![]() In just nine days, "Operation Market Garden" completely collapsed, resulting in the loss of nearly 18,000 Allied troops. The result was a miscalculation that resulted in the British troops moving too quickly, and ill-prepared with supplies and artillery. The success was not to be, however, due to faulty intelligence and numerous blunders, including ignored reports of German activities in Holland. Utilizing over 35,00 Allied paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines in Holland, the operation was to barrel through the city of Arnhem and, bridge by bridge, finally capture Ruhr and bring the war to an end by Christmas of 1944. Maybe that's my problem with 'A Bridge Too Far,' a rather ponderous, self-indulgent, and didactic war flick that, despite its star-studded cast and high production values, feels about three years long, not three hours.Īdapted from Cornelius Ryan's best-selling 1974 novel of the same name, 'A Bridge Too Far' depicts the ill-fated offensive called "Operation Market Garden." In a game of one-upsmanship, British Field Marshal Montgomery attempted to top the success of America's General Patton, and spearheaded a strategy he hoped would end WWII. One can't help wondering, however, if this kind of 'tank opera' was worth the effort, given that "The Longest Day" had done it all so splendidly a generation earlier.If I have one rule for war movies, it's that watching them shouldn't feel longer than actually living through the war itself. ![]() The film is slick, professional and very pleasing on the eye. 'Market Garden' may have helped shorten the war and may have achieved most of its immediate objectives, but it has to be seen as a tragic mistake. Whether the viewer finds the singing of "Abide With Me" moving or grossly sentimental will depend on personal taste, but the subdued ending is very satisfying. Robert Redford's assault across the river is a symphony in olive drab, leading to a wonderful moment of exhilaration. Note how the street on the British side grows increasingly littered with war debris as the battle rages. The fighting at Nijmegen is brilliantly-filmed. Attenborough keeps tight control of a big, complex story, and interlards the large-scale stuff with 'human scale' passages, like James Caan's rescue of his buddy (incidentally, the tracking shot which follows his jeep through the forest is quite remarkable). The German ambush which delays the rolling of the armoured column is another terrific action sequence. The sequence of the boarding and dropping of the paratroops is a thrilling spectacle, shot on a colossal scale. The film illustrates very effectively the way in which a plan can develop its own momentum, regardless of the shortcomings which riddle it. Critically, the plan allowed for only one solitary road to be available to the Irish Guards for the all-important northward thrust. The intelligence indications of heavily-equipped German units in the zone were ignored because they were inconvenient. No-one had anticipated that the Dutch people would pour out onto the streets in throngs, thinking that they had been liberated, and thus bog down the armour. It is easy now to point to the flaws in 'Market Garden', but at the time it looked like a daring and viable alternative to slogging it out against the Siegfried Line. 'Market Garden', as the plan was codenamed, involved parachuting spearhead units onto the great bridges over the Rhine and securing them for the critical few hours it would take for an armoured column to drive up and relieve them. ![]() A daring plan was conceived which would overcome the Rhine obstacle and open the road to Berlin. The Allies' great strategic problem was the Rhine, the wide river which formed Germany's western border. In 1944, the German armies were being pushed back across the Low Countries. From the gently-tinkling light fittings in the Dutch resistors' home to the beauty of the tank tracks in perspective, this is a gorgeously-photographed movie. In 1962, "The Longest Day" gave the epic star-studded treatment to the D-Day landings, and here we are, 15 years on, doing the same for the Arnhem debacle. "Quite frankly," observes 'Boy' Browning, "this kind of thing's never been attempted before." But it has.
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