Read the book...

Rating: 8/10 (15 July 2006)

Beiung a World War II history buff, first I saw this movie, then I read the book. As a story adapted from a book, I tend, maybe unfairly, to compare it with the Harry Potter series. "Bridge' was made with 1977 special effects technology, which had to recreate events which actually happened. The Potter stories used computer technology to conjure up a fantasy world. The comparison comes, as I said, from the fact that both are movie adaptations of books.
I saw the film in the theater but can't remember having been wowed by the jump sequence, which I'm sure must have been breathtaking. Likewise for the artillery bombardment which preceded the initial attack of the Irish Guards.
A similarity to the Potter series is the fact that due to time constraints, a great deal of background information (from the book(s))has to be left out. Some things which might be regarded as errors reflect the fact that screenwriters aren't necessarily historians. Browning, in the first meeting with the three division commanders involved, claims that 'this sort of thing hasn't been attempted before'. Not only is he ignoring the 18,000 man airborne drop into Normandy in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944, but he seems to have forgotten that the Germans attacked Crete in 1941 with 20,000 paratroopers. They took the island but suffered shattering casualties in the process. Gavin may allude to the fact that there was a large-scale German airborne assault in Holland in 1940, which was targeted at bridges and airfields and suffered heavy casualties.
I tend to wonder what Brits think of the disparaging remarks regarding Field Marshall Montgomery which were written into the conversation between Von Rundstedt and Model. Having read other books about the war, I have a little bit of an idea of the problems that Montgomery was facing with regard to manpower. Put simply, while the Bristish soldier, man for man, is as tough a fighter as you'll find, Britain, being a small Island nation, has a tough time fielding large armies. That's why an American wound up with Supreme Command; most of the troops on the western front were ours! Put simple, Monty couldn't afford having his army suffer heavy casualties; that evidently affected his style of command. He liked to stack the deck in his favor as much as he could, before launching any operation. My main criticism of him is that he tended, as Abe Lincoln once said it, to 'cackle before he laid his egg'. Which means he'd talk about how he was going to do this and that to his enemy, then not have to cover up a bit if things didn't go according to plan. Like at the end of the movie, when Browning tells Urquhart that Monty thought that Market-Garden was ninety percent successful. It's more like an American football game, where the home team drove the ball seventy-five yards to the opponents five and came away with no points, and got a lot of players hurt in the process. How could you say that the operation succeeded, when all along everyone said that failure of any part of the operation meant total failure?
My main praise of the picture has to do with how much of the story got told accurately and well in the time allotted. I went back to the book to find out that Anthony Dean-Drummond, the British signalman who was worried about his radios working in Holland, was worried about exactly that, and that they failed in the manner depicted.
My main criticism has to do with General Sosabowski's comment at the end of the story. "I know what let's do today. Let's play the 'war' game' Everybody dies'. If he felt that way, he should have put his comments in a letter to Herr Hitler in Berlin, who seems to have been an individual who thought that war was truly a fun thing to participate in. (?!) You have to read a lot about him, and watch movies like 'Triumph of the Will' to see that. Sosabowski's comment sounded to me like he blamed the Allied High Command for starting the war. As a Pole, he probably was on hand when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939. he should be the most rabid general Officer in that group. The British officers should be next; the order being, who's homes got bombed by the Germans? The Germans never bombed the United States, but their U-boats sank lots of our merchant ships, so that's the only reason why Gavin and Taylor might harbor personal animosity against the Germans. War is easier if you hate your enemy, and Sosabowski should hate the Germans viciously for what they did to Poland.