Un pont trop loin

Even a relatively bad Richard Attenborough movie is a classic.

The final scene with Liv Ulman and Lawrence Olivier evacuating their estate turned into a graveyard is practically worth the price of admission by itself.

This is a sweeping, big budget epic movie with a star-studded cast. Definitely unfocused, but Attenborough pulls it off with considerable historical accuracy and his signature deft touch retelling of this sprawling military debacle. He makes excellent use of his tremendous cast, instead of just having them making appearances. He has plenty of subtle touches like that final scene.

The reception of the movie was hurt I think by its proximity to the Vietnam war. But it has aged very well.

"Quite frankly," observes 'Boy' Browning, "this kind of thing's never been attempted before." But it has. In 1962, "The Longest Day" gave the epic star-studded treatment to the D-Day landings, and here we are, 15 years on, doing the same for the Arnhem debacle. It has to be said, the film looks great. From the gently-tinkling light fittings in the Dutch resistors' home to the beauty of the tank tracks in perspective, this is a gorgeously-photographed movie.

In 1944, the German armies were being pushed back across the Low Countries. The Allies' great strategic problem was the Rhine, the wide river which formed Germany's western border. A daring plan was conceived which would overcome the Rhine obstacle and open the road to Berlin. 'Market Garden', as the plan was codenamed, involved parachuting spearhead units onto the great bridges over the Rhine and securing them for the critical few hours it would take for an armoured column to drive up and relieve them.

It is easy now to point to the flaws in 'Market Garden', but at the time it looked like a daring and viable alternative to slogging it out against the Siegfried Line. No-one had anticipated that the Dutch people would pour out onto the streets in throngs, thinking that they had been liberated, and thus bog down the armour. The intelligence indications of heavily-equipped German units in the zone were ignored because they were inconvenient. Critically, the plan allowed for only one solitary road to be available to the Irish Guards for the all-important northward thrust. The film illustrates very effectively the way in which a plan can develop its own momentum, regardless of the shortcomings which riddle it.

The sequence of the boarding and dropping of the paratroops is a thrilling spectacle, shot on a colossal scale. The German ambush which delays the rolling of the armoured column is another terrific action sequence. Attenborough keeps tight control of a big, complex story, and interlards the large-scale stuff with 'human scale' passages, like James Caan's rescue of his buddy (incidentally, the tracking shot which follows his jeep through the forest is quite remarkable).

The fighting at Nijmegen is brilliantly-filmed. Note how the street on the British side grows increasingly littered with war debris as the battle rages. Robert Redford's assault across the river is a symphony in olive drab, leading to a wonderful moment of exhilaration.

Whether the viewer finds the singing of "Abide With Me" moving or grossly sentimental will depend on personal taste, but the subdued ending is very satisfying. 'Market Garden' may have helped shorten the war and may have achieved most of its immediate objectives, but it has to be seen as a tragic mistake.

The film is slick, professional and very pleasing on the eye. One can't help wondering, however, if this kind of 'tank opera' was worth the effort, given that "The Longest Day" had done it all so splendidly a generation earlier.

Quite a few bad things have been written about A Bridge Too Far. Richard Attenborough's elephantine recreation of the battle for several strategically valuable Dutch bridges in the winter of 1944 is a star-studded, lengthy and exhausting film (and many critics at the time seemed to be of the opinion that it collapsed beneath its own weight). Almost thirty years on, the film is now viewed somewhat more favourably. It may feel 30 minutes too long, and the need for so many stars in so many tiny parts is questionable, but A Bridge Too Far successfully shows a fierce episode of the Second World War in all its chaotic glory. Incredibly, there's no use of the computer generated effects during the big battle scenes that it is relied upon in modern films like Gladiator and Troy. The scenes in this film were shot pretty much as you see them - so the 35,000 parachutists storming Holland, the river crossing led by Robert Redford under intense enemy fire, and other such staggering combat sequences were filmed with thousands of extras and a good deal of meticulous planning and preparation.

The film is based upon Operation Market Garden, an Allied plot hatched towards the end of 1944 with the intention of ending the war in Europe. The concept behind the plan was to drop 35,000 soldiers into Holland approximately 60 miles beyond the German lines, to seize six vital bridges, and to reinforce the paratroopers by sending in thousands of ground troops. However, various mishaps jeopardised the mission and eventually the Allies were cut off and had to withdraw, suffering severe losses.

As stellar casts go, A Bridge Too Far still takes some rivalling. Among the many famous actors involved, these are just a few: Sean Connery, Robert Redford, Laurence Olivier, Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Ryan O'Neal, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins and Elliott Gould. It seems pointless for some of the actors to be cast in these roles - true enough, Connery, Bogarde and Hopkins get decent roles and a fair bit of screen time, but was it really worth paying Redford $2,000,000 for his ten minute heroics? Could a decent actor have not handled the role for a fraction of that amount? Is Gene Hackman really the correct choice for Polish officer Major General Stanislaw Sosabowski? Should a light comic actor like Elliott Gould be doing his cigar-chomping "fun" turn in a movie as serious as this?

Luckily, the film is a big success on other levels. The cinematography is extraordinary; the music is suitably stirring; the potentially confusing story is handled with clarity and true-to-the-facts sensitivity; and amid the chaos a number of very memorable scenes emerge. A Bridge Too Far is a very good war film - maybe the biggest war film ever conceived (The Longest Day and Saving Private Ryan included) - and I feel that, although it has a few casting flaws, it is in almost every other department a great, great achievement.

I'm not a fan of hyperbole but this may be one of the greatest war movies ever made. It works on a number of levels. While being historically accurate it shows individual and group heroism without glorifying war. The players, German and Allied, are presented as human beings caught up in something bigger than themselves. No attempt is made at "jingoism" or gratuitous flag waving. It seemed to me to be refreshing free of moralistic or political statements. It simply let what happened speak for itself. For a history buff like myself it spoke volumes.

The movie is flawless. As mentioned above, it is surprisingly accurate. As one would expect from the cast, acting is first rate. Not a single scene is wasted.

This is a "must see" movie for anyone who appreciates movie making.

I applaud Attenborough for having made this movie. What a headache its filming must have been. It's accurate in a sense both material and overall.

His P 47s may be mock ups, but he used genuine World-War-II era M-4 "Sherman" tanks. (God knows how he managed to muster them.) I can't vouch for the German tank -- there is only one shown on screen and it could pass for a Panther. I also admire him for having the daring to make a movie about an unmitigated Allied defeat. As a whole, movies in this genre depict a victory on the part of the nations producing the movie in the first place.

"The Enemy Below," "Zulu," "Torpedo Bay," "Die Brucke," just to give American, British, Italian, and German examples. The list goes on. About the only time we're permitted to witness defeats for "our side" is during a heroic last stand against overwhelming odds ("Bataan") or when the defeat is the result of dirty pool ("Pearl Harbor"). But here, with no excuses, Attenborough delivers a different message entirely.

The performances are as good as can be expected from actors who have so little time to develop their characters. The battle scenes are realistic enough, without their shoving our noses into spilled intestines.

Attenborough is not a splashy director but he has a couple of things go on that are worth noticing. The Dutch citizens who first greet the Allied troops joyfully as liberators wind up being slaughtered and their cities destroyed by the war that is thrust on them. Civilian suffering tends to get short shrift unless one of them is Sofia Loren or somebody. Another worthwhile touch, a small one. The British politely take over one of those large super-scrubbed middle-class Dutch homes as a hospital -- "just for the slightly wounded, Ma'am." And as the first soldiers enter they step over two kids playing with a toy train on a thick creamy rug -- and a few drops of blood sprinkle the carpet.

Two other observations. "The Longest Day" is sometimes compared unfavorably to this film for a number of reasons, many of them justified. But "The Longest Day" was made under restrictions that had been lifted by the time this movie was produced. Zanuck wanted to show more of the slaughter at Omaha Beach but was prevented from doing so. He was similarly prevented by prevailing folkways from showing Allied troops as more brutal. And he originally filmed the closing scene of the movie not with a triumphant parade of victorious infantrymen marching up the slopes to a peppy military tune but with an forlorn, exhausted, empty grunt, sitting at the water's edge and listlessly tossing pebbles into the waves. The scene had to be deleted. A bothersome thing about "A Bridge Too Far" is that, at least as I've seen it on TV, I can't easily tell who is where. In Ryan's book it's easy enough to follow events and characters but, as edited, this movie is pretty confusing. When five of the major actors all show up together on a balcony, it came as a big surprise. I thought Connery and one or two of the others were still trapped behind German lines! I don't know whether this confusion is due to poor editing or a ministroke.