1998 in Review: "Saving Private Ryan"
Saving Private Ryan opens with 25 minutes of the most gruesome, unsparing, realistic war action you’re ever likely to see, but it’s a little scene in a bombed-out building two hours later that haunts my nightmares. It’s the climactic battle scene in which the American soldiers are defending a bridge from the Germans. Private Mellish (Adam Goldberg) is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with a German soldier on the second floor of a building where he was taking aim at the enemy from high ground. As they roll around the floor, Mellish removes his knife from its sheath, but the German somehow rips it away from him and manages to pin Mellish to the floor. He brings the knife down to Mellish’s chest. For a brief moment, he summons the strength to resist, but it’s too late. Mellish realizes he has lost, and as the knife nears his chest, he starts bargaining. “Listen to me. Listen to me! Stop! Don’t don’t don’t don’t,” he shouts out, before the German plunges the knife into his chest, ending his life. It’s the bargaining that gets me.
All the while, the greatest coward in screen history sits on the stairwell beneath the warring soldiers, listening to their every move, paralyzed by fear, either unable or unwilling to help.
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