The Fantastic Disappearing Rommel

At one point during his excellent commentary for the New Yorker Video edition of Robert Bresson's L'Argent, my friend Kent Jones takes a minute or two to lambaste what he calls a "ridiculous" onetime staple of Premiere magazine, a little box titled "Gaffe Squad" in which readers crowed about the continuity mistakes they discovered in both current and vintage films. Kent's rationale being that such gaffes pretty much have fuckall to do with the aesthetic worth of a picture and merely provide a somewhat meritricious method by which one can allow oneself to feel superior to a picture. Kent put it more eloquently than that, and I'm pretty sure he didn't use the word "fuckall." Anyway...since one is actually rendered incapable of "telling tales out of school" once a) most of said "school" has been bulldozed and b) you've been expelled from what portion of said "school" remains, I'll admit that I wasn't much of a fan of "Gaffe Squad" either, for reasons not dissimilar to Kent's. That's one of the reasons I thank God for the Internet: with the advent of such sites as MovieMistakes.com and such (what, you think I'm actually gonna link to it?), I could argue, as the print version of "Gaffe Squad" lay dormant, that online sites handled such things so much more briskly that it made no sense to revive it, much less move it into my beloved Home Guide section. And when such arguments stopped working, I just did my variant of the old "lalalalaicanthearyou" routine.

That isn't to say that there aren't some continuity gaffes out there worth noting. Some bring a kind of peculiar poetry or frisson to an otherwide ordinary film. And THAT isn't to say that 1962's The Longest Day is ordinary. I've been fascinated by this film forever, largely because, for all the drama of the event it depicts (that would be D-Day, World War II, y'all) the movie is so peculiarly scrupulous that it contains practically no drama. It's an environmental picture with big stars; it's not so much the percursor to Saving Private Ryan as it is a peer to Andy Warhol's Empire. (Incidentally, just as I would love to screen Todd Haynes' I'm Not There for a teen who has no idea who Dylan was, I'd love to get a reaction to Day from someone who's never heard of Henry Fonda, Robert Mitchum, John Wayne, Richard Burton, et al. Don't kid yourselves; there are such people out there.) If Douglas Gordon had real conceptual cojones, he'd have forged a 24-hour version of this film rather than Psycho.

But I'm getting away from my point, which is the gaffe. It's a pretty spectacular one, occuring only about five minutes into the film. Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Werner Hinz)—you know him—is looking out at the English Channel, and musing. It's a rear projection shot—Hinz is standing in front of a screen. So, anyway, he's musing, in German, as we see below:

...and then all of a sudden he just disappears—but keeps on talking, contemplating the mere strip of water separating England from the blah blah blah.

The shot continues for several seconds, with Rommel continuing to muse.

This is such a blatant error that one could convince oneself it was deliberate. As in, "what a remarkable artistic coup on the part of German director Bernhard Wicki, to drop in this blatant demonstration of Rommel's supernatural powers, and then never make reference to them again for the rest of the film!" Watching the remainder of The Longest Day under that particular spell could be the cinematic equivalent of reading Pierre Menard's version of Don Quixote.

Comments

[rockne]

This is interesting...insomuch as you think it wasn't a stylistic choice, but a gaffe...you think they would have let something that severe go by? You think he didn't just want to highlight the rolling surf? (Seriously.)

[Tom Carson]

As someone who's been spellbound by the Borgesian side of "The Longest Day" since childhood and is also a fan of Steve Erickson's ZEROVILLE, I think the obvious solution is to look for the other 1962 release where Rommel must inexplicably pop up for 5 seconds after vanishing from his own movie. Is he the disconsolate 77th trombonist in "The Music Man," the enigmatic 13th juror in a Nazi trenchcoat in "To Kill A Mockingbird"? I know "Last Year at Marienbad" may be our best bet, but there's no reason why he couldn't enigmatically appear in "The Days of Wine and Roses" when Jack Lemmon gets the dt's or checking out of The Enchanted Hunters in "Lolita." And really, the possibilities are endless: "In Search of the Castaways"? . . . "Gypsy"?

[Joseph B.]

One of my favorite war movies, and yes, I know exactly the scene you're talking about! I always mumbled, huh? when it happened, but then just passed it off as some sort of American nod to the nouvelle vague or something. And you gotta love the 3 minute tracking crane shot when the Allied forces storm into the bombed out city. Magnificent filmmaking.

[Herman Scobie]

In defense of Gaffe Squad, it allowed us plebians a tiny voice in the olden, pre-web days. I was thrilled to make the cut twice. It was a sign that you powerful media folks cared a tad. As for those never having heard of Fonda et al, how far away are we from a day when Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts are mere vague memories for the masses?

[Glenn Kenny]

True that, Mr. Scobie. But hey, the Premiere crew never considered its readership plebian, honest to God. There was a longstanding policy there of circulating all letters to the editor to the staff, right down to interns, the better to comprehend a) how what we were doing went over and b) the prevailing mood of the audience. I was always glad we did that.

We tried other experiments in reader participation as well, including interviews with actors using all reader-generated questions...

[colinr]

Well, I'm not a teen but as someone with little musical interest I've not had much exposure to Bob Dylan. I was wondering how best to go about approaching I'm Not There - go in cold or watch through the Scorsese documentary which I've got on tape?

[Glenn Kenny]

What the hell—go in cold, see how it feels to you. Then, if you wanna invest the time, look at the Scorsese doc and after that watch "I'm Not There" again and chart the difference...

[vadim]

Weird. I saw this when I was 16 or so and in no position to judge anything, but I liked it then, and this kind of confirms that there's something interesting about this movie. I remember the bird-signal moment being particularly awesome. It's all so brisk and business-like.

[Mr. Peel]

I have fond memories of the Gaffe Squad running gag of erroneous Laugh-In references in Oliver Stone movies, culminating in writing up a full history of the show, in case Stone intended to mention it in any future films. It was that sort of off-kilter sense of humor which the magazine had that I always enjoyed back in the day.

[Jeff McM]

Is it supposed to be Rommel's POV, maybe? Obviously if so it's still an awkward jump-cut.

[D Cairns]

My guess is, they wanted to cut from Rommel looking at the sea, to Rommel's POV of the sea, but they only had one bit of sea footage. Just optically blowing up the sea shot might have helped, though...

Then I checked my VHS off-air recording, which is cropped to 16:9 and not much use for critical study... except that the jump cut isn't there! Instead of the empty sea we get a longshot situating Rommel and his pals on a camouflaged wall, and it's a match cut from Rommel's pointing with his little swizzle stick. So it seems like the sea shot is indeed a straight gaffe, and a weird one that didn't make it into every print.