Hollywood made a lot of World War Two films, too many to make much of a dent in. Many of them are also very long epics, making them even of more of a chore to watch. Still, it feels like we should at least watch some of the more notable ones to be taken seriously as cinephiles, so I picked this one to start. As you can see from its extra-long poster, it has a massive cast that is practically a who’s who of the most prominent male actors.
This one tells the story of Operation Market Garden in September 1944. The Allied advance into Europe has stalled due to logistical difficulties and there is political pressure to finish the war before Christmas. As such Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery hatches a bold plan to land more than 35,000 paratroopers deep behind enemy lines to capture a series of bridges across the Netherlands that lead across the Rhine into Germany. An armored corps is then to quickly push through along this route to reinforce the airborne troops and secure the bridges, thereby opening a way to directly strike at Berlin.
If you’re any kind of student of history at all, you’d know that this operation was ultimately considered a failure. The forces with objective at Arnhelm, the northernmost of the bridges, landed too way, were under-supplied and out of communications range, and instead of the old men and Hitler Youth they were promised, have to face the II SS Panzer Corps. The XXX Corps took far too long to advance along the road, due to both to heavier than expected resistance and because the Germans managed to destroy a crucial bridge at Son. This meant that some of the paratroopers had to fight unsupported for an incredible nine days instead of the expected two to three days. Many war films, particular American ones, end up becoming an excuse for jingoistic drum beating. Since this one also tells the story of an Allied failure, there is little risk of that here.
The huge cast is necessary to cover the full scope of this massive operation and for us recognizing all of the big names was a fun exercise in of itself. The biggest ones are Sean Connery, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Robert Redford, Laurence Olivier and Gene Hackman. As my wife noted, this also has a more subtle side benefit. With so many characters, it can be difficult to tell one from another and remember who they are if they are played by unknown actors. But since all of the key characters are played by famous people with instantly recognizable faces, it’s much easier to follow the flow of the action and know what’s happening.
Watching this, I also gained a new appreciation of how powerful pre-CGI scenes can look. The scene of the seemingly hundreds of transport planes taking off and what looks like thousands of soldiers parachuting out of them is simply breathtaking. In reality they used about a dozen planes and a thousand men to recreate the drops but it still manages to look impressive in a way that CGI never quite seem to match because you feel on a visceral level that it’s real. The rest of the action scenes look about par for the course for this era, but don’t especially stand out.
The only real complaint I have is the entire subplot involving James Caan playing a sergeant who rescues his captain, while suitably dramatic, isn’t something that really affects the operation as a whole and shouldn’t have been included. The scenes with Robert Redford are the perfect counter-example. He plays Julian Cook who led his unit across the Waal River in flimsy boats to take the bridge from the side so that the tanks can pass. I also think they could have done a better job at showing why making the final mile to Arnhelm was too hard. In particular some extended scenes of the Polish forces, led here by Gene Hackman playing Stanisław Sosabowski, would have been welcome.
In an American film like this, I’d expected more German bashing, but this one seems to treat them surprisingly well. I did note that the action tends to focus more on the Allied forces successfully killing Germans rather than the other way around, presumably because that’s what the film expects the audience to cheer. Plus it portrays Walter Model, the German CO of Army Group B, as somewhat of an oaf who at first believes that the objective of the operation was to capture him and later forbade his officers from blowing any bridges, believing that Germany would need them later for its counter-attack. But the German forces are mostly depicted as being gentlemenly, competent and realistic, going so far as to show the SS CO Wilhelm Bittrich being extremely generous in his treatment of the Allied wounded.
As a war movie that strives to capture the big picture view of a massive operation, A Bridge Too Far doesn’t have the kind of human drama that film critics like. But I think director Richard Attenborough did a fine job in giving the audience a clear understanding of what happened, in an almost documentary-like way, while keeping it exciting and entertaining to watch. I still wouldn’t recommend it to anyone who doesn’t know anything about Operation Market Garden, but once you’ve read up on it, it’s a great movie to cement the events in your memory and get a feel for what it must have been like for all of those involved,