A spectacular reenactment of the Allied paratroopers' attack during World War II's Operation Market Garden.
By early 1944, the Nazis were still firmly in control of the whole of Western Europe and the end of the war seemed nowhere in sight. D-Day changed everything. On June 6, 1944, the Western Allies under General Eisenhower landed on the coast of northern France. In August, Paris was liberated. The Germans were retreating on all fronts. But with success came problems. Supplies were being brought in from Normandy, 400 kilometres away, and were critically short. The Allied advance was almost at a standstill. In September 1944, Marshal Montgomery drew up a spectacular new plan, called the Market Garden. The sudden seizure of the Dutch bridges - access routes into Germany - by British and American paratroops, supported by the rapid movement of ground troops, was to lead to a decisive breakthrough and end the fighting before Christmas. However, the whole operation was complicated by the difficult terrain at the drop site and unexpectedly stiff resistance from German troops. The overall situation is not going well for the Allies... British director Richard Attenborough has conceived his dramatic reconstruction of Operation Market Garden as a spectacular wartime fresco, with an astonishing array of extras, military equipment and star actors, each given their own dramatic episode. The Bridge Too Far thus forms a kind of pandanus to the American Oscar-winning The Longest Day (1962), which depicted the Allied invasion of Normandy in a similarly spectacular style. The two films are also linked by the literary author Cornelius Ryan.
