SnoopyStyle The plans for the D-Day invasion is being set closely consulting with Winston Churchill. Dwight D. Eisenhower (Tom Selleck) has to corral the disparate personalities on the task at hand. Gen. Montgomery wants a slashing strike but must accept the broad invasion. Patton has caused international tension with his off-the-cuff public comments and Ike sidelines him as a diversion. The predictions of casualties are dire. The plan is besieged by equipment shortages, near-discovery by the Nazis, delay, and a fear of failure. On June 6, 1944, Ike sets off the biggest amphibious assault ever attempted.Tom Selleck is bald and without his mustache. He still looks like Tom Selleck. I don't necessarily buy him physically but he has that commanding presence. This is not an action movie. It is a character study. There are several strong characters and each one is played competently. Bruce Phillips is great as Montgomery. I like all the behind the scene jockeying and the back story.

im_veritas_photo Tom Selleck scores an honest tour de force in his portrayal of General Dwight David Eisenhower, Commander-In-Chief, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force, European Theatre of Operations, in the weeks and final days leading up to June 6, 1944. (I am so proud to have gotten that entire title correct.) The plan for the invasion of Hitler's Europe was developed primarily by General Eisenhower, with the help of his allied staff. This made sense. Eisenhower was, as he himself admitted, primarily an organizer and planner. That he indeed was a supreme planner led to the ultimate success of Operation Overlord.Eisenhower had to fight hard, against fractious political forces, for Churchill's and Roosevelt's acceptance. They eventually granted Ike unfettered command of all the allied forces engaged in the landing at Normandy.Few people, myself included, really appreciate the mass of details which had to be coordinated for D-Day. Watch this movie and learn at least some of them. Almost three million troops crossed the English Channel to land in France on, and immediately after, D-Day. Nothing like this had, of course, ever occurred in all of human history. One can only hope nothing like it ever need occur again.This 2004 film has me convinced I'll always, from now on, carefully examine those "Made For TV" movies for gems like this one. All this praise for a movie that has not one bit of "action" in it. It's all docudrama, all about planning and preparation. It is better than anyone might predict.Tom Selleck was, as I indicated above, masterful. I have always liked him as an actor; now I truly admire his acting ability. Selleck belongs with the best.Kudos! A perfect movie, in every way. To hear me say that is really quite rare.

Robert J. Maxwell Not badly done, this story of the way Dwight D. Eisenhower managed to pull off the risky Normandy landings in 1944. It shows its low TV budget but I suppose we can do without still another majestic spectacle and settle for a little more in the way of a character study.Tom Selleck as Ike is surprisingly good. He's an unpretentious and likable guy, a hunk to women maybe but he seems to be accessible as a buddy too. That cracked voice maybe.Here he shrugs off his lackadaisical Magnum P. I. persona and does quite a good job of being Eisenhower, more adaptable than anyone might have thought. He's put on a few pounds for the role, had the hair shaved off his frontal area, and deepened his voice. There's another thing too. Eisenhower smoked like a volcano, and this is shown in the movie. He's constantly puffing away, as are many of the other characters. Smoking cigarettes wasn't the stigma then that it has now become. Butts were in your package of K rations, along with all-American chewing gum. The writers and producers were right to leave out some of Ike's pecadillos, like his affair with his aide, Kay Sommersby. There's no room for romance in this compact drama. But the smoking belongs. It's even used as a gag at Montgomery's expense, which I won't explain. It would have been tempting to drop all the cigarettes from the film and make it more PC. The film makers ought to be complimented on retaining them. The script of course doesn't give him any flaws. He's the hero after all. He never loses his temper. He doesn't browbeat anyone. Well, he DOES let his weather man, Stagg, have a couple of powerful jabs. He has doubts about the invasion schedule but not about himself. We see him doing one of the things Ike did best. He managed to pull together a team of disputatious colleagues and subordinates who were jealous of one another. (He did the same thing as president; he was like your nice uncle.) Every story has to have some sort of obstructionist. In this one it's Charles DeGaulle, who disapproves of Ike's plan and refuses to cooperate with the landings -- something that didn't happen in real life. He and Ike have an argument about who should make the announcement of the landings. It's left unresolved, an editorial imperfection. DeGaulle wasn't easy to work with. Winston Churchill remarked of him, "The heaviest cross I have to bear is the Cross of Lorraine." Selleck gets good support from the rest of the cast, whom we get to know fairly well. Especially neat is General Omar Bradley, even less pretentious than Ike. (Bradley is played by James Remar, whose name sounds as if it ought to mean something when spelled backwards, but it doesn't.) Man, you have to put these guys next to the pompous, prop-carrying MacArthur and his florid prose to appreciate their humility. Ike went on after the war to serve as president of Columbia University and was later elected president of the US for two terms. He was no more colorful as a politician than as a general, but he took us through eight years of the worst part of the Cold War, finally brought an end to the Korean conflict, and foresaw the rise of what he called "the military-industrial complex." A decent guy, and this is a pretty decent movie about a couple of extremely tense days in his life.

pax-18 I swear you come off feeling more sympathy for the Germans than the French after seeing this. There are serious omissions and out of context statements that portray the French in every which way possible in a negative light. Its so obviously tainted by current politics (and I'm sure Tom Selleck's conservative politics) its not funny. The one time in the show where Churchill makes the off comment about the French trying to impede their escape from Dunkerque. As if they were collaborating with the Germans at the time... Totally out of context I cant believe Churchill would've made that comment to Ike at all. It was probably completely made up for the show. See the great BBC docu series "History of WW2" for the context.The admiral in charge of French forces in the area at the time wanted to stay in the fight. He expected the Brits to fulfill their obligations in their alliance at the time and not abandon the field of battle. He didn't understand they couldn't fight on probably because being an admiral vs a land force general didn't help in his understanding the Germans had far superior tactics and there was no point in keeping up the fight and risk the capture of 400 000 allied troops by the Germans. The motivation was honest though not one of a backstabbing nature. The French admiral saw cowardice in his eyes. And he felt betrayed and abandoned by his British allies.But also the fact the French had to threaten the closure of the port (tho they had no means of really doing it) if the Brits didn't evacuate them on a 50\50 basis is a sad statement on the British leadership far more than the French leadership at the time. In the last days of the Dunkerque evacuation 100 000 french soldiers held the line while the remaining 40 000 brits got first dibs off the continent. Hows that for "surrender monkeys"? I seriously hope Americans will get a chance to see the BBC series dramatized documentary "History of WW2" and get a truer picture of what really happened. So that unlike the sad distorted comment by the main comment posted for this picture and the awful Ike program they can really get an honest perspective of what happened.