vision of combat is never allowed to grow numbing. Like the soldiers, viewers are made furiously alive to each new crisis and never free to rest."
The guru of American film criticism Roger Ebert gave the film the maximum 4 stars in his system, included it in his list of "Great Movies" and noted in his review:
""Saving Private Ryan" is a powerful experience. I'm sure a lot of people will weep during it. Spielberg knows how to make audiences weep better than any director since Chaplin in "City Lights." But weeping is an incomplete response, letting the audience off the hook. This film embodies ideas. After the immediate experience begins to fade, the implications remain and grow."
However, along with laudatory reviews, there were also directly opposite ones. Thus, one of the most respected film critics, Pulitzer Prize winner, Columbia University professor Andrew Sarris wrote:
"Prodigiously produced and researched, ambitiously acted, and grandiloquently scored by the eternal John Williams, Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan is the ultimate buddy-buddy picture of the 90’s with surprisingly little moral, historical or emotional resonance, which is to say that I found it tediously manipulative despite its Herculean energy. Still, the nearly-three-hour-long boom-boom shaggy-dog story set in the time and place of D-Day in 1944 is the kind of hot-air balloon that wins Oscars for its production values alone. And these, I concede, are considerable."
Russian film critics mostly praised Spielberg's film. For example, Dmitry Puchkov provided his review with a lot of laudatory epithets, noting that the battle scenes in the film are generally the best of what is in world cinema. At the same time, Puchkov does not deny that Spielberg's film is propaganda. But, according to him,
"there is different propaganda. For example, there is a stupid one and there is a good one. Stupid — it's like now in Russia. When to scream incessantly about how everything has become marvellous and wonderful."
Spielberg's film is an example of good propaganda. Because it shows that
"American soldiers in a difficult moment for their country did not hide like scum in the cracks, but took up arms, and, as befits men, went to war."
The following figures speak about the assessment of Steven Spielberg's film "Saving Private Ryan" by ordinary moviegoers. On a budget of $70 million, the film grossed over $480 million worldwide. 78% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10, and 26% of users rated the film with the highest score - "ten". Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Steven Spielberg's film "Saving Private Ryan" according to FilmGourmand was 9,481, which allowed it to take 88th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
