A Bridge Too Far

Annotation for KRRR! 2024 by Michael Šenovský

Directed by Richard Attenborough, this monumental war mural depicts one of the greatest Allied fiascos of World War II, Operation Market Garden. Both colossal projects met similarly inglorious fates. General Montgomery's military operation failed to capture and hold the titular bridge, and many soldiers lost their lives needlessly defending it. Its film reconstruction, in turn, received a cold critical reception, its cinema receipts barely managed to cover its huge budget, and it was outperformed many times over by another film also loosely inspired in some respects by World War II - Star Wars (1977).

Thanks to industrialisation and advances in technology, organisation and logistics, the Second World War far exceeded in scale all wars before and after it. War operations became too complex and massive to assign all the credit (or all the blame) to one man. The book's author and the film's screenwriter Cornelius Ryan, as well as co-writer William Goldman and director Attenborough, were probably aware of this when they conceived of the adaptation of A Bridge Too Far as not only a spectacle, but also as an articulated and interwoven portrait looking at the entire Market Garden operation from a number of possible perspectives. The dramatic centre of gravity of the film thus lies not only in the battle scenes, impressive though they still are. For the footage of the airborne assault over the town of Arnheim, the filmmakers were assisted by a thousand North Atlantic Alliance paratroopers, along with more than a dozen period transport aircraft. Dozens more period American tanks, transports and jeeps were secured from decommissioned army reserves in Greece or Turkey.

Alongside the numerous extras and rolling stock, however, the film's equally large star cast stands out. Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Laurence Olivier, Robert Redford, Liv Ullman and many others have been cast in leading, supporting and cameo roles, among other things, to help the audience navigate the large cast of characters. Each of them also gives the audience a glimpse of a part of the ongoing operation, and by interweaving their storylines, the war mosaic is assembled in its entirety. The dramatic thrust of the film, then, is the gradual accumulation of problems across each level of the operation that have catastrophic consequences for soldiers at all other levels. The sight of the ill-fated defense of the Arnheim Bridge by a handful of paratroopers is all the more desperate as we see that the supporting airborne troops and tank divisions simply cannot arrive in time due to bad roads and weather.