Review: A Bridge Too Far

WWII story about the Allies attempting to wrap up the war quickly by landing paratroopers in Holland to capture several bridges leading to Germany, and supposedly being easy pickings from there. For several reasons shown over the next nearly three hours, this plan didn’t work out quite so smoothly. Dirk Bogarde plays Lt. Gen. Frederick Browning, heading the operation, Sean Connery plays the British General leading the paratroopers (despite his hatred of flying!), Sir Anthony Hopkins is the Lt. Col. leading paratroopers at the bridge in the town of Arnhem, and Gene Hackman plays a frequently disgruntled Polish Maj. General also taking part in the mission. In smaller roles we have Sir Michael Caine (as a smart-arse Brit Lt. Colonel), Edward Fox (in a colourful turn as a British Lt. General), Elliott Gould (who shouts a lot as an American Colonel), James Caan (as a tough bastard American Sergeant), Denholm Elliott (as an RAF officer, he served in the RAF in real-life too), Jeremy Kemp (basically in the kind of top brass role Harry Andrews and Trevor Howard often played), Robert Redford (as a cool-headed American Major), Ryan O’Neal (as an American Brig. General!), Arthur Hill (as the medical officer who has a tense encounter with Caan), Lord Laurence Olivier & Liv Ullman (as a doctor and volunteer running a hospital of-sorts), and that’s Alun Armstrong as a Scottish soldier holding a chicken. Seriously, the guy hasn’t aged a bit. He’s always been middle-aged! Representing the Germans are Maximilian Schell and Hardy Kruger as a Lt. General and Maj. General, respectively.

 

Director Sir Richard Attenborough (whose “Gandhi” was incredible) and screenwriter William Goldman (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, “All the President’s Men”, “Harper”, “Misery”) strike out with this horribly choppy, underdone yet bloated all-star WWII effort. All those stars, pretty much all of them gone to waste in a film that can’t find the time to settle on any of them long enough for the audience to latch onto any of them, really. There’s so many characters that even a film that runs nearly three hours long finds itself constantly cutting from one to the next to the next, and it results in frankly no one really caring about anyone or anything because few have time to stand out. It gets genuinely annoying after a while, especially when Attenborough is still introducing stars/characters after 110 minutes like the characters played by Lord Laurence Olivier and Liv Ullman (Olivier gives one of his subtler latter-day performances despite yet again fiddling about with an accent. Why did he do that so often late in his career? He was never any good at it!).

 

Sean Connery probably registers closest to being an actual character, and his rugged charisma also manages to shine through. His scenes are the only ones that have any sense of urgency, tension or danger about them. Edward Fox, Dirk Bogarde, and more briefly Arthur Hill and Jeremy Kemp also bring their working boots, no matter how much screen time they get (James Caan is the only other American than Hill to really try his best here and is quite decent). Fox and Kemp bring a real old-school British war movie vibe to their performances that I enjoyed, and Bogarde probably towers over all, even though his character seems less important in the second half. But the majority are forgettable (Hardy Kruger and Maximilian Schell needn’t have bothered given how tiny their roles are, which pisses me off as both are terrific talents), whilst some are even worse. These being Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford, Sir Michael Caine, Elliott Gould, and especially an embarrassing Gene Hackman in one of his least convincing performances ever. O’Neal is simply miscast and out of his depth in a role calling for gravitas and authority, whilst Redford, Caine, and Gould never for a second seem anything other than stunt casting and in Gould’s case, probably a ‘guest star’ role. Caine and Redford can barely contain their ‘doing this for money’ motives here. As for Gene Hackman, accents are absolutely, positively not his thing. Cast as a Polish general, he looks embarrassed and given how comically awful his accent is (just wait ‘til you hear how he pronounces ‘Germans’!), I don’t blame him. In a role that should’ve gone to Charles Bronson, Hackman’s impossible to take seriously, a rare miss from a usually terrific actor (He seems to save bad performances for William Goldman scripts, as he was later terrible in “Absolute Power”, that had a terrible script too). You really know Hackman has done something terrible when you have a scene with Dirk Bogarde, Sean Connery, and Ryan O’Neal, and the only thing you’re noticing is Hackman’s shit accent. It probably pips James Coburn’s Australian accent in “The Great Escape” in the annals of bad movie accents (Coburn at least hit the mark every now and then…sort of). It’s obvious what the problem is here, and the solution would’ve been to have just focussed on one of the several missions the film presents here.

 

The film looks good, and perhaps the best asset overall is the music score by John Addison (“The Entertainer”, “Torn Curtain”), which is excellent. It’s a shame that the film is somewhat dramatically inert, because the action/war scenes are really well-done. It has one of the best parachuting scenes you’ll ever see, and some of the action here is among the best in cinematic history in terms of staging and attractive cinematography by Geoffrey Unsworth (“Hell Drivers”, “2001: A Space Odyssey”, “Cabaret”, “Superman”). You’ve seen other war films where the action takes place in the streets I’m sure, but it’s especially well-done here. It must’ve been frightening to be a civilian at the time. It certainly contains the best war footage of any film up to its time. So the film certainly isn’t a dud, just a disappointment. You want to like it, but it’s just not good enough to warrant that. Needing to be shorn of about half of its stars/characters, this is just a game of ‘spot the star’.

 

Choppy, bloated, and ineffective. The action is terrific, but not enough. I bet it’s Terrence Malick’s favourite war film, his “The Thin Red Line” suffered similar problems, though at least in this one you can actually spot all of the stars and it’s not a pretentious dick of a film like Malick’s film was. I’ll give Attenborough that one. A pretty major miscalculation from talented people who should’ve known better. It’s a little better than “The Battle of Britain” and “Midway”, but not much. There’s a good 110 minute war movie in here, but instead it has been stretched to almost 180 for no benefit. 

 

Rating: C+