A Bridge Too Far (Richard Attenborough, 1977)

 A Bridge Too Far chronicles Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ disastrous airborne operation to go behind enemy lines and seize bridges in the Netherlands to provide a route into Germany.

Plagued by poor landing spots, underestimates of enemy strength, and communications failures, the campaign turns into a series of holding actions, as beleaguered paratroopers are encircled by German forces while the armoured divisions which are supposed to relieve them are bogged down.

Famous for its length, scope and relative failure, A Bridge Too Far is better than its reputation.

It is long, and - particularly in its early scenes - ridiculously repetitive. 

For example, the parachute sequence: 

a remarkable feat of logistics and staging, but it is diluted a bit by how many times we are shown people jumping out of planes from multiple angles (including some POV shots).

Once the operation gets underway, the movie comes into its own.

The pacing never flags, and the film moves between individual storylines without feeling like it is flagging, and stays with characters through key subplots before cutting away.

The movie focuses on the major moves of the operation, peppered with smaller subplots focused on individuals grappling with specific obstacles.

The all-star cast are solid, lending weight to smaller vignettes: James Caan plays a veteran who goes through hell to get his commanding officer to safety; Robert Redford plays Major Julian Cook, who led a detachment across the Maas-Waal Canal so they could capture the Waal bridge from both sides.

 

The real standout is a young Anthony Hopkins as John Frost, the officer of the unit which made it to the Arnhem bridge and were quickly besieged by the Germans.

The film’s sheer expanse initially feels like sheer excess - ‘look at how many men, vehicles and explosions I can put on screen!’. By the end of the film, I was locked in rather than exhausted.

The film’s largesse feels more like world-building, a comprehensive chronicle of a disaster which was a disaster partly because it was dependent on a variety of different variables in multiple locations.

That scope means that the through line is a little muddy, and the final scenes, cutting between different sets of characters, complicates the film's final statement - or, at least, provides a multiple choice for the film's final message.

If the film has a flaw, it is that the film cannot figure out if it wants to be an old-fashioned, all-star war epic, or a human drama about a massive loss of life. There are times where it feels like the film wants to have its cake, and other scenes where it feels like it wants to undermine the genre's glamourising of the war.

In the end, A Bridge Too Far is not as dark as perhaps it intended, but it is also not a rousing companion piece to The Longest Day. 

I spent the movie wrestling with its ultimate intentions. Ultimately, it feels like Attenborough, screenwriter William Goldman and his collaborators did not have the laser focus to deviate from the expectations of a genre piece of this scale. While it deals with large-scale death and injury, A Bridge Too Far is not an incisive critique of the event, or a statement on the machinations of war. 

The film's best final moment belongs to Dirk Bogarde as the campaign's overall director and biggest booster, Lieutenant-General Browning. Confronted by Sean Connery's Major-General Roy Urquhart after he has escaped German encirclement, Browning changes his tune and claims to have had doubts about the project: "Well as you know I always thought it was a bridge too far..."

It is a good movie, but one that feels too enthralled to its size to drill down into its intended themes.

Related

Operation Crossbow (1965)

Battle of the Bulge (1965)

Tobruk (1967)

The Bridge at Remagen (1969)