Bob Landry’s landing film was not lost, nor is it missing. It’s right before our eyes. We don’t recognize it as such because we expect his first film to show scenes from D-Day. But there is no Landry film from D-Day, for the simple reason that, apparently, he did not land on D-Day. Certainly there is no evidence that he did. […]
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Film that did make it off the beach and back to London had to face two additional obstacles. First, would the censors pass it? The second obstacle was perhaps the most daunting: would anyone care about the images? […] In place of the established myth, with its enticing melodrama, I supplied an alternative tale with its own attractions, a complex skein of personal and interpersonal motivations: camaraderie, fear, failure, guilt, self-protection, white lies. No less rewarding, I’d like to think, just in a different way. […] The fact that this roll, along with the other films most likely classified top secret, got developed in LIFE‘s darkroom under the supervision of not just darkroom chief H. C. “Braddy” Bradshaw and LIFE staff photographer Hans Wild but also a SHAEF custody officer, precludes any possibility of some fatal neglect during processing. […] Nothing about this time-consuming yet vital censorship process was included in Morris’s version of the film saga. It is Morris’s deliberate avoidance or trivialization of the topic that raises suspicion that there must have been much more than he was willing to discuss. […] |
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