A Bridge Too Far (1977)

Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far concerns Operation Market Garden, the Allies’ ill-fated attempt of winning the World War II early via an ill-conceived operation in the Netherlands. Ill-fated because – at least in the film’s telling – valuable intel was ignored, important equipment was unusable and anyone at all managed to survive the waves of background incompetence because the men on the ground where particularly tenacious – and probably so used to the War’s combination of idiocy and horror by now, they had learned to cope with it.

Attenborough clearly wasn’t a fan of General Montgomery, and thus the man becomes an off-screen incarnation of bad planning and wilful ignorance – however much one reads this as historically accurate, it certainly isn’t an invalid opinion. In general, Attenborough has little time for those upper echelons whose boots never touch a war zone and let others do the dying, and focusses on characters – all played by an astonishing amount of acting talent – who live or – more often - die by those decisions. The film also spends some time on the impact Operation Market Garden had on the civilian population of the Netherlands, and eventually ends on a handful of survivors in a haunting shot that shows little enthusiasm for any war, even a just one.

Tonally, this is a very strange film: about a third of it feels and sounds like a stodgy but extremely high budget British war movie with a terrible score and performances of a style that belong in this sort of thing (old chap), even when it’s, for example, the usually not at all stodgy Michael Caine hired for it; another third is a series of very 70s New Hollywood style vignettes featuring guys like Gould, Caan, Redford and Hackman (with a bad Polish accent) doing their very different thing in the kind of scenes you’d expect them to be in. The final third mostly concerns the particularly unpleasant adventures of one Lt. Col. Frost having to go through a kind of synthesis of Old Britain and New Hollywood, with a measured and careful performance by Anthony Hopkins, full of moments that are just as bitter and human as those in the American part of the film yet still feel very British in perspective and manner.

Curiously enough, this disparate mix works for the A Bridge Too Far, at least to a degree. Perhaps because it mirrors the very different approaches to warfare brought by the different Allied fighting forces, or perhaps because it simply speaks to my sense of perversity.