A Bridge Too Far

Rating:
Summary: One of the greatest casts in movie history
Review: The cast of this movie reads as a who's who of great actors. I loved the movie, which details a not-so-well-known operation that could very well have ended the war 6-9 months before it actually did.

Rating:
Summary: With So Many Stars, It Can't Go Wrong!
Review: Many have criticized Richard Attenborough's 1977 adaptation of Cornelius Ryan's novel unfairly. Certianly, the complexity of the story and the quantity of important characters doesn't allow for a deep character study such as what you would find in "Apocalypse Now." The movie however gives a complete picture of Montgomery's boggled operation from beginning to end. The characters are fleshed out enough to make them believable and to give the story substance. The movie isn't so much about the characters but about the campaign and the operation of its individual components: hence, the movie is actually quite complex but fluid in structure. The batlle scenes are good for their time, the Germans actually speak German, and the all-star case sweeps the audience away into all the triumphs and failures of Operation Market Garden. Again, with an all-star cast starring James Caan, Robert Redford, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, Dirk Bogarde, Sean Connery, Liv Ullmann, Ryan O'Neil, Maximillian Schell, and others, how can you go wrong?

Rating:
Summary: Long WW2 Film Is Short On Character Development
Review: Quick! Name one big star from the 1970s who wasn't in 'A Bridge Too Far.' Well.. Marlon Brando. And Gary Coleman. OK, never mind.

This a sprawling buffet of a war movie by Attenborough, and an expensive one. The battle scenes are as good as you'll find pre-Private Ryan, and there is a lot of attention to detail here. The film ambitiously attempts to portray British Field Marshall Montgomery's failed September 1944 gamble to cross the Rhine in September 1944, and make a 'rapier thrust' into Germany. (George Patton lost his gasoline, and bid to leap the West Wall, to this campaign.) The gamble failed when the airborne troops could not capture every Dutch bridge along the single road to be traveled by the British armored corps, and instead of boys and old men, they found two refitted panzer divisions ready to meet them.

The book by Cornelius Ryan was one of the best books written about a single WW2 battle. The movie tries to do justice to the book, but probably too much justice, since every general and senior officer involved in the battle seems to get a Warhol-sized moment in the sun. As a consequence, we don't get to know any of them, with the exceptions of Sean Connery (British 1st Airborne General Urquhart) and the redoubtable Anthony Hopkins (Lt. Col. Frost). The movie would have been best kept to Frost's amazing last-stand at the Arnheim bridge, holding off tanks assaults with Piat rifles and hand grenades. Instead, we get just about every angle of this campaign, including some of the German side. Some of the actors are just Wrong - two in particular, Ryan O'Neal and sorry to say, Gene Hackman as a Polish airborne general. They don't work.

The battle scenes after the 'Tora, Tora' buildup are nonstop. Unless one has read the book, they are also confusing. One of those pop up old-fashion maps from earlier war movies (or Ryan's book) would have helped. What bridge is this? And what town is that? This is a noisy film. I recall stumbling out of the theater with ringing in my ears. At least with a DVD, you can take this in small doses.

OK for teens, although the Game Boys will be out by the second hour. Liv Ullmann's in this movie, which guarantees it's OK for general audiences. Just why Liv Ullmann is in this movie is a mystery, I guess maybe so grognards had the excuse to take the significant other, and, in the words of a British general in the film, "Mightily bored they'll be."

Rating:
Summary: Too Much for a Simple Reviewer
Review: You can watch this movie a dozen times, you can read the book it was based on by Cornelius Ryan, and you will never catch everything. The men, the plan, the failures, and the causes create more details than a simple man from rural Minnesota can do it justice. I will try as best I can however to tell you why this is one of the must see movies for everyone.

Firstly, this movie is based on the book of the same name by Cornelius Ryan about the events of and leading up to Operation Market Garden in WWII. We see from the hindsight of history the greatest military blunder for the allies in WWII in the European theatre. In the end, the plan effectively murdered 80% of the British 1st division. It took away much needed supplies away from American General George Patton whose tanks were stopped from their momentum across Europe, and it killed a lot of elite paratroopers needlessly.

What makes this movie so good is that the directors did a fabulous job of bringing together all the elements of the battle into sequences that flow together well, and the directors were able to balance the hefty personalities that acted in this film. The filmmakers also did their best to find working equipment for the film, and also built fiberglass models that are unnoticeable in the viewing of the movie.

The acting is superb, and I can't do it justice, with people like Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, and Ryan O'Neil, Robert Redford, all of who appear without a sense of Prima Donna-ness, it's remarkable.

I can't say enough about the movie; it's wonderfully entertaining, as well as remarkably annoying as we see the stupidity of the politics of war. This is a movie that belongs in everyone's library.

Rating:
Summary: A Bridge Too Far- A Cast Too Big
Review: As Much as I love this movie they tried to squeeze too many big names into it.In order to get these fine actors and actresses in they chopped up this movie. With the exception of the Arnhem Bridge sequences, with Anthony Hopkins and others, the flow to Cornielius Ryans book has been destroyed. It wasn't that way in Ryan's "The Longest Day". A fine performance by a younger Anthony Hopkins.

Rating:
Summary: "Only the weather can stop us now!"
Review: If you like war movies -- and if you don't, why are you reading this?? -- the real question about "Bridge" is whether you feel it is a sluggish, overblown, depressing sequel which is doomed-to-remain-in-the-shadow-of-it's-big-brother, "The Longest Day", or do you think it stands on its own as one of the better WWII movies ever made?

I can definetly see the argument against it. It is slow-moving (in spots), not entirely fair to one of its principal characters (General Browning) and lacks much of the humor (even if it was contrived, Hollywood humor) of "The Longest Day." It is also undeniably depressing. American audiences were not too keen on a movie which ends with the Allies getting their knickers handed to them by the Germans, even if most of those knickers belonged to the British.

Having said that, I believe that "Bridge" is a great and very under-appreciated flick. The cast, with a couple of exceptions, does a fine job. Both Ryan O'Neil and Gene Hackman are totally miscast (I love Gene Hackman, but his horribly fake Polish accent is just embarrassing), but everyone else delivers with impact, and in this movie, 'everyone else' is a literal statement. Like "Longest Day" it is a veritable galaxy of stars, from Sean Connery to Robert Redford, Lawrence Olivier to Anthony Hopkins, from Elliot Gould to Edward Fox to Michael Caine to James Caan, playing various Allied leaders. And let's not forget Maximillian Schell and Hardy Krueger as the principal Germans. The battle scenes are impressive, especially the street fighting between the Red Devils and the guys from 9th SS Panzer division on the Arnhem Bridge, and the river crossing effected by the 82nd Airborne to take Nimijgen Bridge (I know I spelled that wrong, sorry, Dutchmen). Some of the fighting is outrageously brutal, such as when the Polish paratroops jump directly into the German guns or when the Germans try to bully their way across Arnhem bridge and get parboiled in their own vehicles, and in this capacity "Bridge" definetly has it over "Day" which made combat look like a theme-park amusement ride. It also explores the effect clashing armies have on the civilians who get in the way of the fighting, even those civilians who are supposedly being "liberated." The movie's ending reminds me of that quote which was supposedly made in Vietnam by an American officer: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it."

In a nutshell, "Bridge" is the story of Field Marshal Montgomery's attempt to bring a sudden end to the European war in the fall of 1944 by crossing the Rhine and taking the Rhur Valley (the "Pittsburgh of the Rhine"....Germany's industrial heartland) by storm. His idea was to lay down a 'carpet' of paratroopers 75 miles from the Allied lines in Holland to the Rhine River (which forms the German-Dutch border), seize the bridge there at Arnhem, and then roll a big army down the 'carpet' and over the bridge into Adolf's home turf. This would have the effect, if you will allow me to mix my metaphors, of driving a stake right through the Third Reich's Heart. For a man who has been accused of being an overcautious, image-conscious, set-piece commander, 'Operation Market Garden' was an incredibly gutsy plan. But as it turned out, it was also an incredibly risky one.

The big problem, pointed out in the movie with droll British wit, is that 'Holland is half underwater' and therefore a pain in the arse to move a modern army across at any speed, much less the breakneck pace perscribed by Monty. The three airborne divisions in question, dropped dozens of miles behind German lines, would have to hold out for days while the army bored through German resistance to link up with them. That was understood. What was less understood was how bad the road system in Holland really was, how unpredictable the fall weather would be, and how hard the Germans would fight once they understood where Monty was going. That, and Murphy's law, which as applied to this film would read: "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong....for the British."

Despite this, the plan almost worked. It was doomed by a crucial failure in Allied intelligence, which had failed to pick up on the fact that the Germans had put and entire SS panzer corps in Arnhem to rest and refit. Whoops! The elite British 1st Airborne drops into the city expecting to be met by second-rate rear-echelon troops and ends up fighting two SS panzer divisions instead. As another Brit points out in the film, 'It's hard to stop tanks with rifles and machine guns.' The end result is a sort of Union Jack version of the Alamo, with the gutsy Devils fighting a hopeless battle while waiting in vain for relief that never comes.

In fairness to General Browning, who is presented as the villain of the piece, deliberately ignoring and downplaying the risks of the operation and even arranging for one whistle-blowing subordinate to be sacked for blowing his whistle too hard, my understanding from reading Cornelius Ryan's book (from which this movie was made) was that it was Browning who told Montgomery that trying to take Arnhem on top of the Son and Nimijgen spans was going 'a bridge too far' (his words). Montgomery went ahead anyway, and afterwards claimed that the operation was '90% successful', which is like saying that the only difference between a winner and a loser is who had more points when the time ran out. In Arnhem, in September, 1944, time ran out for Montgomery, and it was one of the finest groups of fighting men who ever lived who paid the price.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful images, good performances. But sprawling in scope
Review: You have to admire trying to make a commercial movie out of a lost battle. This movie has some very good performances and some wonderful images. Yet, somehow it feels like it could have been and should have been more. It feels less than the sum of its parts.

For example, Anthony Hopkins as Lt. Col. John Frost is one of the best things in the movie. Who doesn't love the cheeky refusal to surrender by telling the Germans that Frost and his hopelessly outnumbered English soldiers simply don't have the facilities to accept a German surrender? And Hopkins' wordless performance when the German officer comes to the remnant of the force at Arnhem is just wonderful. There are many other such performances and images in this film.

Although, why they went box office and had Redford win a battle that the British Grenadiers actually won is still something I find irritating. But that is a whole other debate.

My own view is that the biggest problem is the sprawling way the story is told. In trying to get everyone and everything on the screen more gets lost than told. Somehow the narrative thread of the story needed to be tighter and more direct. If the story needed to be told on such a grand scale maybe it would have been better told as a good mini-series. The movie is almost three hours and jumps around a lot. We get to follow a lot of threads, but none of them deeply.

I would have preferred a couple of stories standing in for the whole battle and followed them closely than get ten on screen minutes of the underground family with the fourteen year old son. Of course, that family was standing in for even more families in the underground and their tragic story adds pathos to the tale. But we want more with them than we get and that is true with every story in the film. I guess I am saying that the movie needed to be pared down and given greater focus (not shortened necessarily) or expanded beyond the bounds of a theatrical movie.

While all movies are a product of the time they are made rather than the time portrayed in the movie, this one also seems particularly caught up in the post-Vietnam malaise and anti-war sentiment. Not that many are pro-war, it is that some reluctantly understand that wars do come and others reject that under all circumstances. In 1977 the latter view held sway.

This DVD is not a carefully restored reproduction of the film. It contains some image problems that a digital re-mastering could have fixed. But this film wasn't a commercial success and the judgment was probably made that the DVD didn't warrant extra investment.

All in all I am glad I own the DVD and will watch it every now and again, particularly to see the English actors. Their performances here are superior.

Rating:
Summary: The only game in Market Garden town
Review: I first saw the theatrical release in 1977 at the age of eleven with my parents. My father wanted to see it no doubt largely because he played a role in Market Garden as a crewman on a C-47. The event made a strong impression on him because it was the first time he had flown in combat.
As a child the scope and action made a strong impression on me and I have watched this film dozens of times since on TV. Not too long ago I purchased the DVD to have so that I can pass on some information to my children about their grandfather's role in the epic conflict of WWII which becomes more remote and abstract with each passing year.
Since then I have read the book many times as well as various related books to the topic. Firstly the movie was intended to explain a large, varied, and important historical event. It was also created very much as a product of war film-making as it stood at the time. Lots of characters with none having primacy, all of these people being played by actors with name recognition factor. Nowadays they would never do this because too many actors would want too much to be in it. I have a feeling they must have worked near scale to be in this. Once I had a better understanding of the difference between good and bad acting I have to say for the most part this is pretty bad acting throughout. Perhaps that's unfair in that the screenplay tended to use rather cliched and predictable, stereotyped conversation. Ryan O'Neil is particularly bad in my opinion. Someone pointed out that he was portraying a thirty something general and that this was laughable. I don't know where that comes from. Age wise he was right on to play Gen Gavin. But that was where the similarity ended. Michael Caine never fully rids himself of his cockney accent which undoubtedly Col. Vandeleur would not have had as an upper class career British Guards officer.
Action wise the movie darts from units in different areas which could be very confusing for those without a grasp of the actual campaign. The battle scenes were in keeping with the techniques of the time but now have been far outstripped by the new ones that make heavy use of computer animation such as the Stuka attack in "Enemy at the Gates". It's hard to compete with that.
Accuracy of gear and uniforms was good, particularly for the Allies. For the Germans not as much. German tanks were some sort of slapped together rough re-creation of a Panther. At least they tried as opposed to the ridiculous use of 50's and 60's era US tanks for panzers in "Patton". They did an excellent job recreating fleets of C-47s with a limited number actually available.
The musical score is excellent. Truly a holdover from when custom orchestral work was standard. The DVD is rather poorly mastered but for the price what would anyone expect?
In the end if you are interested in the battle this is it. This is the only place you'll see this many British Airborne. Obviously story wise and intimacy wise American airborne portrayals have far outstripped this in "Band of Brothers". I doubt we will ever see a war film that tries to convey such a macro vision of this battle. Truth be said I think history and those of us interested are better served by works like "BoB" which portray the experience of war more like it is, personal, dirty, cold and ugly.
In the final analysis if you are interested in the event this is your only choice. For those willing to accept some flaws and not be too overly critical of detail or acting styles it is not either a waste of time or money.

Rating:
Summary: A Classic War movie....too bad it was not a big hit
Review: A Bridge Too Far

In 1962, Darryl Zanuck and 20th Century Fox released The Longest Day, a three hour recreation of the Normandy invasion on June 6, 1944. With a screenplay by Cornelius Ryan (author of the book on which the film is based) and boasting an all-star cast from four different countries, The Longest Day was one of the first of several major film reenactments of major battles of World War II to be released over the next decade or so.

Whenever a successful movie of any genre starts a trend (witness, for instance, the variations of quality in science fiction films released after Star Wars premiered in 1977), the results range from good (1970's Tora! Tora! Tora!) to fair (The Battle of Britain, released a year earlier) to bad (1965's Battle of the Bulge) to ridiculously awful (1976's Midway). The basic format first presented by The Longest Day and carried on to A Bridge Too Far is:
1. Choose a major battle of World War II, i.e. Pearl Harbor, the Ardennes, etc.
2. Cast sure-fire A- or B-list actors (Henry Fonda, John Wayne, Sean Connery, etc.)
3. Make a reasonably accurate movie about the battle.

Now, The Longest Day, for all its flaws (and it does have them) is still a good movie and it was a big hit in 1962-3, so it was only natural that Joseph E. Levine would want to bring Cornelius Ryan's best-selling account of Operation Market-Garden to the silver screen. In some ways, because Ryan's three major books on World War II dealt with some of the same personalities (Eisenhower, Montgomery, Hitler, even PFC Arthur "Dutch" Schultz), they are a trilogy (the third book is The Last Battle, about the fall of Berlin in 1945). Thus A Bridge Too Far is a sequel to The Longest Day.

Set in September 1944, Richard Attenborough's film depicts the failed attempt by the Western Allies to vault over the Rhine River in a daring combined arms assault on a series of bridges in German-occupied Holland. Market, the airborne half of the operation, involved 35,000 British and American paratroopers and the largest air armada ever, while Garden, the ground phase, was a supposedly speedy drive up a single highway by a British armored corps, the 30th. Initially successful, Market-Garden failed because of several factors, including overconfidence approaching arrogance on the part of the Allied High Command, a skillful German defense, and sheer bad luck.

As a film, A Bridge Too Far is just as good as The Longest Day. The screenplay by William Goldman, cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (who died a year later after completing Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie), musical score by the late John Addison, and Attenborough's firm directing make this film a truly spectacular account of a historic event. The international cast is stellar: here you'll see major stars of the 1970s, such as Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins (later of Hannibal Lecter fame), Hardy Kruger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O'Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell, and Liv Ullman (and these are only the major cast members, mind!).

For all that, though, A Bridge Too Far was not a major success. It got good reviews (Judith Crist, a major film critic of the time, called it one of the most accurate World War II movies she had seen), but it was released at a time when movie audiences were shying away from war movies. Saigon had fallen only two years before, and the public was still in its anti-military, anti-war post-Vietnam mindset. Furthermore, while its combat footage is tame by Saving Private Ryan standards and its message underscores the futility of war, A Bridge Too Far is a movie about an Allied defeat ( although the same could possibly be argued about Tora! Tora! Tora!), and this, too, kept audiences away in droves.

But the biggest reason for A Bridge Too Far's death at the box office was its biggest competitor for viewers in that summer of 1977: George Lucas' Star Wars.

The DVD, by MGM, boasts very few extras (only the theatrical trailer and a little booklet of behind-the-scenes factoids), but the movie is presented on wide-screen format and the subtitles are spelled correctly. (In the full-screen VHS version the subtitles contain misspellings: in one scene a German officer refers to Patton as "Patten". Also, in the theatrical release, Attenborough often had to identify places with titles [as the battle took place on a considerable slice of Holland]; these were deleted on the full-screen VHS version but restored on the DVD.)

Rating:
Summary: Don't waste your time
Review: This is one of the worst WWII movies I have ever seen. Last week it was shown on TCM; I'm glad I never bought it! It is the only movie I 've seen covering Operation Market Garden however, It was a sleeper. I couldn't wait for it to be over. I would not watch this movie again. Looking for action, Watch: Battle Ground, The Longest Day, Objective Burma.