The Second World War is widely perceived as the Good War, in other words one of the rare examples of epic struggle between clearly defined sides of Good and Evil. Those individuals, organisations and countries that participated in it, at least those on the winning side, have every reason to be proud of it. So, it isn’t surprising that such sentiments found their way onto the silver screen in the form of films so incredibly expensive and spectacular that they could be characterised as Seventh Art equivalents of monuments and memorial complexes. Such practice is usually associated with the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and other Communist countries, but it wasn’t exactly uncommon in the West, with the 1962 Hollywood epic The Longest Day being the best-known example. The last big-budget Western film to fit such a description was the 1977 Anglo-American co-production A Bridge Too Far, which, ironically, covered the last of the Allies’ major military defeats.
A Bridge Too Far is based on the book by Irish journalist Cornelius Ryan, author of the book that was adapted into The Longest Day, so this film can be viewed as its unofficial sequel. The plot begins in the late Summer of 1944 after the Anglo-American forces managed to break out of their Normandy beachhead and liberate most of France and Belgium. The Germans have suffered terrible losses and are considered to be in complete panic and disarray, but the speed of the Allied advance has created problems with logistics. Worried that the Germans might regroup and build a strong defensive line on the Rhine, the Allied leadership comes up with a plan to quickly cross the mighty river at the place least expected by the enemy. The ultimate target is the bridge at Arnhem, a city deep inside the Netherlands, still under German occupation. In order to surprise the Germans, the Allies launch the greatest air landing in military history, with the US 101st Airborne Division tasked with securing important bridges near Eindhoven, the US 82nd Airborne Division tasked with securing bridges at Nijmegen and the British 1st Airborne Division under General Roy Urquhart (played by Sean Connery) tasked with securing the Arnhem bridge. They must hold those bridges until relief comes in the form of the armoured columns of British XXX Corps under the command of Lt. General Brian Horrocks (played by Edward Fox) advancing towards Arnhem on the narrow road from Belgium. On September 17th 1944, tens of thousands of Allied paratroopers land behind enemy lines in the Netherlands and the Germans are indeed surprised, but the three airborne divisions fare very differently. While the Americans, despite difficulties, manage to secure their objectives, everything that could have gone wrong goes wrong for the British at Arnhem. That includes crack German formations of II SS Panzer Corps under the command of General Wilhelm Bittrich (played by Maximilian Schell) whose presence, despite warnings from the Dutch resistance on the ground, was fatally ignored by Allied planners. Only the British 2nd Parachute Battalion under Lt. Col. John Frost (played by Anthony Hopkins) actually manages to reach the bridge, but they are soon cut off from the rest of the division and confronted by a numerically and technically superior enemy. Despite desperate odds and a lack of ammunition, Frost and his men hold their position as the hope of rescue diminishes with every hour.
A Bridge Too Far deserves praise less as a film and more as an impressive logistical achievement. Made at a time when CGI wasn’t available, the reconstruction of a battle of such epic proportions required not only thousands of extras, but also a large number of 1940s planes, tanks, artillery and similar military equipment difficult to find three decades later, at a time when most of it had already become obsolete. Another, more challenging, problem was to present a battle fought by tens of thousands of people over many different locations as a single coherent story. William Goldman, one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters of his time, solved it in a way similar to The Longest Day. Events are presented through a series of loosely connected vignettes, during which some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the time (Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford, Elliott Gould, James Caan) appear in what could often be described as nothing more than glorified cameos. This approach works and the audience, also thanks to the use of some of the actual battle participants as technical advisors, gets not only an accurate but a very clear picture of what went on. Constant scenes of fighting, explosions, destruction, carnage and general mayhem become repetitive after some time and it is easy to imagine some segments of the audience, especially those with little interest in WW2 history, losing interest before the actual end.
The main problem for A Bridge Too Far is in its tone or, to be precise, the somewhat schizophrenic approach of its director towards the subject matter. Richard Attenborough, although a WW2 veteran himself, became famous a decade earlier with a film adaptation of the musical Oh! What a Lovely War dealing with another global conflict which, instead of being perceived as a Good War, is viewed as a pointless slaughter. Despite a few scenes featuring Dutch civilians who enthusiastically greet Allied soldiers as liberators, A Bridge Too Far in many scenes actually resembles the First World War, at least in the experience of the British soldiers, which includes a WW2 variant of the Lions Led By Donkeys trope. This could be recognised in the character of British general Frederick Browning (played by Dirk Bogarde), commander of Allied I Airborne Corps, whose disregard for caution and intelligence provided by his subordinates results in a bloody fiasco. Such pacifist sentiments were still in vogue following the Vietnam War, but they looked out of place in a film supposed to celebrate and honour sacrifices made for the liberation of Europe. And if Attenborough indeed wanted to warn future generations about the dangers of war, the next decades made those efforts as futile as those of the Operation Market Garden planners.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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