Daily Dialogue — June 5, 2018

“You know those five thousand ships you say the Allies haven’t got? Well, they’ve got them!”

— The Longest Day (1962), screenplay by Cornelius Ryan based on his book

The Daily Dialogue theme for the week: Combat.

Trivia: 20th Century Fox was taking a real gamble making this film. At ten million dollars, it was a hugely daring venture, but even more risky was Cleopatra (1963), which was being filmed concurrently. This was to set Fox back the then unprecedented sum of forty million dollars. Although “Cleopatra” did well at the box office, it was simply too expensive to recoup its costs and nearly bankrupted the studio. Fortunately, this film turned out to be one of Fox’s biggest hits and helped offset the financial damage caused by the Egyptian epic.

Dialogue On Dialogue: I remember watching this as a kid and one thing which stuck with me was the Germans spoke German, the French spoke French. I believe it was the first movie I saw with subtitles. So the line cited above got laughs in the audience, based on them reading it.