When I first saw the DVD in the store, my first thought was 'Tom Selleck as Ike? No way.' Although I had my reservations, I picked up the DVD, and when I watched it, I felt that his portrayal of the general was superb. It reinforced the immense respect that I have for Selleck as an actor.
No, Selleck was not miscast.
Did anyone else change their minds about this?
Being that I'm a HUGE Magnum P.I. fan, and I like most of what Selleck does, I was really looking forward to seeing this movie when it came on tv, and I wasn't disappointed in the least. I never had any doubts that Selleck could pull it off, I just didn't think he would pull it off as good as he did. This was an excellent movie.
sharei don't know about miscast, because he did it so well. but just physically he didnt seem to fit. Ike was i belive a little shorter and not quite as strapping as selleck is, but still i think he did it justice.
George Baily : You made one mistake Mr. Potter you double crossed me and left me alive!
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carolinian:
I LOVED the movie; at first I as skeptical but when I saw him without his trademark 'stache' & a crewcut I was impressed;
But the guy who REALLY surprised me was James Remar as Bradley....after years of seeing him in '48 Hours', 'The Warriors', 'Band of the Hand', I never would have thought of him being able to play Brad.
NM
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I would say yes. While Selleck has a great screen presence and I am a fan of most of what he has done, it never got to be more than Tom Selleck doing Eisenhower. The screen play also seemed dour and leaden as it never gave me the sense of how Eisenhower forged competing egos toward the D Day invasion. Seems like a degree of historic revisionism with too much emphasis of lamenting the loss of americans which I don't believe fit in that time period.
I don't want to be mean though, the screen play provided the enormity and scope of the D Day invasion. Great photography and it gave the sense you were in 1944. And Tom Selleck did bring a vision and passion to playing Eisenhower
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When I saw this on the shelf at the local library my first instinct was "SELLECK? AS IKE??? YEAH, RIIIIIGHT!" Well, I saw not too much else that got me excited so I looked at the cover once again and said, "Ah Heck! Why not?"
I watched it last night and although I'm not a big Selleck fan, I must say that I believe he did an excellent job in this movie.
**My only disagreement is where in the overview 'PLOT' reads:
"IKE: COUNTDOWN TO D-DAY depicts the tense 90 days leading up to the D-Day invasion and how Dwight Eisenhower, against all odds, brilliantly orchestrated the most important military maneuver in modern history."
Although there are brief moments of tension in the movie, it appears to me that this was more about Ike's human side...about how difficult it was to make the decisions that were made. And his remorse in the loss of so many lives. As he says "Even just ONE..."
Congratulations Mr Selleck on a job well done.
Great portrayal. Powerful, but reserved at the same time. He never over-played the character as some actors might have. But he did fine.
God bless!
"Evil is powerless if the good are unafraid."
-Ronald Reagan
Selleck is several inches taller than Eisenhower and much heavier. But Ike was an athlete , wide-shouldered and slender-waisted. It impressed me that Selleck seems to have studied Eisenhower’s movements, and got them down very well. The chain-smoking was a habit of Eisenhower, and Selleck made great dramatic use of it. The voice is different, of course, and Ike was more brisk. As an aside, I point out that Ike was the only post-war president who did not involve us in military adventures and was able to extricate us from the one he inherited. To this day, though, it is not widely known that he planned and executed our intervention in the Lebonese Crisis of 1959, in which the brought to bare huge military resources which succeeded without a significant loss of men/material. Bluster though they might, the Soviets knew what sort of man they were dealing with.
shareI don't think Selleck was miscast, I think he did an awesome job
shareNo, I could never really see Tom Selleck as Ike. Some actors, like Ed Harris, have a great range. Others, like John Wayne or Clark Gable, for example, were successful by just being John Wayne or Clark Gable in every movie they were in. For me, Tom Selleck is like that.
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I just re-watched my copy of this movie, as I do along with The Longest Day and Episode 2 of Band of Brothers around the anniversary of D-Day almost every year. I have to say that Tom Selleck was better than Robert Duvall was in the 1979 miniseries Ike.
I remember, upon hearing about this movie when it was first released, being skeptical as to whether Selleck could pull it off. But then I saw his picture in TV Guide with his mustache and head shaved, in uniform as Ike, and thought, "This has possibilities."
Selleck is five inches taller than Ike was, (6' 3 1/2" vs 5' 10 1/2") but that wasn't as much of a factor as I thought it might be.
I like Robert Duvall and I respect him greatly as an actor, and he was naturally balding like Ike and closer in height to him. But when I saw his miniseries, I had to keep reminding myself that Duvall wasn't playing some fictitious general in some fictional war movie, he was playing Ike, the guy in all the WWII photos and newsreels, and who was President of the United States when I was a little kid. I wasted too much energy doing that to be able to accept him in the role. (I also had the same problem with Colin Firth in The King's Speech; I lived in Canada for a couple of years in the 1960s and there were still a lot of King George VI coins in circulation, and I had to keep reminding myself that Firth was supposed to be the guy on those Canadian coins.)
I didn't have that problem with Tom Selleck. I particularly liked the scene where he's talking to the 101st Airborne paratroopers the night before D-Day, maybe because the real-life photos of that event have become so iconic and Selleck took over the role convincingly.
To me, the best film portrayal of Ike is a tie between Henry Grace in The Longest Day and Robert Beer in The Right Stuff, albeit they were cameos and Beer was eclipsed in his one scene by Donald Moffat as Lyndon Johnson. But as far as a film or miniseries in which Ike was the central character, Selleck wins easily.