How ‘Saving Private Ryan’ took its cues from Nancy Drew: “Red herrings and switcheroos”
Most people would assume, and for a thousand very good reasons, that Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan has absolutely nothing to do with Nancy Drew, the amateur sleuth created by Edward Stratemeyer who’s been a fixture of the literary world since 1930, but the director would disagree.
On one hand, there’s the classic World War II movie that was robbed of the ‘Best Picture’ trophy at the Academy Awards it should have won, and endures three decades later as the benchmark by which all other authentic and immersive war stories told on the big screen will forever be measured against.
On the other hand, there’s a teenager who lives in the fictional town of River Heights, constantly finds herself drawn into mysteries that only she can solve, and has become the subject of several films, a handful of TV shows, and over 300 books. Nancy traipsing around rural America is a million miles away from Saving Private Ryan‘s jaw-dropping D-Day landing sequence, so where’s the connection?
Only a filmmaker as schmaltzy and sentimental as Spielberg would use one of the quaintest, most inoffensive, and all-American literary characters, one largely aimed at younger readers, as a touchstone when developing a feature about a global conflict that claimed millions of lives and pitted countless countries against each other. Then again, maybe it shouldn’t be too surprising after all.
In an internal memo from March 1997, when Spielberg, screenwriter Robert Rodat, and various DreamWorks executives were refining the story, discussions were held over how to portray John Miller and his men embarking on their mission to locate and retrieve James Ryan, a soldier they’d never met, didn’t know what he looked like, and knew nothing about apart from his name.
“Steven paralleled the effort to find Private Ryan with a classic mystery template, whether it be Sherlock Holmes or Nancy Drew,” the memo read. “The quest for the MacGuffin should be persistent and intense, filled with red herrings, false clues, and switcheroos. This will help to elevate us from a war story into a real mystery about who and where Ryan is.”
To be fair, that’s not too far off from what ended up onscreen. Even though he’s the title character and the driving force behind the plot, Matt Damon’s James Ryan doesn’t appear onscreen until the third act, and as much as it sounds like it’s doing him a disservice to hang the MacGuffin label on his shoulders, that’s pretty much the function he serves.
As for the “red herrings, false clues, and switcheroos”? Tom Hanks’ Miller and his squad endure several fruitless attempts to discover Ryan’s whereabouts, and when they think they’ve finally located him, they make the mistake of telling Nathan Fillion’s James Frederick Ryan, not Damon’s James Francis Ryan, that all of his siblings have been killed and it’s time for him to go home.
That said, the chances of anyone who’s ever seen Saving Private Ryan sitting there and thinking to themselves, ‘You know what, this really reminds me of a classic Nancy Drew mystery’, are less than zero.
