The actor and World War II veteran who dismissed ‘Saving Private Ryan’ as “sentimental twaddle”
Steven Spielberg aimed to make Saving Private Ryan as authentic as possible, and as a result, the movie was almost unanimously praised by historians and war veterans alike as one of the most realistic depictions of combat ever committed to the screen.
However, that doesn’t mean the film wasn’t without its detractors. Oliver Stone, himself a combat veteran who’d earned medals for valour in Vietnam, admired the seminal opening scene, but didn’t care for the rest of the picture, even going so far as to say, if it were him, he’d have shot Tom Hanks’ John Miller.
Saving Private Ryan proved to be so realistic and reflective of the experience shared by the soldiers who’d fought in World War II that the United States Department of Veterans Affairs established a hotline “to assist veterans who experience emotional trauma as a result of the movie,” in the event that any scenes were triggers for traumatic recollections.
And yet, one actor, who also happened to be there during the Omaha Beach landings, had a different view. Having abandoned his fledgling career to enlist in the military after the war broke out in 1939, Richard Todd experienced his greatest success when he returned to cinema in the late 1940s.
He won a Golden Globe for ‘Best Promising Newcomer – Male’ for the 1949 war drama, The Hasty Heart, which also earned him Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for ‘Best Actor’. He worked with Alfred Hitchcock on Stage Fright, King Vidor on Lightning Strikes Twice, and was a member of The Longest Day‘s star-studded cast, to name just a few.
Speaking to The Guardian in 2009, Todd explained, with good reason, that he had no interest in watching modern-day movies that depicted D-Day, an event he experienced first-hand. When asked if that extended to Saving Private Ryan, rightfully regarded as one of cinema’s greatest-ever war stories, he admitted he hadn’t seen it, and he wasn’t planning on changing his mind.
“I don’t want to particularly,” he said. “I regard so many of the pictures made nowadays as sheer exaggerations. Sentimental twaddle. I don’t think I’d be very impressed with it.” Spielberg’s classic was widely embraced by the veterans’ community, including those who took part in the D-Day landings, but even though he was an actor by trade, Todd wouldn’t give it the time of day.
He does have a point in saying that many war films released in the last couple of decades have been guilty of ladling on the sentimental syrup a touch too think, but even as one of the most sentimental directors there’s ever been, Spielberg didn’t indulge one of his most recurring excesses too much.
Of course, just because he’d been there in the flesh, Todd wasn’t obligated to watch Saving Private Ryan to see if it got a passing grade or not, but he’s definitely one of the few to lump it into the “sentimental twaddle” category.
