Reeling Backward: "A Bridge Too Far" (1977)

Recently this column focused on "Theirs Is the Glory," a fairly unique film in which the actual participants of the failed Allied stratagem to end World War II by Christmas 1944, Operation Market Garden, returned to the site of the battles one year after the fact to recreate the action for a motion picture. The same military operation later became the basis for the 1977 feature film, "A Bridge Too Far."

In my essay on "Theirs Is the Glory," I mostly concentrated on the similarities between it and "Bridge," wondering if screenwriter William Goldman or author Cornelius Ryan, on whose book the latter film is based, were influenced by the earlier picture. That inspired me to go back to "A Bridge Too Far," and see how it has held up to my memory.

It only reinforced my opinion: "A Bridge Too Far" is one of the great WWII epics, and an incredible marriage of narrative structure, inspired direction, gritty performances and technical mastery from the support crew, particularly the musical score by John Addison (who himself served as a soldier in Market Garden).

Market Garden would remain a forgotten bit of history for 30 years until Cornelius Ryan wrote his book about the adventure, in which the Allies dropped 35,000 paratroopers behind enemy lines to capture a series of bridges. The plan was to have XXX Corp, the British armor column, punch up the road to connect the bridges, thus creating a hole directly into Germany.

Except, the Allies ignored evidence of a great deal of German resistance along the route, including an entire Panzer tank division near Arnhem, the last and most important of the bridges, since it spanned the Rhine River and the border into Germany itself. The British paratroopers, who were only supposed to have to hold the bridge for two days, gave up after nine, leaving behind 80% of their men as casualties or prisoners of war.

That's a lot of story to cram into a feature film, even a three-hour one, but Goldman's screenplay is an exercise in elegant structure. The story begins and ends with generals, both Allied and German, as they plan bold stratagems and then later try to pick up the pieces of where things went wrong. The middle section focuses on the lower ranks of soldiers, the dogfaces who actually have to carry out the fight their superiors dreamed up.

You've heard of "all-star casts," but this one is simply jaw-dropping. For the Brits: Anthony Hopkins, Dirk Bogarde, Michael Caine, Edward Fox, Sean Connery. For the Germans: Hardy Krüger, Maximilian Schell, Wolfgang Preiss. For the Americans: Robert Redford, Elliot Gould, Gene Hackman, James Cann, Ryan O'Neal. Not to mention Liv Ullman and Laurience Olivier  as Dutch civilians. And Denholm Elliott and John Ratzenberger turning up in bit roles.

Redford, arguably the biggest movie star in the world at the time, doesn't even show up until after the two-hour mark. 

I found it interesting how the script is laid out into essentially four sections. The first is the planning of Operation Market Garden, in which British heads are swelled and the first seeds of doubt creep in. Frank Grimes has a terrific role as a nervous major who unsuccessfully points out the presence of tanks, and is sent on medical leave as a result. The second section is the actual drop, a beautiful and daunting ballet of parachutes -- more than 1,000 men jumped out of planes for the sequence -- and the Allies' initial success in taking their objectives. The third is what I call the "American vignettes," and the last act is when everything goes to hell.

The vignettes are a quick succession of three stories centered around American characters. Elliott Gould is up first in a semi-comedic bit about his regiment failing to take the first bridge before the Germans blow it up, necessitating the building of a claptrap "Bailey bridge" to get the tanks across -- but not before delaying them 36 hours. Gould is terrific and charismatic, chomping on a cigar and shouting jokes in between the orders. Addison's music goes into a jazzy, bouncy mode.

Then we get James Caan as a nearly monosyllabic sergeant who protects his young captain -- he doesn't put on his coat at first, so we think he's just a punk private or something -- even guaranteeing the officer that he won't die. He appears to fail in his mission, as the captain is left for dead after being shot in the head. But the sergeant carries the body in a jeep through enemy lines to a mobile Army hospital and, at gunpoint, forces the surgeon (a spot-on Arthur Hill) to examine the wounded lad, revealing that he's still alive. 

(This may sound like Hollywood bullshit, but other than the part about being chased in a jeep by German soldiers, it really happened.)

The last and most harrowing of the vignettes is Redford as the major tasked with crossing the Waal River and taking the bridge at Nijmegen. Due to logistical snafus, they had to make a daytime crossing in flimsy portable boats, the wind blew away their smoke cover, and the unit was cut to pieces. Watching Redford with his helmeted head tucked down, pulling his rifle butt through the water like an oar, all the while chanting "Hail Mary, full of grace..." remains one of my seminal cinematic moments. (Again, this really happened.)

Sean Connery also gets a mini-vignette of his own as Major General Roy Urquhart, commander of the British airborne division dropped near Arnhem, who gets cut off from his own command and has to hide out in a little Dutch enclave, dodging from house to house, during which time he is presumed dead.

Lieutenant-General Frederick Browning, played by Dirk Bogarde, more or less acts as the heavy, playing the gung-ho Brit general who will not cancel the operation for any reason. Those who "rock the boat" are encouraged to clam up or suffer the consequences. 

At the end of the film Browning is depicted as duplicitously claiming to always have been skeptical about the operation -- "As you know I've always thought we tried to go a bridge too far" -- rather than an unreserved booster. In reality, Browning raised his doubts prior to the operation, and he and his family -- Bogarde actually served alongside Browning during the war -- were outraged at his villainous portrayal.

It being only three decades and a bit after the events depicted, many of the actors had an opportunity to talk with and even befriend the men they were playing. Edward Fox knew Lt. Gen. Brian Horrocks, commander of XXX Corp, prior to filming and later cited it as his favorite movie role. Michael Caine changed some of his dialogue after asking his counterpart how he would have issued orders, and the real Lt. Col. Johnny Frost had to explain to Anthony Hopkins that he would never have run too quickly between cover, because he had to show his men how contemptuous he was of enemy fire.

The production of "Bridge" is a Homeric story unto itself, and one others have already told better than I could -- notably by Goldman himself, who wrote a making-of book, "Story of a Bridge Too Far," and also included an entire chapter about it in his seminal showbiz tome, "Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade." 

(Extremely short version: Joseph E. Levine, a lifelong maverick producer, personally financed the film's $22 million budget -- about $86 million in today's dollars -- himself, then convinced some of the biggest global movie stars to participate by all accepting the same weekly pay rate. He recruited Richard Attenborough (him again) to direct, undertaking an incredible logistical and artistic challenge. Then as some of the amazing footage of the airdrops and battle scenes started to come back in, Levine showed the rushes to distributors who bid on the international distribution rights to the film. As a result, "Bridge" was already in the black before the first ticket was sold.)

The ultimate result was surprising, and not. Everywhere but the U.S. the film was a smash hit. Here, American and audiences and critics used to rousing pro-Allies depictions of the war collectively shrugged their shoulders at a massive production about a colossal military screw-up. Thus, "A Bridge Too Far" is barely known on these shores.

Their loss; "A Bridge Too Far" was perhaps the last of the great World War II epics.

Reeling Backward: "Theirs Is the Glory" (1946)

I've long been a vocal advocate for "A Bridge Too Far," one of the last of the big-budget World War II spectacles and, in my mind, one of the most underrated. It didn't make much of an impact in the States, but was a big hit overseas.

Screenwriter William Goldman noted in his classic tome about the Hollywood biz, "Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade," that the British are very fond of memorializing their disastrous military adventures, while Americans tend to shy away from them.

So it was a surprise to me to discover "Theirs Is the Glory," a 1946 film shot a year after the actual Battle of Arnhem. While "Bridge" depicted the entirety of Operation Market Garden, a bold and (many feel) rash attempt to punch through into Germany and end the war by Christmas 1944, "Glory" focuses on the battle for the last of the series of bridges the Allies were trying to capture. (The bridge that was one too far.)

What's amazing about the film is that it contains no actors or studio mock-ups of the battle site. The actual men who participated in or witnessed the fighting returned to the town of Arnhem one year after the actual events and recreated them for the cameras. "Glory" also contains extensive footage of the actual battle itself shot by newsmen and military photographers.

As a military strategy, the quest for the Arnhem bridge over the Rhine was too clever by half. Paratroopers from the First British Airborne Division, who by necessity are only lightly equipped, were dropped well behind enemy lines near the town and charged with capturing the bridge. This they did, with great derring-do.

Unfortunately, they were only supposed to have to hold it for two days. The column of Allied tanks got bogged down in the mission of linking up the captured bridges, giving time for the German forces to respond and, as one general memorably orders in "A Bridge Too Far," "flatten Arnhem."

Out of some 10,000 paratroopers dropped for the Arnhem operation, only about 2,000 successfully escaped when their forces withdrew after nine days. The rest were killed or captured -- most of the latter being too severely wounded to retreat.

The concept for the film is novel, but it's a better idea than a movie. It ends up playing out like a bunch of disconnected footage of soldiers running hither and fro, in between obvious showbiz pyrotechnics simulating artillery, and falling down from non-existent bullet wounds.

The soldiers are obviously not actors, and don't do very good jobs of portraying themselves. They tend to speak in stilted sentences in that very blasé British way, in which men in terrible peril seem not at all concerned about it. It gets so silly, it reminded me of that scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" in which an English soldier is mildly perturbed by a tiger biting off his leg.

Director Brian Desmond Hurst, a more than competent journeyman, tries his best to lend some narrative momentum to the proceedings, spotlighting a few soldiers and focusing on them. But in the end "Glory" feels like what it is, a pastiche starring non-professionals.

So it becomes more interesting to me to see how this little-known film (at least in the U.S.) affected "A Bridge Too Far." I was struck by the similarities of several sequences, and wondered if Goldman was inspired by them (or if he even saw the film). "Bridge" was based on a book by Cornelius Ryan that was published three decades after the events; perhaps Ryan was influenced by "Glory."

The Liv Ullman character, a local Dutch woman who aids the Allied soldier, seemed to have her look and demeanor modeled after a person in "Glory." She even wears a similar woman's suit and also has a religious bent.

One of the most harrowing sequences in "Bridge" is a night crossing of a river using flimsy little boats, with the soldiers getting cut to pieces by German crossfire. There is a very comparable scene toward the end of "Glory," though here it is the withdrawal from Arnhem rather than part of an earlier advance.

"Bridge" has a nerve-wracking bit where the Brits have been forced back from their supply drop sites, and the Allied planes continue to rain down ammunition and other supplies that they desperately need but can't get to. In both movies, a single soldier scrambles out to try to retrieve one of the massive tubes, but dies for his gallantry.

Johnny Frost is a memorable character in "Bridge" played by Anthony Hopkins, a gallant young officer who leads the forces holding the north side of the Arnhem bridge long past anyone's expectations. There are remarkably similar scenes in each film where Frost and his soldiers, now wounded and without hope, lie together in a bombed-out building essentially awaiting their fate. Frost bravely gives the command for those who are fit to escape back over the river.

In "Bridge," though, this is the opportunity for one of the best bits of dialogue in the movie, where a young soldier tells a story about why he always has an umbrella, even in combat, because he doesn't want to be mistaken for a German and knows "no Jerry would carry one."

It may be Hollywood bullshit, but it's smashingly good B.S.

Even though it's not a very good film, mostly what "Theirs Is the Glory" does for me is reinforce how good "A Bridge Too Far" is, in imposing a cohesive story on a massive series of events and large array of people. Goldman's screenplay is really superb, giving us a dozen or so distinctive characters and letting the action play out through their eyes.

The movies have often -- rightly -- been accused of changing around historical records for their own purposes. But sometimes you have to "showbiz up" the tale to get at the nut of the truth. "Glory" tries for verisimilitude and is dull; "Bridge" spritzes things up and soars.