Out of the sky comes the screen’s most incredible spectacle of men and war!
A Bridge Too Far (1977) Film Summary
Today, usually relegated to the status of DVD filling out the collection of war movies along with, say, Kelly’s Heroes (1970) or The Dirty Dozen (1967) you bought last Father’s Day, A Bridge Too Far deserves a little rehabilitation. Richard Attenborough directed this big-budget, would-be blockbuster combat epic between his well-received Young Winston (1972) and his Oscar-garlanded Gandhi (1982), which of course everyone who’s ever studied modern history at high school has been forced to watch.
By comparison, A Bridge Too Far was largely dismissed at the time as a lumpy, overlong downer and misfire for the usually prestigious actor-turned-director Attenborough and screenwriter William Goldman, who adapted the script from a book of the same title by Cornelius Ryan. An Irish-born writer, Ryan had come to specialize in panoramic historical accounts detailing the big events of World War II, replete with flavorful illustrating vignettes taken from copious interviewing and research, most famously The Longest Day, which had been popularly filmed in 1962. Whereas The Longest Day depicted an event that has become essentially the modern world’s creation myth, D-Day, A Bridge Too Far concerned itself with a much less romantic moment in the Allies’ journey to victory, the grueling, bloody, badly failed Operation Market Garden.
This was a bold plan hatched by Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery in an attempt to end the war early and outpace rival George Patton. The operation saw a massive drop of paratroopers to capture three vital bridges, including one over the Rhine at the Dutch city of Arnhem, with the aim of establishing a foothold there and allowing an easy invasion of Germany’s industrial belt. To get the job done, the paratroopers, from the American 101st and 82nd and the British 1st Airborne, had to hold the three bridges while the British XXX Corps charged 62 miles up a narrow, heavily defended highway to relieve them.
But the plan, which was partly predicated on an implicit assumption amongst much of the Allied general staff that the Germans were in essence already beaten or had channeled too much of their strength against the Soviets to give real resistance, quickly began to show holes, especially as the operation was flung together in quick time and supply and equipment issues piled up with fatal consequences. Pure bad luck also beset the valiant attackers, as the 1st Airborne soldiers, led by Maj. Gen. Roy Urquhart (Sean Connery) with stalwart support from Lt. Col. John Frost (Anthony Hopkins), found themselves trying to battle off a whole SS tank corps transferred to the region by Von Rundstedt (Wolfgang Preiss) for a rest.
Agonizing difficulties slowed up the advancing column, including losing the first bridge to demolition and stiff defenses at the second at Nijmegen, while the 1st Airborne were steadily decimated in a shrinking pocket.
Attenborough tackled Ryan’s account armed with a cast of well-known faces to help the audience orient themselves in a complex landscape but who could also distract with random spot-the-star discourse. Like Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), A Bridge Too Far affixes docudrama-like, detail-based storytelling to a big, prestigious, potentially unwieldy production usually given to more simplistic projects.
Also like that earlier film, while the result is obviously not perfect, I get the feeling it was met with a cool reception less for any major flaws than for its downbeat focus on one of the less glorious moments of the now-sanctified war, as well as the fact that war epics were conspicuously out of favor in the ‘70s. The day for projects like this had been ten to fifteen years earlier: cast member Michael Caine had done a few rounds with the Gerries in the similarly sprawling Battle of Britain (1969), while Connery, in his pre-Bond days, had been in The Longest Day.
A Bridge Too Far might well be called a subversion of the war-epic genre by dint of its essential thesis that war is a terrible, all-encompassing event regardless of the heroism that it can stoke on a small scale. Attenborough’s film was a much bigger hit in Europe than in the US, perhaps because it describes the war in a way only people who had the conflict land right in their own yard might readily grasp, as an imposition of madcap armies smashing cities, homes, and infrastructure, the work of centuries.
Attenborough presents a handful of ordinary Dutch citizens—father and son resistance workers (Siem Vroom and Erik van’t Wout), Kate ter Horst (Liv Ullmann), who lets her house be used as a hospice for wounded soldiers, and humanitarian Dr. Jan Spaander (Laurence Olivier)—as avatars for those who do their best to cope with the carnage consuming their living space and ultimately fall victim to it.
These events were certainly worth recounting, replete with incidents of courage and horror, mostly well conveyed by Attenborough. Some of the more memorable include a young soldier gunned down trying to drag air-dropped supplies back to his comrades, whose load was revealed to have been a worthless load of spare regimental caps, and 82nd Maj. Julian Cook (Robert Redford) leading a desperate attack by boat across the Waal River to capture the Nijmegen Bridge, chanting his Hail Marys all the way.
A vignette featuring James Caan as one Sgt. Dohun is virtually a short film in itself, as he sets out to save the life of his wounded Captain (Nicholas Campbell), including a dangerous jeep charge through enemy lines and threatening an army surgeon (Arthur Hill) with his 45, building a great punchline as the surgeon, after explaining he must punish such actions, commands an MP to hold Dohun under arrest for ten seconds. Elliott Gould turns up amusingly cast as a classically foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping Yankee warrior, Stout (Actually, I was born in Yugoslavia, but hey, what’s the difference?”).
When the first bridge is blown up by the Nazis before his eyes, he has to oversee building a Bailey bridge to get the operation advancing again, exchanging quips all the while with J.O.E. Vandeleur (Caine), a swashbuckling Brit officer eager to charge like the cavalry towards Arnhem but foiled by the mounting difficulty of the task. Gene Hackman is oddly cast as Maj. Gen. Sosabowski, leader of a Polish detachment of paratroopers intended to relieve Cook’s forces, who sees so much danger in the plan that he almost asks for a letter excusing him of responsibility for how it turns out. Dirk Bogarde is Lt. Gen. “Boy” Browning, the immediate overseer of the operation, who blinds himself to its faults. Meanwhile, Preiss, Hardy Kruger, Maximilian Schell, and others fill out the uniforms on the German side, not really given much to do.
Like many thespians turned filmmakers, Attenborough had a fine touch with fellow actors, and here that fine touch helps stave off the unevenness of performance apparent in many all-star projects. Just about everyone here is on form, particularly Connery, who brings quiet, restrained, but definite grit to his role, and Bogarde. Gould does tend to be a bit broad, while Hackman and Ryan O’Neal don’t quite seem comfortable, with the latter playing the increasingly beleaguered and angry 82nd commander.
A Bridge Too Far actually contains the most compelling cinema Attenborough has ever managed, as well as some of his most laborious. Globs of red blood falling on a pristine white carpet and a young soldier tooting away on a flute in the middle of a battlefield clamor unsubtly to strike notes of pathos, and a plaintive rendition of “Abide with Me by a chorus of battered soldiers about to be taken prisoner recalls the coda of Paths of Glory (1957) a mite too strongly. Attenborough had a gift for staging—his films always convince greatly on a level of vistas and crowds and a convincing sense of time and place—but no great camera imagination.
Here in the film’s concluding forty minutes or so, his grip on a sense of how all the pieces connect begins to break down into a succession of well-shot but stagy tableaux vivants. A Bridge Too Far falls victim to a fairly common problem with this kind of moviemaking, one that The Longest Day escaped partly from sheer filmmaking savvy and also because the episodic sprawl actually helped its impact—the sense of a great event encompassing whole tribes of people.
The tragic history enacted here demands a more specific and personal axis, but some figures presented as vital to comprehending this undertaking, like Vandeleur, just don’t actually become that important. Meanwhile, Olivier’s Spannder and Redford’s Cook, who become the tale’s heroic linchpins by default, aren’t even glimpsed until the film is more than half over.
Also, although Goldman’s script sports occasional flashes of his familiar wit and waggish style, too much of his dialogue is basically mere exposition, and his characters are ill-defined. Attenborough’s vehement if essentially uncomplicated brand of moral engagement, one of his most consistent themes, here echoes his debut as director, Oh! What a Lovely War (1969), tackling the same topic of war’s absurdity but with that film’s theatricality exchanged for harsh realism. As he would in Gandhi, Attenborough plays the very English liberal, analyzing a perceived problem in his national character.
He diagnoses a certain note of boyish fantasy lurking behind the operation’s momentum in spite of its faults, as more than one character compares their enterprise to a western film’s heroic cavalry charge, only to find these Injuns don’t run off at the sound of the bugle call. He also interestingly signals that Market Garden was doomed as an unspoken attempt by the British high commanders not to share their sandbox with the Americans, going deeper than just Monty and Patton’s rivalry, which leaves the best of both Allied nations fighting hard for not much good at all.
A Bridge Too Far also wields its production values confidently and tries to transmute them into filmmaking delivered for experiential vividness, particularly when Attenborough offers paratrooper’s-eye camerawork of diving out of planes and plummeting to earth, shots that must have been spectacular on the big screen. Battle sequences evoke a bleak ferocity in action, looking forward to the efforts of Sam Fuller on The Big Red One (1980) and Steven Spielberg on Saving Private Ryan (1998) in pushing to present war as something chaotic, bloody, and governed by chance.
One of Attenborough’s flourishes, a mob of laughing inmates from a busted-open lunatic asylum beholding the passing army with disconcerting jollity, presages the same black joke used by Fuller. Attenborough captures the shock of violent death and depicts the ruthless qualities needed to survive such a situation lurking under the surfaces of seemingly ordinary men, as when Urquhart guns down a German soldier who peers in through a window whilst he’s talking to a Dutch couple—death arrives in the rose garden. The tone of the first half, with a rather annoyingly tinny score by John Addison, suggests a great adventure slowly bogging down in grim reality.
The dark tone is alleviated by some astounding acts, particularly the slightly romanticized but genuinely thrilling sequence depicting Cook’s attack, an interlude of expert action filmmaking from Attenborough. And the very last shots, of Horst and Spaander leading a bedraggled column of refugees through a war-torn scene with a young boy mimicking martial glory with a stick, achieve a genuinely iconic sense of an age of war as consuming and self-perpetuating in spite of all lessons.