No matter what he does with the rest of his life, the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan is the greatest WWII sequence ever shot. Nothing comes close.
Dang yes. Spielberg is a cinematic genius. Credit where credit is due. Can't stand his politics.
Not very long before my father died, along with my older brother, we watched two movies together. One was Saving Private Ryan and the other was Schindler's List.
My dad served in the SPT during WWII but had made several beach landings under heavy enemy fire and had a close friend who BTW was Jewish and was at Normandy and my dad told my brother and me that the opening depiction in Saving Private Ryan along with the other battle depictions in that movie was as close as any Hollywood movie that he’d ever seen before had ever come to depicting what it was really like. At times it was a bit too close - it was very hard for him to watch.
Same for Schindler's List.
My dad was born in Norway - Kristiansand, he came to America as a very young child in the late 20’s but had family; his grandparents, several aunts, uncles and cousins who were living there under the Nazi occupation. His grandfather ran the local newspaper and wrote several anti-Nazi editorials and published anti-Nazi pamphlets and on at least one occasion, stood in the back yard of his house shooting his pistol at German planes as they flew over. This type of activity during the occupation would result in execution or being sent to a concentration camp.
The Gestapo was about to arrest him when his daughter got tipped off by one of the German officers she was “making nice with” and he went with the Norwegian Underground, the Milorg to live for a time up north in the mountains until things cooled off.
As to my great aunt – yes she “dated” several German officers during the occupation, seemed to be a “party girl”, a “loose woman” and also benefited from that – she’d bring home to the family things that were difficult to obtain and under rationing that she got as “gifts” from the German officers she knew such as extra sugar and gas rations.
After the war she was accused of being a Quisling, was briefly jailed but was never put to trial and was released. It turned out that she was an agent of the underground resistance and passed valuable information through them to the Allies.