Facing up to failure

Rating: 6/10 (7 March 2018)

No, the Americans didn't want a film that showed a huge failed operation involving American arms (they were still reeling from Vietnam), and 'A Bridge Too Far' found little favour in the States. Only in the UK did it recoup its considerable costs.
This is the story of Arnhem, the moment in September 1944 when Montgomery was stung into a doomed attempt to capture the Rhine bridges because he was being made to look slow by George Patton, who was not, however, facing anything like the same opposition.
Neither Patton, Monty or Eisenhower are represented in the story, and the officers being played by the all-star cast are not exactly household names, the relationships between them never clearly defined. In fact, the plot as a whole is quite hard to follow in the course of this overlong and over-repetitive screenplay.
Best-known of the officers is Frederick Browning (Dirk Bogarde), commander of the Airborne Division, who is generally blamed for going into denial about enemy strength. He declares that the wehrmacht is down to schoolboys and pensioners, and when shown a picture of several tanks beside one of the bridges, he claims they're not operational. But neither Bogarde nor any of the others is able to carry conviction as a regular officer, who has spent his whole career deferring to higher authority. Sean Connery and Michael Caine in particular are unable to camouflage their rebel blood. More believable, at least, is Edward Fox as the sociable and popular Brian Horrocks ("Pack my dinner-jacket"), who gets a loud cheer as he delivers a briefing.
Interestingly, the German officers are all shown speaking German, with no dubbing or sub-titles, clearly meant as a decisive step away from the German accented cod-English that filled-up all those cheap black-&-white war-films of the 50's. Yet the pre-title sequence is a needless history lesson, delivered in exactly that style, apparently by some female victim of war whose status is unexplained.