A bridge too long

I mentioned several weeks ago how war historian Cornelius Ryan wrote the book on the D-Day invasion, The Longest Day, which was turned into an epic movie. Another of his books was similarly turned into an epic film 15 years later. That movie, A Bridge Too Far, aired as part of Dirk Bogarde's turn as TCM's Star of the Month since he was in the all-star cast. I got around to watching it not long before it went off my cloud DVR since YouTube TV only keeps recordings for nine months, but since I had a backlog of Bogarde films I wrote this post rather early and left it as a draft until a suitable time after the other Bogarde movies.

A narrator at the beginning of the movie, over newsreel-type footage of the late stages of World War II, informs us of the situation on the ground as it was at the end of the summer of 1944. The Allies had invaded Normandy in June, of course, and advanced reasonably far. But the Rhine was a major barrier because, if need be, the Nazis could just blow up all the bridges and set defensive positions on the other side. Anyone trying to cross the river would be a sitting duck. British general Montgomery came up with a daring plan that Eisenhower eventually agreed to, which was given the code name Operation Market Garden. The plan is to drop troops behind enemy lines in the Netherland, close to a bunch of important bridges. The troops are then supposed to capture six major bridges and hold them until traditional infantry coming from Belgium.

Dirk Bogarde was getting to the age where he would play the sort of military officer ranked high enough to be able to stay behind the front and come up with the overriding plan; he plays British Lt. General Browning who is more or less in command of the whole British part of the operation, even more difficult than the American part because the British are being dropped farther behind the enemy lines. Leading the men actually going in is Major General Urquhart (Sean Connery); they get the most distant bridge, at Arnhem.

As is always the case in war, large operations may seem brilliant on paper, but they're going to meet real life the minute the soldiers are expected to execute them, not that this is any fault of the soldiers. Especially when an operation is this big and is expected to run like clockwork, it should be obvious that there's a much bigger potential for things to go wrong. Indeed, the commander of the Polish forces, Maj. Gen. Sosabowski (Gene Hackman) raises objections to Lt. Gen. Browning when Browning briefs everybody on the operation. However, Browning say British intelligence believes the the Germans are badly enough off that the portion of the military defending the Netherlands is either too old or too young to put up a truly effective defense.

The date for the drop eventually comes, and as you might guess from the title even if you didn't know anything about the war, you'll guess correctly that problems do happen. Urquhart's radios don't work, and they have difficulty getting from the drop zone to where they're supposed to go. Since they can't radio, future supplies that are supposed to be dropped to them wind up with the Germans, leaving them in an untenable situation. Other portions of the operation have lesser problems, a lot of which were due to adverse weather, something you'd think the bigwigs could have predicted and planned for. Although the Allies weren't able to get to get that last bridge, there were enough successes that military historians have debated how much of a failure Market Garden was.

A Bridge Too Far has a bit of advantage over The Longest Day, in that there are so many points of action that a longer movie isn't quite to the detriment the way it is in The Longest Day. Having said that, however, I have a feeling the material would have worked better as a TV miniseries, with commercial breaks at suitable points to switch between the various parts of the operation. The movie is competently made, although with the number of major stars in the past, it's also easy to see why some contemporary critics thought the movie collapsed under its own weight. It definitely feels like a slog at times.

I've only read the Reader's Digest condensed version of A Bridge Too Far (seriously), and that decades ago, so I can't honestly say just how right Cornelius Ryan got things. But I think the movie is a worthy attempt at trying to document a massive military action, even if it's by no means perfect.