01 Sep 1964
Action on the Beach
Behind the scenes look at the D-Day special effects created in filming The Americanization of Emily (1964).
This film tells the story of Col Rudder’s 2nd Ranger Bn and their heroic attack on the gun battery at Pointe du Hoc, which covered both Omaha and Utah beaches. Despite their thorough training scaling techniques that included sectional aluminium commando ladders, rocket grapples and ropes experienced commanders predicted a disaster. In the event bad weather, navigational errors and communications failure meant that less than 200 Rangers were delivered to the foot of the cliffs late and under enemy fire. Small groups of Rangers battled their way up ropes and ladders, with grenades bursting around them, to scale the muddy unstable cliff. A handful of men spread out and cleared the stunned defenders but, as often is the case, seizing the objective was only a part of the battle. Isolated for over 24 hours, with no relief from the near disaster at Omaha, the Rangers fought on against increasingly determined German counter-attacks.
Presenter
Presenter and Director
Presenter
Presenter & Producer
01 Sep 1964
Behind the scenes look at the D-Day special effects created in filming The Americanization of Emily (1964).

12 Aug 1969

A British Colonel is angry with his superiors after his entire platoon is slaughtered by the Germans in what he saw as a suicide mission. So for his next mission, he takes along a platoon a convicted criminals - to prepare the Normandy beaches for the D-Day landings.

08 Feb 2008

May 1944, a group of French servicewomen and resistance fighters are enlisted into the British Special Operations Executive commando group under the command of Louise Desfontaines and her brother Pierre. Their mission, to rescue a British army geologist caught reconnoitering the beaches at Normandy.

01 Mar 1979

Starting in late May 1944, during the German retreat on the Eastern Front, Captain Stransky (Helmut Griem) orders Sergeant Steiner (Richard Burton) to blow up a railway tunnel to prevent Russian forces from using it. Steiner's platoon fails in its mission by coming up against a Russian tank. Steiner then takes a furlough to Paris just as the Allies launch their invasion of Normandy.

25 Sep 1962

The retelling of June 6, 1944, from the perspectives of the Germans, US, British, Canadians, and the Free French. Marshall Erwin Rommel, touring the defenses being established as part of the Reich's Atlantic Wall, notes to his officers that when the Allied invasion comes they must be stopped on the beach. "For the Allies as well as the Germans, it will be the longest day"

15 Jan 1947

Bob Sharkey, an instructor of would-be spies for the Allied Office of Strategic Services, becomes suspicious of one of the latest batch of students, Bill O'Connell, who is too good at espionage. His boss, Charles Gibson confirms that O'Connell is really a top German agent, but tells Sharkey to pass him, as they intend to feed the mole false information about the impending D-Day invasion.

02 Jun 2019

Guy Martin undertakes a challenge to restore a plane from the Second World War, and recreate a parachute jump into Normandy, as thousands of Allied soldiers did during D-Day.

03 Oct 2007

A filmmaker returns to Normandy thirty years after a working on a movie based on a local homicide and tries to find the actors who worked on the project.

25 Jan 1970

"Patton" tells the tale of General George S. Patton, famous tank commander of World War II. The film begins with Patton's career in North Africa and progresses through the invasion of Germany and the fall of the Third Reich. Side plots also speak of Patton's numerous faults such his temper and habit towards insubordination.

26 Jan 1992

A documentary, using dramatization of fact, that examines the Battle of Verrières Ridge, where on July 25, 1944 and not long after D-Day, an inexperienced battalion of the Canadian Black Watch Regiment launched a doomed attack and was defeated with heavy casualties by veteran German SS troops. Part of "The Valour and the Horror" mini series.

03 Mar 1991

In 19th-century France, doctor's wife Emma Bovary seeks to escape her dull provincial life through various extramarital affairs and extravagant spending, leading to tragic consequences.

24 Jul 1998

As U.S. troops storm the beaches of Normandy, three brothers lie dead on the battlefield, with a fourth trapped behind enemy lines. Ranger captain John Miller and seven men are tasked with penetrating German-held territory and bringing the boy home.

01 Jun 2012

Victory in the Sands, the award-winning official Utah Beach D-Day Museum film, captures the dramatic events of the Allied landing at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944. As part of a top secret operation, brave Allied forces launch a bold assault on Hitler's Atlantic Wall against nearly impossible odds. This highly coordinated land, sea, and air invasion is a turning point of the war and marks the beginning of the liberation of Europe and the defeat of Nazi Germany.

01 Jun 2019

Unflinching and deeply personal, D-Day In 14 Stories interviews many of the last surviving veterans who were on the beaches of Normandy that fateful day 75 years ago (a rare spectrum of Allies and Axis); seldom-heard voices, including a female Resistance fighter, an African American, a Native American, Jewish Americans and a 5-year old French boy.

05 Jul 2024

In the midst of the D-Day invasion, a group of US soldiers are given orders to smuggle a member of the French Resistance behind enemy lines to assassinate a high-value Nazi target.

28 May 1980

A veteran sergeant of World War I leads a squad in World War II, always in the company of the survivor Pvt. Griff, the writer Pvt. Zab, the Sicilian Pvt. Vinci and Pvt. Johnson, in Vichy French Africa, Sicily, D-Day at Omaha Beach, Belgium and France, and ending in a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia where they face the true horror of war.

31 May 2004

The story of the senior-level preparations for the D-Day invasion on June 6, 1944 from the time of Dwight D. Eisenhower's appointment as the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, to the establishment of the beachhead in Normandy.

06 Jun 2014

The Normandy landings of 6 June 1944 were pivotal to the outcome of WW2. We learn when Churchill and Roosevelt first proposed the operation and how preparations started—finishing with the key events of D-Day and the far-reaching effects of its outcome.

24 Dec 2017

Over the centuries, Mont Saint-Michel, an extraordinary island located in the delta of the Couesnon River, in Normandy, France, a place floating between the sea and the sky, has been a sanctuary, an abbey, a fortress and a prison. But how was this architectural wonder built?

18 Mar 2022

Film on the recording of Peter Doherty's and Frédéric Lo's 2021 album "The Fantasy Life of Poetry and Crime" in Doherty's Normandy home.