I dont think it was a delibrate slight against the British though which is what you are implying. It was just easier not to have them in. Different uniforms, guns etc, casting would have different. It would have just been extra padding and not particularly accurate. If they'd been included you'd have just got history fanboys moaning about "how did the Brits get to Omha?"
An American ,Joe McCarthy, flew with the Damn Busters but he was never portrayed even though he commanded one of the planes. Nobody ever criticized that film for being anti American. How many black or Indian pilots are portrayed in The Battle of Britain? How many British pilots portrayed in war films are from working class backgrounds?
You can pick apart a lot of war films but this criticism of SPR isnt justified.
I get that Spielberg was trying to make a war film, not an advert for Benneton
I don't think he was deliberately slighting non U.S. nations, just leaving them out for convenience of story telling a bit like early 80's kids toys adverts didn't deliberately exclude non white kids, it just happened that way until people started noticing. After that almost every advert had a person (unrealistic) of every colour all in one room per advert .. except SPR wasn't trying to sell toys to kids, it was trying to be historically accurate and did a better job than most war films so far, going that extra mile, speaking to war veterans for research, recreating tiny details authentically etc ... but I'm sticking to my guns that we should have and would have seen other nation's (not just British) allies .. somewhere .. at some point, even if the cap had had some background actors mumbling in non US accents in the background so as to not break the flow of the true story line .... not this bloke though ..
:fetish:
Just kidding ... but not this bloke though ..
On a slightly more serious note though, Alex Dudgeon was a UK soldier who'd marched across France, he was the youngest of his group, stumbled across the first machine gun he'd ever seen and was allowed to hang on to it by his captain, he described to me in great detail about four French women who were waving as his unit walked past then all lifted their skirts and flashed their fannies
.. Alex searched the dead German fellow he'd taken the gun from and found some jam and flour .. they holed up over night in a bombed church and his captain told Alex that, seeing as he was the one who'd found the machine gun, he was going to be on watch out duty that night while the other men slept ... the next morning, Alex dug a hole in a part of the shattered church floor, made a makeshift oven and made our lads crappy jam tarts ..
When Alex was in his 80's in 2001, he had necrosis of the flesh in one of his feet, it was causing him quite a bit of pain and in his nightmares, a German was a pushing a bayonet through his foot .. I ended up saying "Private Dudgeon, wake up! that is an order!" .. only way I could wake him up and then he'd make me promise not to tell the other men in his ward bay that he'd been crying .. then I'd make him a cup of tea and he'd say whatever he wanted to until I had to go to my next job and then he'd (hopefully) get back to sleep.
