The only honest film about World War II?

Rating: 10/10 (10 September 1999)

Back in 1984 I mentioned this film treatment of Cornelius Ryan's book to my college roommate, who asked, perhaps rhetorically, "Why make a war movie about a defeat?"
They're all a defeat for one side or the other, I suppose. But more importantly, war stories are about humans attempting superhuman efforts -- bridges too far -- and often falling far short of their aims.

In the John Wayne - John Garfield type of war movie, the second lead dies and the hero avenges his death. In the Rambo series, the enemy are Bad Guys who get mowed down in comic-book fashion. This isn't that kind of shallow story at all. It's a complex, well-paced, even-handed story about arguably the largest failed military operation ever attempted.
Operation Market-Garden was the largest airborne assault the world has yet seen, coupled with an armored drive not exceeded until the ground phase of Operation Desert Storm. Had it succeeded in opening a second front into the Low Countries and down the Ruhr valley, it could have ended the war many months and thousands of lives earlier than the following May. It's to ponder: The desperate snowy campaign through the Huertgen forest and the Battle of the Bulge might never have happened at all.
What happened is surely no spoiler for anyone who read the film's title -- an intelligence estimate ignored here, a foulup with radio crystals there, missed timetables on the route march -- all conspired to strand the entire British airborne force at Arnhem. In the film, the British resistance to the last round of ammunition is underplayed and heartbreaking, as is the Rangers' desperate attack on the bridge and Polish Brigade's slaughter in an attempted night crossing. Again and again, I perceived the thematic thread running through the story, that war, ultimately, is normal people attempting to overcome and survive the impossibly abnormal.
It's honest enough to make one cringe, and yet the Germans don't come across as villains. It's possible to feel some shock and sadness as a British officer has to shoot a young German private in the back to avoid being discovered and captured in a Dutch house. A German officer offers a British paratrooper some chocolate: "Would you like some? It's excellent. English. Your planes have been dropping this behind our lines."