An excellent war film...with only a few flaws

Rating: 9/10 (30 July 2018)

"A Bridge Too Far" is an excellent war film and the template for which all other Second World War epics should be compared. The history is excellent, the acting extraordinary, and the film tells in a clear and concise manner what was otherwise a very complicated combined ground and airborne military campaign.
With that said, there are a few notable flaws in the film. First and foremost...the miscasting of Gene Hackman. In the film, Hackman portrays the Polish general Stanislaw Sosabowski. Hackman does his best, but the acting simply doesn't work. Aside from a poorly done Polish accent, Hackman does not portray well (although he tries) the sheer dejection that Sosabowski must have experienced being sidelined by Allied generals who thought Poles were of little use in military operations. Add to it, this film for Hackman was stuck right in between "The French Connection" and "Superman". It is a totally alien character for Hackman to be playing and it shows.
Second, we have what is generally referred to as the "innocence of the SS". The late 1970s were a very interesting time for Germany and its memories of World War II. A lot of the Waffen-SS veterans were attempting to gain government recognition for military pensions and there was an overall movement building, on both sides of the Atlantic, that Waffen-SS soldiers were simply front line troops who did their duty, separate from the atrocities of the Holocaust.
There were certainly Waffen-SS members who were not criminals, however "A Bridge Too Far" portrays the Waffen-SS as an honorable fighting force which is respected by the British. Nothing could be further from the truth, in particular case of the 2nd SS Panzer Corps (figured prominently in the movie) which was deeply entrenched in war crimes and had commanded some divisions, especially on the eastern front, which had committed numerous atrocities. The 10th SS division Frundsberg, to be fair, was one of the few SS divisions which was not involved in any significant war crimes; however, the division commander Heinz Harmel asked his name not be used in the film, most likely since memories of what the SS truly stood for still lingered, even thirty years after the war.
Overall, "A Bridge Too Far" is an excellent film and highly recommended for any aspiring historian of the Second World War.