Watched over a few nights because it is really quite long, A Bridge Too Far is on of those rainy Sunday afternoon films. It recounts the events leading up to and the events of Operation Market Garden, the audacious attempt to seize a series of bridges miles behind enemy lines in a effort to shorten the war.
The film dose not shy away from highlighting both the inadequacy of the planning and outright mismanagement of the operation. Ambitious one paper we see the operation undermined as equipment is lost, air drops that give equipment to the Germans, intelligence on German movements ignored, landing zones miles from the objective and refusal to 'rock the boat' by highlighting malfunctioning radio equipment.
We also get an insight to the German response as they try to understand what is happening, at first a high-ranking officer fears he is the target of the operation before it becomes clear that the bridges are the target.
Director Richard Attenborough is even handed and meticulous in his depiction of events and calls upon a stellar cast to bring home the drama; James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Elliot Gould, Ryan O'Neil, Laurence Olivier and Robert Redford all amongst the cast.
It is almost a dramatised documentary rather than a more typical war fiction and generally more effective for it although it can be a little dry in places where more could have been made to really put across the scale and cost of the mistakes made both in terms of the war and the number of lives lost.
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