Movie Review: A Bridge Too Far ****

I spent Sunday afternoon two weeks ago working on my German skills by watching "A Bridge Too Far" on the 62nd anniversary of the largest airborne drop in history. September 17, is also the anniversary of the Battle of Antietam, so that date evidently lives in infamy for multiple reasons. Operation Market Garden today bedecks our history books as a sad defeat and a needless loss of good paratroopers. British General Montgomery's plan called for 35,000 paratroopers (the Market phase) to drop behind German lines and seize four stages of bridges over rivers in Holland. General Horrock's British XXX Armored Corps would drive 63 miles into German territory over the bridges, culminating with the crossing of the Rhine at the Arnhem bridge, which would give the Allies the keys to the Ruhr industrial region of Germany. The armored drive was the Garden phase of the operation. They were supposed to make it to Arnhem in two days.
In 1977, one of the greatest all-star casts ever assembled took on the roles of an excellent dramatization of Cornelius Ryan's book by the same title, and today "A Bridge Too Far" stands among the finest and most accurate of war movies. The sheer scope is stunning, as a fleet of C-47 skytrains fill the runway and the sky, many tugging gliders behind them. The American 101st Airborne took the Son bridges, but the demolition of one of them by German defenders delayed XXX Corps for 36 hours while their engineers built a Bailey pontoon bridge. Colonel Stout (Elliott Gould) and the Irish Guards commander (Michael Caine) have a classic exchange as the latter rides through a crowd of cheering Dutch citizens. Gould: "Have you got that Bailey crap ready?" Caine: "If by that you mean those glorious, precision-structured pontoon bridges that are the envy of the civilized world, then yes." The U.S. 82nd Airborne took the Grave bridges intact, but the Nijmegen bridge gave them a great deal of trouble. General Gavin (Ryan O'Neal) ordered a river assault in small boats led by Major Cook (Robert Redford) which succeeded in taking the far side of the bridge while tanks took the near side.
Meanwhile, General Urquhart (Sean Connery) who commanded the British 1st Airborne, found Arnhem occupied by the II SS Panzer Corps, which armor the Dutch Underground had warned about. Tragically, the British high command chose to ignore their warnings and the operation went forward. Colonel Frost's (Anthony Hopkins) portion of the 1st Airborne took one end of Arnhem bridge, held for seven days and the British captured the lot. Urquhart never reached the bridge. General Sosobowski (Gene Hackman) with his Polish Brigade, came to Urquhart's aid, but German troops shot his men up badly as they dropped in and again as they tried to cross the Rhine at night. After eight days of fighting, Urquhart and his 2,000 remaining troops (out of 10,000) slipped back across the Rhine to the Allied side. Their wounded the British paratroopers left in the hands of a Dutch doctor (Lawrence Olivier) who ran out of medical supplies and he arranged their surrender to the Germans. As POWs, they would have some chance of survival. With Arnhem bridge still in German hands, Market Garden achieved no major strategic objectives to balance against a tragic loss of life. Even so, Montgomery always maintained that the operation was 90% successful, notwithstanding the 8,000 British paratroopers who became casualties.
Is "A Bridge Too Far" an anti-war movie, as some critics maintain? On the whole, I don't think so, even though the screenwriter had General Sosobowski utter one clearly anti-war line. As I would not consider an accurate portrayal of heroism to be necessarily pro-war, I will not brand as anti-war a film which shows a defeat in all of the grim tragedy that it represented. I recommend "A Bridge Too Far" with **** and absolutely no reservations. The use of period tanks in large numbers is an enormous achievement and the film's score is one of my favorites.