Language Barriers

"The Tower of Babel" as painted by Peter Bruegel the Elder in 1563...
Genesis 11:7 - "Come, let us go down, and there confound their language,
that they may not understand one another's speech."

There was this standup comedian – name escapes us – who admitted to anxiety attacks when movies opened with titles that had to be read. There are those among us who experience the same anxiety when a film is subtitled. Sometimes, subtitles are inevitable, particularly when the picture includes an international cast. Which brings us to a seemingly unique feature in a select few films wherein the players are distinctively split by nationality.

While you’re scratching your head, allow us to suggest, as an ideal paradigm of what we’re babbling about, 1962’s “The Longest Day,” executive producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s docu-saga of the Allied Invasion on the Normandy coast of France during World War II, in which American actors were cast as American soldiers, British actors as British soldiers, German actors as the German military, and French acteurs as the French Resistance, the latter two nationalities speaking their native tongues over English subtitles.

Not surprisingly, as it was produced less than two decades after the actual D-Day, a number of actors in “The Longest Day” were themselves veterans of World War II, some with stories of their own as harrowing as those depicted on the screen.

Eddie Albert, cast as a fictitious infantry colonel in “The Longest Day” (pictured below), toured Mexico as a circus clown and high-wire aerialist while working for U.S. Army intelligence, photographing German U-boats in Mexican waters. As a lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Albert was awarded the Bronze Star during the invasion of Tarawa in November 1943 after rescuing a number of Marines while under heavy enemy machine-gun fire.

Red Buttons, who played a paratrooper who survived being strung up on a church tower in Sainte-Mere-Eglise, the first village in Normandy liberated by the Americans (pictured below), had been drafted into the U.S. Air Force.

Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt, the eldest son of former President Theodore Roosevelt, was portrayed by Henry Fonda (pictured below). Fonda enlisted in the U.S. Navy after declaring, “I don’t want to be in a fake war in a studio.” Sadly, 36 days after leading the first wave of troops onto Utah Beach, earning the Medal of Honor for his command, Roosevelt, whose arthritis forced him to walk with a cane, died of a heart attack in Sainte-Mere-Eglise. He was 56. For his service during war, Henry Fonda was awarded the Navy Presidential Citation and the Bronze Star.

Roosevelt’s commanding officer, Major General Raymond “Tubby” Barton, was played onscreen by Edmond O’Brien (pictured below, with Henry Fonda), who served in the U.S. Army Air Force.

Steve Forrest (best known for his macho posing as “Hondo” Harrelson, the leader of TV’s “S.W.A.T.” team for two seasons in the mid-1970s), fought at the Battle of the Bulge. Incidentally, Forrest’s older brother, actor Dana Andrews, memorably played a troubled World War II veteran in “The Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946).

 . 

Steve Forrest is pictured as a captain in a parachute infantry regiment in "The
Longest Day," alongside John Wayne, as L. Col. Benjamin H. Vandervoort.
The role of Vandervoort was originally offered to 38-year-old Charlton Heston.
Incidentally, the real-life Vandervoort was 27 years old at D-Day.
Wayne was 55 years old when he played Vandervoort.

Although actor Robert Mitchum did not actively serve in the military during World War II, he deserves mention here for his stellar turn as cigar-chomping Brigadier General Norman Cota (pictured below), who famously declares on the beach of Normandy, "Only two kinds of people are going to stay on this beach - those who are already dead and those that are going to die."

Brigadier General James Gavin, nicknamed “Jumpin’ Jim” as the only American general to make four combat parachute jumps in the war, was portrayed by Robert Ryan (pictured below). Ryan himself had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps and served as a drill instructor at Camp Pendleton.

Rod Steiger, cast as a destroyer commander (pictured below), enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served as a torpedoman on destroyers in the South Pacific, seeing action at the Battle of Iwo Jima. “I loved the Navy,” Steiger recalled. “I was stupid enough to think I was being heroic.”

"You remember it, remember every bit of it, because we are on the eve of a day
that people are going to talk about after we are dead and gone."

John Wayne, who virtually bullied himself into the cast of "The Longest Day," demanded, and received, a stand-alone billing in the credits and a hefty salary of a quarter million dollars, compared to the modest $25,000 paychecks allotted the mere mortals around him.

It's no secret that John Wayne sat out World War II at home under the comfort
 of a family deferment (as the father of four) and under the coddling wing of a
movie studio reluctant to risk a bankable commodity to the hazards of combat.

On the British side, Richard Burton (pictured below), who portrays a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, coincidentally served in the RAF as a navigator (his poor eyesight prevented him from being considered as a pilot) during World War II.

Cast as a loudmouthed infantryman (pictured below), Sean Connery was actually dismissed from the Royal Navy because of a duodenal ulcer.

Kenneth More, who played Connery’s commander on Juno Beach (pictured below), served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy and saw active service on a cruiser and on an aircraft carrier.

Actor Richard Todd served in the King’s Own Light Infantry, the Parachute Regiment, and the 7^th Light Infantry Parachute Battalion as part of the British 6^th Airborne Division. He participated in the British Operation Tonga during the D-Day landings and was among the first British officers to parachute into Normandy as part of Operation Overlord. Todd met up with Major Reginald John Howard (whom Todd would portray in “The Longest Day”) on Pegasus Bridge on the Caen Canal and helped repel German counterattacks.

Offered the chance to play himself in "The Longest Day," British actor Richard
Todd (left) joked , "I don't think at this stage of my career I could accept a part
that small." Todd was portrayed onscreen by the faceless actor on the right.

The actors depicting German brass and boots-on-the-ground often had war stories of their own to share. Depending on sources. Hans Christian Blech, who played Major Pluskat, the literally shell-shocked officer who first sees the Allied armada emerge from the fog (pictured below), received his distinctive facial scars either from fighting on the Eastern Front during World War II or from an automobile accident as a teenager in Darmstadt, Germany. (The real-life Pluskat, who died at age 90 in 2002, was a military consultant on "The Longest Day.")

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

Gert Frobe, who played an oafish foot soldier nicknamed “Coffee Pot” in “The Longest Day” (pictured below), would gain international recognition as the titular 007 archenemy in 1964’s “Goldfinger” (although his voice was ignominiously over-dubbed by an English journeyman actor) Frobe joined the Nazi Party at age 16 in 1929 but left it eight years later. In 1944, he was drafted into the German Army, where he served until the end of World War II.

In 1965, Gert Frobe was quoted in a British newspaper as saying, “Naturally I was a Nazi.” He later denied making the comment, stating, “What I told an English reporter…was that during the Third Reich I had the luck to be able to help two Jewish people, although I was a member of the Nazi Party.”

Frobe’s movies were subsequently banned in Israel, until a Jew, Mario Blumenau, informed the Israeli Embassy in Vienna that his life and his mother’s had indeed been saved by Frobe when he hid them from the Gestapo.

On the subject of Bond villains and reluctant allies, sonorous-voiced Walter Gotell, born in Bonn, became a familiar presence as the KGB’s General Gogol in a several films, five with Roger Moore as 007 and one with Pierce Brosnan. Gotell had an early bit role as an assassin in “From Russia with Love,” starring Sean Connery. Gotell, cast as a German infrantryman in "The Longest Day," emigrated with his family to England after the rise of the National Socialism (aka Nazism) in Germany.

 

Bernard Lee, Roger Moore, Walter Gotell, and Barbara Bach
clown around on the set of "The Spy Who Loved Me" (1977).

Curt Jurgens, who played Bond villain Stromberg in 1977’s “The Spy Who Loved Me,” appeared in “The Longest Day” as Gerneral der Infranterie Gunther Blumentritt (pictured below),. Born in 1915, Jurgens worked as a journalist before embarking on an acting career on the Vienna stage.

 

"We are going to lose the war because our glorious Fuhrer has taken a sleeping
pill and is not to be awakened. Sometimes I wonder which side God is on."

Critical of National Socialism, Jurgens was sent to an internment camp in Hungary as a “political unreliable.” After the war, he became an Austrian citizen. In his first Hollywood motion picture,  “The Enemy Below” (1957), a World War II drama, he played a sympathetic U-boat commander opposite Robert Mitchum’s destroyer escort captain (pictured below). Like the aforementioned Major Pluskat, the real-life General Blumentritt served as a military adviser on “The Longest Day.”

General Alfred Jodl, the Chief of the Operations of the Armed Forces High Command who would sign the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich and was ultimately hanged in 1946 for war crimes (although he had asked the court, per military tradition, for a firing squad), was played by Wolfgang Lukschy. The Berlin-born Lukschy had an established career off-camera, dubbing voices for Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, and, among others, Robert Mitchum. Onscreen, Lukschy is most known internationally as the crooked border town sheriff, John Baxter, in “A Fistful of Dollars,” starring Clint Eastwood (pictured below).

Like Wolfgang Lukschy, Herne, Germany-born Ernst Schroder (pictured below, in "The Longest Day"), once considered one of the greatest character actors of the German theater, dubbed the voices of several American and British actors into German, including James Cagney, Rex Harrison, Spencer Tracy, and Peter Ustinov.

Schroder served briefly in the army during World War II, was wounded, and returned to the stage in 1942. When the National Socialism movement closed the theaters two years later, he returned to service in the army and ended the war as a prisoner in Italy. At age 79, he was diagnosed with cancer. In 1994, fourteen years after his daughter jumped to her death off the Golden Gate Bridge, Schroder committed suicide by leaping out of a window.

World War II interrupted the acting career of Wolfgang Preiss, who portrayed General Max-Josef Pemsel in “The Longest Day” (pictured below), but the war stayed with him as he continued to play German officers for the duration of his career, from the 1960s into the 1980s, including “The Train,” “Von Ryan’s Express,” TV’s “The Rat Patrol,” “Is Paris Burning?”, “Anzio,” “Raid on Rommel” (as Field Marshal Erwin Rommel), “A Bridge Too Far,” and the miniseries “The Winds of War” and “War and Remembrance.” Unsurprisingly, the real-life Max-Josef Pemsel, who passed away in 1985, was a military consultant to the makers of “The Longest Day.”

Preiss was also noted for portraying pulp movie villain Doctor Mabuse in a number of German films. Peter van  Eyck, who played the protagonist in a handful of those Doctor Mabuse movies, originally left Germany in 1931 and subsequently lived in Paris, London, Tunis, Algiers, and Cuba before settling in New York City. He played in piano bars and composed songs for cabarets.

 

Peter van Eyck takes an urgent call in "The Longest Day."

Van Eyck worked as a stage manager and production assistant for Irving Berlin, as well as an assistant director at Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre. Van Eyck would later costar with Orson Welles (who also directed) in 1955’s “Mr. Arkadin.” He befriended Austrian-born director Billy Wilder, who found radio jobs and small film roles for him. Van Eyck became a U.S. citizen in 1943 and was drafted into the U.S. Army as a commissioned officer. At the end of the war, van Eyck returned to Germany as a control officer for film. In 1953, he landed the significant role of the intense Dutch truck driver Bimba in the acclaimed French-Italian production “The Wages of Fear,” starring Yves Montand.

Incidentally, General Dwight D. Eisenhower was portrayed in “The Longest Day” by non-actor Henry Grace, an acclaimed set decorator with a striking resemblance to the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Nominated for nine Oscars, Grace won the Academy Award in 1959 for “Gigi.”

 

Hollywood set decorator Henry Grace (left) made his sole onscreen appearance,
as General Dwight D. Eisenhower (right), in "The Longest Day."

Eisenhower showed an interest in playing himself onscreen, but filmmakers deemed it would be too difficult to make him look younger. According to Mamie Eisenhower, Ike walked out of a screening of “The Longest Day,” apparently disgusted over Hollywood’s freewheeling artistic license with history.

Speaking of history, “The Longest Day” was one of the first movies about World War II made by an American studio in which members of their respective countries spoke dialogue in their own language. Despite being walked out of by Eisenhower, the film strove for a theretofore unseen authenticity in a war movie, and remained the most realistic depiction of combat until Steven Spielberg brought us “Saving Private Ryan,” followed by the miniseries “Band of Brothers” and “The Pacific.”

The French came up short in “The Longest Day,” relegated to a handful of scenes, with a short B-list of Gallic actors, primarily cast as fighters in the French Resistance. Which might explain why, four years after “The Longest Day,” French director René Clément collaborated with a German-born producer who worked in France on “Is Paris Burning?” (1966), based on a best-selling book co-written by a French author, chronicling the liberation of Paris in August 1944 by the French Resistance and the Free French Forces.

Swiss cabinet-maker, acrobat and burlesque dancer manager Billy Frick,
portrayed Adolf Hitler in "Is Paris Burning?" so convincingly that
National Lampoon magazine featured him on the cover of its "Escape!" issue.

This time, an A-list of French talent was called upon, including Jean-Paul Belmondo, Charles Boyer, Leslie Caron, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Alain Delon, Yves Montand, Simone Signoret, and Jean-Louis Trintignant.

Onscreen antagonists Gert Frobe and Yves Montand
share smiles off-camera on the set of "Is Paris Burning?"

Scripted by Gore Vidal and Francis Ford Coppola, the “Longest Day” wannabe, which also featured American heavyweights Kirk Douglas (as General Patton), Glenn Ford (as General Omar Bradley), Anthony Perkins (as a sergeant), Robert Stack (as General Edwin Sibert), and Orson Welles (as Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling), was a huge hit in (where else? France), but a box-office failure elsewhere. The film was spoofed in Mad magazine as “Is Paris Boring?”

As always, the inimitable illustrations by Mad's premier caricaturist,
Mort Drucker, highlighted the magazine's parody of "Is Paris Burning?" 

Thankfully, no subtitles were required reading when director Stanley Kubrick made “Spartacus” (1960), a fictionalized, high-brow sword-and-sandal epic (scripted by the controversial, onetime blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo), depicting the historical slave uprising in the Roman Empire spearheaded by a rabble-rousing gladiator.

Whether it was by Kubrick’s design or, more likely, by executive producer and star Kirk Douglas', the slaves, destined for a thumbs-up, thumbs-down existence as gladiators, were, predominantly, played by American actors, while British actors were cast as the Roman aristocracy.

Bronx native Tony Curtis and the son of New York City Jewish immigrants,
Kirk Douglas, defiantly declare, "I'm Spartacus!"

In his first motion picture, future Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner
George Kennedy had an uncredited role as a slave in "Spartacus."

john Ireland (center) was usually more comfortable in a Stetson, chaps ,and
cowboy boots,notably as Cherry Valance in "Red Rier" and as Johnny Ringo,
Kirk Douglas' nemesis in "Gunfight at the O.K. Corral."

With a voice that sounded like he gargled with gravel, film noir tough guy Charles
McGraw made an early Hollywood impression as s hitman in "The Killers" (1946).

Not unlike Hollywood contemporary Charles McGraw, Harold J. Stone (far left)
played more than his share of tough guys in a four-decade career.

Los Angeles-born Woody Strode's striking visage left its impression in such
westerns as director Richard Brooks' "The Professionals" and Sergio Leone's
"Once Upon a Time in the West."

Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier):
"...Spartacus. You are he. Aren't you?"

Yorkshire- born Charles Laughton (who plays Roman Senator Gracchus)
and Laurence Olivier were longtime acting rivals and off-camera were
barely on speaking terms.

Londoner Peter Ustinov won a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award
for his performance as the unctuous Roman slave merchant Batiatus.

Los Angeles-born John Gavin, cast as Julius Caesar in "Spartacus," actually
signed to portray James Bond in "Diamonds Are Forever" before Sean Connery
was persuaded to reprise the role. Gavin was appointed U.S. Ambassador to
Mexico in June 1981 by President Reagan and served until June 12, 1986.

New York City native John Dall was 25 when he was nominated for a Best
Supporting Actor Oscar in his first film, 1945's "The Corn Is Green."

Kirk Douglas was purportedly unsure about casting London-born
Jean Simmons as Varinia. He originally auditioned German actresses,
 but he didn't find them pretty enough and opted for Simmons.

There were passable exceptions, such as London-born Jean Simmons’ performance as Varinia, a slave and future mother of Spartacus’ son. Julius Caesar was depicted as a fledgling senator by Los Angeles native John Gavin, a sculpted slab of beefcake who played Janet Leigh’s lover in Hitchcock’s “Psycho.” Marcus Glabus, a Roman centurion captured and humiliated by Spartacus and his rebels, was portrayed by John Dall, an American actor best known as an icy, intellectual killer in Hitchcock’s “Rope.”

More overtly political was the division in the international cast of players in “Danton” (1983), a dramatization of the last months in the life of Georges Danton, a charismatic leader of the French Revolution. History regards Danton, who served as the first President of the Committee of Public Safety, a major force in the overthrow of the French monarchy and in the establishment of the First French Republic.

After living in self-imposed exile, Danton returned to Paris in 1794 as a moderate and opponent to the so-called Reign of Terror. A ten-month period of political “cleansing,” the Reign of Terror was marked by mass public executions of “enemies of the Revolution.” The death toll rose into tens of thousands. Over 16,500 were beheaded on the guillotine (nicknamed “The National Razor”) – 2639 in Paris alone – and another 25,000 in were killed in summary executions across France.

Georges Danton (left) and Maximilien Robespierre (right) were on the same side
at the onset of the French Revolution, but. in the words of critic Roger Ebert, "came
to have fundamental philosophical differences that only the guillotine could settle."

Danton’s political rival in Paris, Maximilien Robespierre, a lawyer, manipulated the Committee of Public Safety to facilitate his control of the nation and became the most influential figure of the Reign of Terror. Danton, convinced that the unbridled fury of the Reign of Terror was itself a betrayal of the ideals of the Revolution, stepped back into the spotlight based on his conviction to overthrow Robespierre.

The stage having been set for the political rivals, Danton, as depicted in broad, vibrant swaths by the physically imposing French actor Gerard Depardieu (pictured above), emerges as a passionate, excessive, sometimes dishonest, even vulgar champion of the people, an 18^th century rock star, while the wimpy Robespierre, as played by Polish actor Wojciech Pszoniak (pictured below), slithers through the drama as a small, aloof, fastidious dictator who recognizes Danton’s threat to his continued policy of wholesale murder of citizens for the good of France, and subsequently arranges a rigged trial of Danton and his execution.

According to critic Roger Ebert, who called the film “absolutely superb” and awarded it four stars, summed it up when he noted, “The two parts of the French Revolution were the passionate idealism and the utter finality of the guillotine.”

"Show the people my head," Danton tells the executioner, "it's worth it."

In the film, Danton’s supporters were portrayed by French actors, while allies of his rival, Robespierre, were played by Polish actors (dubbed into French). A co-production of Poland, France, and West Germany, “Danton” was directed by Andrzej Wajda, the politically savvy Polish filmmaker responsible for “Man of Iron” (pictured below), an acclaimed biopic of Lech Walesa, the tireless Solidarity firebrand who served as the President of Poland from 1990 to 1995.

Wajda had earlier directed “Ashes and Diamonds” (1958), often lauded as one of the masterpieces of Polish cinema. Set in post-World War II Poland, the picture featured a career-defining performance by Zbigniew Cybulski (pictured below), a brooding phenomenon behind sunglasses hailed as the “Polish James Dean.” Before he reached his 40^th birthday, Cybulski died after falling under a moving train.

Despite contradicting statements made in interviews by the director, audiences and critics alike saw obvious parallels between the depiction of the Reign in Terror in “Danton" and the tumultuous political climate in contemporary Poland, when the Solidarity movement was contending with the oppression of a Soviet-backed Polish government. In his review for The New York Times, critic Vincent Canby observed, “I supposed Mr. Wajda presents us with a Danton who is the articulate conscience of the Revolution, someone, perhaps, not entirely unlike Lech Walesa, the popular spokesman of Poland’s Solidarity movement.”

As depicted in "Danton," the sickly Robespierre is bedridden when Danton
is transported to his execution in a horse cart. Passing Robespierre's house,
Danton shouts, "You will follow me within three months! No one will remember
you, your house will be razed!" Danton was executed April 5, 1794. Three months
and 23 days later, Robespierre indeed fell victim to the Terror and the guillotine.

"Danton" angered Frenxh Leftists, while the Polish government postponed its showing in theaters indefinitely.

The Emmy Award- and Golden Glove Award-winning 1980 miniseries “Shogun” was based on James Clavell’s best-selling book, subtitled “Novel of Japan,” which itself was inspired in part by the life of British navigator William Adams, who journeyed to Japan in 1600 and became a Western samurai in the service of a shogun, a military governor appointed by the emperor.

“Shogun” cast Richard Chamberlain (dubbed “King of the Miniseries” for his performances in “Centennial,” “Shogun,” and “The Thorn Birds”) as a shipwrecked 17^th century navigator named John Blackthorne, “adopted” by a Japanese nobleman, Lord Toranaga (played by Japan’s most acclaimed and most recognizable actors, Toshiro Mifune) as his personal “anjin” (naval pilot).

Lord Toranaga (Toshiro Mifune) and John Blackthorne (Richard
Chamberlain) take a stab at communication in "Shogun."

The Japanese actors, understandably, speak Japanese, but when originally broadcast, the miniseries notably did not use subtitles for the Japanese dialogue. Since the production was presented from Blackthorne’s viewpoint, the filmmakers believed that what Blackthorne doesn’t understand, the audience shouldn't understand.

Twelve years before “Shogun,” the incomparable Toshiro Mifune costarred with Lee Marvin in “Hell in the Pacific.” During World War II, two soldiers – an American and a Japanese – find themselves marooned together on an uninhabited South Pacific island. The two enemies, separated by a language barrier, must inevitably work together to survive.

Lee Marvin, who served as Marine in World War II, received wounds at the Battle of Saipan in the summer of 1943 and was awarded the Purple Heart. Toshiro Mifune, drafted into the Imperial Japanese Army Aviation division, served in the Aerial Photography unit during World War II. Praising Mifune’s performance, a writer for the British Film Institute appreciated that the film “captures something of his range, humor and power.”

Directed by John Boorman (best known for the 1972 backwoods drama “Deliverance,” starring Burt Reynolds, Jon Voight, and Ned Beatty), “Hell in the Paciific” contains a minimum of dialogue, which, like “Shogun,” is neither dubbed nor subtitled.  Not coincidentally, the screenplay for “Hell in the Pacific” was written by Eric Bercovici, who co-produced and scripted “Shogun.”

“To the credit of the writers and producers,” The New York Times noted, “the dialogue…is not essential to understand…There are obvious exchanges that need no subtitles.”