Over archival newsreel footage, a female voice (one of the film\u2019s few) sets up the time and place: late in the war, 1944 to be precise, as rival generals Patton and Montgomery were attempting to \u201cbeat the other to Berlin.\u201d And thus was born Operation Market Garden, an ambitious attempt to simultaneously overtake multiple bridges in Holland, and punch through the German line; it was, per the narration, \u201cmeant to end the fighting by Christmas and bring the boys home.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cHaving suffered through years of military training,\u201d Siskel wrote, \u201cI\u2019d like to think I understand basic military tactics. But even during a second viewing of A Bridge Too Far, <\/em>I\u2019ll be damned if I knew exactly who was doing what, when.\u201d Siskel\u2019s not incorrect here; he\u2019s offbase in overstating the importance of that knowledge. Producer Joseph E. Levine, who is discussed, in the film\u2019s reviews and marketing, as much as any of his pricy actors, was one of the last of the great cinematic hucksters, and while coordinating the casting of some of the biggest stars of the 1970s was certainly a good marketing hook, it was also narratively helpful \u2013 he rightly understood that they typical audience member would need faces they knew in order to navigate through the film\u2019s vast web of characters and events. And if they weren\u2019t able to, well, at least they\u2019d have a whole bunch of movie stars to gawk at.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And they did: as alphabetized in the credits and posters, A Bridge Too Far<\/em> stars Dirk Bogarde, James Caan, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Edward Fox, Elliott Gould, Gene Hackman, Anthony Hopkins, Hardy Kr\u00fcger, Laurence Olivier, Ryan O’Neal, Robert Redford, Maximilian Schell, and Liv Ullmann. It doesn\u2019t matter that so few of them share scenes (though a handful do), or that they sometimes seem to be acting in different movies. The sheer wattage of the star power is stunning. (The ubiquity of Hackman and Caine in the subsequent decade\u2019s films was so often noted that it became a running gag in the 1993 comedy PCU<\/em>, in which a student is working on a theory that a film by one or the other is always on television; late in the movie, he discovers an airing of A Bridge Too Far<\/em> and announces, \u201cThis is my thesis, man! This is my closing argument!\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n And it\u2019s fascinating to watch what each of them does to stand out in that cast. Connery leans in to what he does well, adopting his go-to gruff, man-of-action pose and serving as the first line of reaction when things start to go south. Hackman, never really known for his dialect work, tries out a none-too-convincing Polish accent, but he gets off some good lines. Gould decides to ham it up, and does it with such verve that you allow it; few things in the film are as delightful as the mere sight of the M*A*S*H<\/em> star chomping his cigar, leading a brigade, and barking \u201cschmuck\u201d at people. Caan wisely underplays \u2013 he knows you\u2019re not gonna out-\u201cact\u201d any of these guys \u2013 and ends up with one of the most memorable scenes in the picture. And an absurdly young Anthony Hopkins is wonderful as an officer who discovers that his inclinations towards politeness may not serve him well in a battle situation (\u201cLook here, I\u2019m awfully sorry, but I\u2019m afraid we\u2019re going to have to occupy your house\u201d). Redford doesn\u2019t show up until the 125-minute mark, and by then, you\u2019ve likely forgotten he\u2019s in the movie \u2013 but there he is, looking tan and golden-haired and, well, just like Robert Redford.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s not that \u201ca cast of thousands\u201d is enough to sustain a movie \u2013 but it\u2019s at least enough to sustain your interest, and it\u2019s not surprising that, in a time of countless Irwin Allen (and Allen-inspired) all-star disaster movies, the film\u2019s original critics were not exactly buoyed by the mere prospect of watching movie stars be movie stars for three hours. But that\u2019s not all that\u2019s going on here; Richard Attenborough directs, taking his first stab at big-canvass filmmaking, and in dramatizing \u201cthe largest airborne operation ever mounted,\u201d we get an unmistakable sense of a directory having a great time playing with the many new toys that are at his disposal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And that, most of all, is why A Bridge Too Far<\/em> seems like such a throwback. This kind of large-scale epic filmmaking is, sadly, mostly a thing of the past; they don\u2019t make big war movies that often anymore, because the target audience for them is older than studios care about anymore, and they don\u2019t make movies on this kind of scale anymore, because it can all be done in a computer. But it can\u2019t be done this well<\/em> in a computer. They just don\u2019t make \u2018em like they used to anymore<\/em>, the saying goes, and it\u2019s a clich\u00e9, but sometimes clich\u00e9s are accurate. \u201cA Bridge Too Far\u201d is now streaming on Netflix<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/bridge-1024x576.jpg\")
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