A Bridge Too Far (1977)

 

Off-List: A Bridge Too Far

As my second Off-List movie for 1977 I chose “A Bridge too Far”. An epic scale war movie, it belongs to a category the List editors generally ignores. Sometimes with some right, they do tend to be rather trivial, but “A Bridge Too Far” is a noteworthy movie on several accounts and I think it deserves a slot.

“A Bridge Too Far” tries to tell the story of an operation towards the end of World War 2 codenamed Operation Market Garden. In September 1944 the Allied forces drove hard to end the war before Christmas, but struggled with the problem that the Germans had prepared a defense line on the Rhine. A daring plan was conceived to take three bridges in The Netherlands with airborne troops and thereby secure an easy way into Germany. As history will tell us the plan was a trifle optimistic and left thousands of allied soldiers to die far behind enemy lines.

A story with this sort of scope was attempted before with “The Longest Day” (based on another book by the author who wrote the one “A Bridge Too Far” is based on) and this is not where the similarities end. To cover an event of this magnitude, the story has to be broken down into many smaller stories, each of which include a separate set of characters, but combined they have to merge into a larger, coherent whole. And that is super tricky. Each element has its own stellar cast (the roster of A-listers is truly impressive!) and we have to see enough of them to get engaged, but even with a three-hour running time, these are often only vignettes. Only the soldiers of the besieged 1^st Airborne Division in Arnhem (led by Sean Connery as Major General Roy Urquhart) we get back to again and again as their situation degrades from bad to truly terrible.

This combination of ultra-zoom and big picture at the same time is truly difficult. It was the Achilles heel of “The Longest Day” and it is precariously close to break “A Bridge Too Far” as well. As a viewer I wish for a map and a roster of characters and how they each interlink. For the most part, I can only recognize the difference between American, British and German soldiers by the color of their uniform and their language and this is where there is some value to have famous actors like Robert Redford, Michael Caine, James Caan and Elliott Gould take up minor roles, because I can then identify the characters by the actor. Still, who exactly we were following at any given time was tricky and I was mistaken more than once.

What does work is the sense of scale and authenticity. This was the most expensive production ever made at the time and the production team had gone to painstaking length to get everything right, equipment, timeline, characters and locations. Most of the locations are the actual locations in The Netherlands and that gives it that documentary feel that makes me believe what is happening. Another thing that works for me here is how the initial cockiness gets replaced by frustration and desperation. We do not need to know all the technical details to sense that this is a disaster. This is probably the most significant departure from “The Longest Day” and what places the movie in the seventies. When people go to war, they are invincible, trusting that management has it under control and that this will be another day at the office. Then reality happens. No plan survives meeting the enemy, especially if management are on cloud 9 and removed from reality. The losers are all those soldiers sent out doing the job for management and die as a result. In the post-Vietnam and post-Watergate era this will have struck a chord.

This may start out as a movie about heroism, but it is really about who pays for political and military expediency. One of those war movies that leaves you with a really bad taste in your mouth.

For this reason, I think “A Bridge Too Far” is better than its reputation and superior to hero worshipping movies like “The Longest Day.