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Rating: 4/10 (24 March 2014)

They don't make them like this anymore - thank goodness! If I were asked to sum up this film in one word, cringeworthy would suffice. This particular episode in WWII may well warrant a film, but they could have done better with a tenth of the number of 'stars' and a four-times better script. For pity's sake, every one of the sprawling individual little scenarios consisted of the kind of hackneyed stereotypes which began to be outdated in the 1950s and early 1960s. One could forgive the 'knocking the Hun for six' jingoism in 'The Dam Busters' as the wartime Pathe newsreel propaganda had not fully died down when that film was made, but 'A Bridge Too Far' was made in 1977 and Levine and Attenborough had no excuses for such twaddle. I'm not sure whether it was the American officer chewing on his cigar, or the British officer with his umbrella, or the 'rebel without a cause' always played by James Caan, or the immortal superhuman James Bond in uniform always played by Sean Connery, which annoyed me the most. Or, perhaps it was the limiting and wooden script given to Dirk Bogarde, who, along with Olivier, were wasted in cameo roles. The final damning indictment on the film was completed by the Pathe newsreel type music and the nauseatingly predictable and stereotypical background speech and shouted comments of the soldiers 'all doing their bit'.