#305: A Bridge Too Far
It wants to be The Longest Day 2 — but it’s just too long
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 17, 2020.
Initial release: June 15, 1977
Director: Richard Attenborough
History is written by the winners. Success gets amplified, failures get papered over. Small wonder that the disastrous Operation Market Garden, a failed Allied attempt during World War II to invade Germany through the Netherlands, would not get much focus. But that’s exactly what Richard Attenborough’s A Bridge Too Far aims to do.
We know the historical details. With France all but liberated, the Allies were ready to push into Germany. General Bernard Montgomery of the United Kingdom proposes going around the Seigfried defensive line into Holland and seizing several bridges over the Rhine river. He promised the war’s end by Christmas. Despite some initial success, the operation soon bogs down, in no small part due to parts of the invasion force landing almost directly upon a pair of SS Panzer units due to poor intel. Poor communication, poor logistics and poor equipment further doom the operation. The planned invasion of Germany is postponed for six months, and the Allies would not make serious advances across the Rhine until March of 1945 — another lesson in not promising a war’s end by Christmas. You’d think they’d have learned after the last time.
With this history in mind, Attenborough (yes, David’s brother) has crafted a film that is very much of a piece with the massive three-hour epics of the 1960s such as The Longest Day and Battle of Britain, despite being filmed in the late 70s. It shares all the usual features of this subgenre of war films: loads of characters, many of them played by famous actors to the point of being a Screen Actors Guild meeting; many plot threads that don’t always interweave; and a fairly dry, episodic approach to storytelling. I would even go so far as to say that this picture is actually quite rote. This fashion of war movies was all but dead at this point, supplanted by more cynical Vietnam-era films like 1979’s Apocalypse Now and 1971’s Johnny Got His Gun. But Bridge remains doggedly retro. We’re treated to a who’s-who of famous British and American actors, such as Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Robert Redford, among others. Each of them embodies some particular stereotype: stuffy, stubborn British upper class, rough-n’-ready Americans, stiff-limbed Germans.
The real problem with films like these is that in the attempt to tell a history they don’t really tell a story. Saving Private Ryan might have frontloaded itself with its nightmareish Omaha Beach sequence, but the bulk of the film was a simple story about finding a soldier whose brothers had all been killed. Bridge on the other hand feels disjointed, episodic; similar to films like The Longest Day, it spreads itself too thin, trying to tell a big story by telling a bunch of smaller ones, but they don’t hold together and they don’t end satisfactorily. The result is an uneven mix of explosive action scenes and multiple moments of drama where relatively flat characters interact with each other in a dry re-enactment of historical events, some of which are often embellished for the sake of dramatic effect.
While the script itself is nice and quippy, and more realistic than the relatively cleaner dialogue of the more moralistic early 60s, it’s still constrained by the overall structure of the film. Attenborough however has a decent eye for cinematography and this helps immensely. The action scenes are probably the big reason anyone would watch this movie, and they don’t disappoint. While it’s of course no Saving Private Ryan in terms of grotesque attention to detail, it still makes decent use of the $25 million budget.
If A Bridge Too Far had been made a decade prior it might not have felt so tired. There’s a reason films like it hadn’t been made much since the end of the 1960s. While it still manages to be an intense, enjoyable watch, i can’t help but feel like it lives up to its own name.
